Our Favourite Song

 This week's quote reads, "Life is not a wish concert, but sometimes it plays your favourite song."

Which I suppose means that sometimes, our heart's desire will happen... the part about playing your favourite song reminded me of being a teenager, when Radio 1 would be playing on the bus on the way to school and back again, and the joy of hearing my current favourite single - whether that was by T. Rex, David Bowie, Status Quo or Queen, to name but a few - during the short journey, rather than other tracks I disliked. Because of course in those days, before mobile phones and apps such as Spotify, we were very much at the mercy of what the radio DJs chose to play. (I'm so old that this was even before the invention of Sony Walkmans [Walkmen??] - it was the radio or nothing).The worst case scenario was a journey filled with music I disliked, the best case scenario was the opposite. But it was out of my control. 

Taken less literally, I guess it is talking about moments of grace, when something marvellous happens when we are least expecting it. Perhaps we are walking under a cloud-covered sky, and the sun comes out, and the world is transformed. Or we open our e-mails, and there is good news about the health of a loved one. Or our book is accepted for publication... there are so many small joys to be savoured and appreciated, so many "favourite songs" which are waiting for us to wake up and listen to them.

Sometimes, it is more about finding the silver lining (to coin a cliché) in an unpleasant situation... which happened to me as recently as yesterday. I was on my way back home from the Nightingale Centre in the Peak District, after a rich and nourishing Ministerial Fellowship Conference, when the front right tyre on my car blew out at speed on the M1. Luckily I managed to get to the hard shoulder safely and, double-luckily, we are members of a breakdown service, so all I needed to do was ring them up and wait to be recovered. The downside was, it took two solid hours from the moment I rang them to the moment the breakdown truck arrived. I moved to the passenger side of the car, because passing lorries were coming alarmingly close to my car and making it rock and sway. I was not a happy bunny!

Silver linings: while I was waiting, the call-centre guy from Autohome rang me twice to check I was still okay and safe, and an officer of the Highways Agency also stopped to check the same. I really appreciated their kindness and care. And (crucially) I had my Kindle with me, and an interesting book to read.... But I was very glad to get home (especially as I had decided to skip lunch to get home an hour earlier!).

Keeping Our Balance

 This week's quote reads, "To keep your balance, you must keep moving."

Nope. Sorry, whoever wrote this, I don't agree. In order to find our balance, and then maintain it, the first necessity is stillness. Or at least, that is what I have found.

Because if we are constantly moving, how are we to find any kind of still centre? For most of us, the first half of life (and probably later than that) is all about keeping moving - about discovering who we are, what we love, what we're good at, finding our "tribe" of people, whether those be family, friends, our faith or some other community, or a mixture of all of them. The first half of life is all about striving, achieving, moving on, moving up, moving, moving.

Successful people can run away from themselves for years. They (and I count my younger self among them) skate across the surface of their lives, achieving, dazzling. It often takes some traumatic event (the loss of a loved one, or a devastating failure) to bring us up short. When this happens (and it generally does, at some point in our lives) our balance is lost and we find that there is no still centre around which we can regain it.

If we are lucky (and I was) there will be some wise friend or mentor around to give us advice. Which, for many of us, will be to stop moving, to sit in silence, to simply be. I have found that this (together with walking alone in nature) are the only ways of keeping my balance, and of discovering a new balance, a quiet centre. I was afraid of loneliness for much of my life and found the company of people infinitely preferable. But I believe that my decisions to quit smoking and drinking, combined with my interior spiritual journey in the early 2010s (still continuing) helped me to welcome solitude as a time to think, to reflect, to spend time in my own company, to come nearer to the Divine. These days, when I spend too much time in the company of too many people, I need a lot of time alone to come back to myself, to regain my balance.

True extroverts will find this hard to understand, but introverts and ambiverts will be reading with little cries of recognition. I'm not saying "I want to be alone" like Greta Garbo, but that I need a balance between being with people and being on my own. These days, I have found a balance I am comfortable with: I like to spend most of my daytime hours alone, working, or writing, or crocheting, but enjoy coming back into congenial company during the evening, with Maz and Luna. I love spending time with my best friend, and with my close family, but drop back into my customary routine with - no, relief is the wrong word. It is like slipping one's feet into a pair of comfortable slippers and sitting in one's favourite armchair, deeply relaxed, after a busy day.

