Light from Darkness

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the concept of nadir. That experience of being at rock bottom, in the shit, at the end of your tether. It’s hell. And it feels like there’s no way out.

So two news stories really made an impact on me recently.

The first were the images of the newly restored Notre Dame. I’m far from a believer, but like many people I was aghast five years ago to see the cathedral in flames. It looked like a millennium of history would be lost to a discarded cigarette.

Yet to see the immaculate white stone of the interior today is to witness something we could previously only ever have imagined – a grand medieval cathedral as it would’ve looked when first built. And it is breathtaking.

The gleaming white stone of the newly restored cathedral.

The second was the news that 49 saplings have been grown from the ‘Sycamore Gap’ tree and distributed to charitable organisations across the UK. The tree had been a much loved landmark in the north of England before, in an appalling act, it was felled by vandals for reasons unknown. Now its descendants will be enjoyed by millions for generations to come.

The ‘Sycamore gap’ tree before it was felled.

Two incidents that seemed awful and hopeless and without any possibility of redemption. Yet today, through the endeavours of a bunch of human beings, hope has come from despair.

Now, we’re not trees or cathedrals, but all of us go through those times when everything that could go wrong does go wrong. And it feels hopeless. Like there’s no way out. But that’s the thing about a nadir. You can’t go any lower. And – as Yaz and the Plastic Population once sang – the only way is up.

All you have to do is put one foot in front of the other.

It will pass. And good will come.