mind

Let’s say I have a dream. Not one that requires a fairy and a wand, but more like I’ve felt a change in the wind and I need to tighten my sail. Oh, I’ll still arrive at the next shore in the end, but I could make all the difference to the quality of that arriving, if I made a correction or two.

Well that’s fine. In the bag you might say. After all, my big and agile brain has come to this conclusion. I can just sit back now and watch it happen.

Wrong.

As the day begins I am a veritable bounce of good intentions. I go about my list of tasks in the way I usually go about my list of tasks, but this time my step is lighter and my inner movie is definitely Disney. I reel in the line of hours, wind them around my spool. Done.

Ahead of me, I can see the old habit coming closer. It’s part of the pattern, of course, so it will come closer and closer until it is right in my face and looking at me expectantly.

This is when I begin to tell myself that the whole commitment thing is pointless. Who’s looking anyway? Who cares? I am still dashing along with verve and vigour, sails full, ahead of the game, aren’t I?

But I know different. So how to make this change, that’s the question, and the answer is, baby steps. I just need to correct my sail once, just once, and then to feel the shift and tell myself, Well Done!

Then, do it again the next day.

People we admire are always those who overcome themselves. We all know what it is to be ‘ok’, doing away, not bad, and other such beige states of being. We also, I think, imagine that those who overcome themselves, and therefore the mountains that block out their sun, are just lucky.

Lucky Schmucky. No such thing.

You don’t get through to the Olympic team by luck, nor to Wimbledon, nor to the finals of The Voice.

What those ‘lucky’ people chose to do was to tighten their sails every single day and often during it. They pushed themselves when others sat back in the sun with a pint pondering the meaning of life. Over long lonely hours, they kept practising over and over and over again until they stepped out into the light with a Da-dah! and we all marvelled at their superhuman-ness, something each one of them would deny with a derisive snort.

I may not want to play at Wimbledon, join the Olympic team or sing on TV, but there will be something in my life I just know I want to change, if only that fairy would appear with her wand and make it happen. If I do nothing, nobody will know. But I will. And when the fat lady sings, will I know that at least I tried?

We found an acorn and planted it in the woods, just pushed it into the soft peaty floor and moved on.

So did the acorn. Now, it’s shade from the sun and shelter in a rain shower.

There is something about waiting that can create an internal chaos.

Waiting for a train or a flight. Waiting for a day to come or a person.

Waiting for life to change, or start, or end. Waiting for seeds to grow, for my turn to come in or to go out. For guests to arrive or leave.

For a new baby. For test results.

That last one has to be the worst.

I knew a very old lady, once, who had been a maid all her working life. She was deeply proud of being a maid, and would make sure you got it right, the title right, if, perchance you got in a fankle over political correctness. This woman had no time for such malarky. Just say it like it is, she would say, wagging a bent finger under your nose. Maid is maid, however you try to say it.

She used to name certain days, waiting days. These days, for her, as a country girl, were usually connected with the weather. A waiting day meant the sky was shut, the wind all blown out, everything just standing there or hanging there……waiting. Of course, the weather matters a lot when your family are land workers, which hers were. Whether to plant, of plough, harvest or lay out in rows to dry, all dependant on the weather, and if the weather was waiting for something to happen, it never explained what. Could be rain. Could be there was a kick-ass gale in the planning, just off stage and hidden from human view. In her day, there was the wirless, but no fancy satellite information about high pressures over Iceland. Just the local yokel out with his moisture meter – or his eyes looking up and his own gut feeling.

On her waiting days, she would do something. Clean the silver (not her own) or pull out the beds for a good ‘doing’ or tidy handkerchief drawers, that sort of something. Anything, basically, to fill in the waiting time, and, in the doing of something, she might calm her own anxieties.

We can learn from her.

If, whilst waiting, we focus on what we are waiting for, knowing with perfect clarity that, in doing so, we make absolutely no difference to the thing, but only serve to discombobulate ourself into a right stooshie, we might consider a different approach. Of course, if the thing we wait for is scary and deeply buried in the underworld, such as the results of a medical test with an alarming set of possibles attached, we will be unable to erase it completely from our thinking. But the mind is quite easily led, I have found, and can be eased into a different place, at least for a little while.

I agree that giving the silver a clean, supposing we have any in the first place, or pulling out the beds for a good ‘doing’ are hardly exciting options, but that, I believe, is the key. Dullard tasks can soothe our brilliant and dangerous minds into a calm humdrum.

It doesn’t take the worry away. It doesn’t change the end result. But it does ease the path from breakfast to lunch, from hour to hour, from Monday to Friday. It won’t be a smooth one, nor easy, but when the demons trip us up and make us fall, the best we can do is get up and try again.