Standing in someone else's shoes...

...living someone else's life. Sometimes I wonder if the life I am living is yours - the one you would have lived, if you had lived, and if you had learned to overthrow your fear.

For so many years I was in awe of your worldly upbringing: the new years' parties at ambassadorial residences (when you were 7), the grade 6 trip to Greece, to say nothing of the authentically egalitarian fundraising that went on for years beforehand, so that no kid could be excluded by their family's lack of means. Your travels around the world, the summer internship in Vienna, medic days in the navy, the radical parents (o how times have changed) who ignored local scorn for the single mum whose husband had committed suicide and left their only child with her to care for, and who made jokes about porn to embarrass your teenaged mates.... I was in awe of your education, your five languages, your latin, your encyclopaedic knowledge of history, your citizen-of-the-world view of life.

I was in awe... of you.

Now, I suddenly find I'm living a life I could never have imagined for that tongue tied, monolingual, clever-but-narrowly-educated, ardent-but-illogical, most-of-all shy girl from the outer eastern suburbs of Melbourne. I am working for the UN. I am living in Rome. I go to the beach on friday nights and drink cocktails while the sun sets over the Mediterranean and talk about world politics and why WFP still sells bottled water. I work with women who have delivered aid programmes in Afghanistan and North Korea and get training on how to withstand hostage taking from a bloke (I kid you not, his name is Gordon Brown) who had his leg nearly blown off in Pakistan last June.

I wish you were here. You would love this. You would love just knowing that someone you know is doing this.

I find it humbling beyond words to realise that it is ME doing this.

And on the lonely weekends, where I have only my own four walls to talk to, I understand the constant pressure to succeed and shine and impress, the desire to ring home for hours on end and never mind the huge phone bills; the urge to go outside, anywhere, just to be out of the house... I understand the utter frustration of being the "dumb foreigner" who can't speak the language well enough to ask for even the most mundane things. And I understand, as I never did before, how sometimes the longer you're away the harder it is to go home, and how easy all that makes it to stay up too late at night and have one too many vinos.

I understand the fear of failure because I have seen it reflected in my own eyes. (Sometimes, this job is so hard. I wonder if I can bear it.)

But I also know the joy of finding a laneway whose crooked shadows reveal unexpected treasures; the old guy in a leather apron who repairs shoes for a pittance (he's just off the Piazza of the Trevi fountain, btw); the pure grinning joy of being on a bicycle in the sunshine, ignoring the faceful of windblown hair in eyes and mouth, of discovering the special places that do some signature dish, or a piece of clever recycling, or that flavour of icecream you've never found anywhere else in the world and may never again. (Fig, by the way, is my latest favorite.)

I know the frustration of making a million shallow acquaintances and the glow of wondering if perhaps this person might become a true friend.

Life is hard. Sometimes it's achingly, crushingly, lonely and sometimes bad things happen that make us want to weep. Sometimes - too often - in the wider world, those bad things are done by people, to other people. But there is always some little thing, waiting around the corner, in the smile of a child, the love in a friend's voice, the arm of a lover, or just the glitter of sunlight on the river, that makes it all worth while.

And yet.... in our quest for glory its so easy to forget those things... I wish I knew what it was about human nature that drives us to forget the good things and go diving into the darkness, following it all the way to the bottom of the glass.

It doesn't have to be this hard - this impossibility that we make for ourselves with the messages inside our heads. We may not be able to change the circumstances in which we find ourselves, but we can always choose how we respond to them. The truly hardest part is remembering that, even while sitting alone in the gloom.

Staying there can be so tempting.

And perhaps this is the thing, the "one thing" that we wish we could name and bottle....we battered and imperfect souls who have somehow climbed out of the abyss and wondered how we did it when others we have loved - people we thought were stronger than us - have fallen beside us.

I wish, more than ever, that I had had back then the insight I think I may be coming into now. But perhaps that's what makes it so precious, this hard won wisdom, that it requires hard times in order to win it, and few of us come through that are able to see past our own scars.