Lydia's Boundaries.

I want to say a few words about my friend Lydia. In the time-honoured tradition of protecting the innocent, I’m giving her a fictitious name. It’s the one I used when I made her a character in a story. She admonished me for it. ‘I’m definitely not a Lydia,’ she said, and I’m sure she isn’t. So Lydia will do nicely.

Lydia is an extraordinary person. She’s the sort of person you never really get to know, for she lives in her own delightful world and treats time as an illusion. This can be frustrating, because it sometimes takes her six months to reply to an e-mail. If you want to be acquainted with her, you accept her for what she is: a walking light bulb who radiates a glow wherever she goes. She is the one who introduced me to Khalil Gibran and the Tao, for which I shall be forever grateful.

She recently completed the eight years of general medical training with a posting to the hospital in Stornaway on the Isle of Lewis. She chose to rent a lochside cottage an hour’s cycle ride from work, just so that she could experience the peace of a remote location and see the stars in all their glory at night. She considered the two hours cycling, on top of the long day to which junior doctors are subjected, a small price to pay for something that mattered to her. She probably even enjoyed it, because it gave her the chance to stop and talk to the local sheep.

Animals trust her. During one of her weekends trekking alone across the wilder parts of the Outer Hebrides, a golden eagle flew down and landed on the ground in front of her. She found it thrilling, but not all that extraordinary. I asked her whether she was aware of the difficulty trained naturalists have in just getting to spot a golden eagle in the distance.

And then she got posted to Inverness and lived in halls for a while. Her irrepressible spirit was not to be shackled, and so she went for a walk along the riverbank between 12 midnight and 2am during one of the coldest winters we’ve had in decades. The temperature was -20C; that’s -4F. She wrote about how delighted she was to see the full moon reflected in the river, and even more delighted to see it reflected in her cup of peppermint tea from the flask she had thought to take with her. And, guess what? An otter came out of the river and walked alongside her in the snow. Otters are notoriously shy of humans, but not of Lydia. It wasn’t the first time an otter had come and greeted her.

The only time I knew her get into trouble was when she went walking alone in a remote part of the Himalayas. It was very cold, apparently; there was no hot water to bathe, little to eat, and the shelter was scanty. She became ill. Fortunately, she had an aunt living in Delhi a few hundred miles to the south, and so she made the long, arduous trip there by public transport. Her aunt was a practitioner in herbal medicine, and got her well again. But even Lydia realised that she had maybe overstepped her boundaries a little too far. She didn’t regret it, of course. People like Lydia don’t do regret.

And that’s one reason for making this post: the question of personal boundaries. We all have them – demarcation lines separating those areas in which we’re comfortable from those in which we’re not. Some people, like Lydia, have very far-reaching boundaries; others have much narrower ones. And there are those, like Lydia, who like to step across them and see if they can cope on the other side. Others are obsessively cautious and never overstep their boundaries. This is a matter of personal choice and nobody else’s business. It annoys me when people say you must push beyond your boundaries, as though it were some unwritten rule of life; and it annoys me equally when others say we must be cautious in all things, as though recklessness is a sin. There are no rules. Who is judging, except somebody who is merely our equal but thinks they know better? We have a right to be whatever we want to be in that respect. There’s no guilt to be had in either observing caution or throwing it to the wind. It’s only life, after all.

But I still dedicate this post to the lovely Lydia. What a privilege it is to be part of her circle.