How do you keep your balance?

           

Coping Badly

This week's blogpost nearly didn't happen: I am staying up in the Lake District with my best friend, and have forgotten to bring my computer mouse with me. I have my laptop, but no mouse. And I am finding it incredibly difficult, and teeth-grindingly frustrating, to use the laptop's tracking pad. I even had to ask my friend what it is called!

Which has made me realise what a creature of habit I am. With my mouse, I scroll down effortlessly, place the cursor at any spot I choose without effort, and generally just get on with whatever I'm writing. But I am having to laboriously learn how to move around a document, how to copy and paste, how to scroll down, all accompanied with much cursing. Nothing is labelled and I have to guess where to click on the tracking pad to get it to do what I need it to. Grrr!

Most of you will probably be laughing at my incompetence, yet the frustration is real. I have no desire to learn this new skill - I'm used to my mouse, and will return to it on Sunday with little coos of joy.

It has been a salutary reminder that the only constant in life is change and that I need to keep up, and somehow embrace it, rather than reacting so negatively, as I have this morning. I am embarrassed that the lack of a mouse has thrown me for such a loop - I had thought I was more adaptable. I can remember learning how to use a mouse in the early 1990s - my son was three and we had just bought our first home PC. There was a little game, consisting of putting a jigsaw of four pieces together, using the mouse, which my son mastered effortlessly, but I found so difficult.... 

So I have persevered, and this blogpost is the result. 

Interruptions Welcome

This week's quote reads, "Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans." 

And I had to laugh, if a bit ruefully. I used to be a fairly uptight, perfectionist, person, making plans for every aspect of my day, easily upset if something happened to de-rail them. Which has happened just this minute: I have taken a photo of the postcard on my phone and e-mailed it to myself, so that I can include it in this post. But it hasn't come through, and unless it does so in the next half-hour or so, this post will be without an illustration.

A few years ago, this would have caused me to gnash my teeth, get annoyed. But now I thought, oh well, never mind. Worse things happen at sea (to coin a cliché). The skies will not fall if this post does not have an illustration, far from it. How many people read my blogposts anyway?

During the past decade or so, mainly thanks to the wonderful Brené Brown, and her book, The Gifts of Imperfection, I have learned to become a recovering perfectionist, much more able to let my precious plans go, and enjoy what comes up instead. It is a much richer, more rewarding way to live. I know I have posted about this fairly recently, here, and laughed out loud when I discovered the post under the tag 'perfectionsim'. And feel no inclination to edit the post and correct the typo. Which is surely progress?

Because, as I said in that post, "life is messy, chaotic, unpredictable, and we cannot dictate how it will turn out. The one thing we can predict with some certainty is that it will not be perfect. No-one's life is perfect. And so the important thing to realise is that settling for "good enough" will ensure that in the long run, we are far happier than we would be if we were constantly yearning for the 'perfect' life."

I also believe that if we are too fixated on our precious plans, we can miss many spontaneous joys. For example, if my DH and I go on holiday, we have a general idea of some places we would like to visit, but are happy to play it by ear and go with the weather, go with the flow. Which has resulted in some gorgeous, unexpected events. Like bumping into Will Kirk of The Repair Shop at the Weald and Downland Museum a few weeks ago - he was charming.

Life is much more enjoyable when we allow a little spontaneity into it, plans or no plans... Interruptions welcome.

A Chain Begins with Two Links

 This week's quote reads, "I would now be ready for a chain of happy circumstances."

 

And I thought, o-kay... what does that mean? It is a statement of hope for a happy future, but surely there is more to it than that? Then it struck me: a chain begins with two links. If there is only one link, it is not a chain, it is a loop. Going nowhere. So perhaps in order to be happy, in order to experience "happy circumstances" we need to open our single loop and make connections with other people, get involved in the world around us. 

Which takes vulnerability, trust and courage. When we look around our world and see so much senseless hatred (witness the dreadful attack on the Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester yesterday - my heart goes out to all the people involved, suffering for the idiocy of the Israeli government) our instinct can be to hunker down, draw up the drawbridge and hide. It takes courage to stand up and protest, to reach out with compassion. As my own faith community, the Unitarians, have done. Yesterday, when news of the attack began to spread, the following statement appeared on Facebook:

"We are shocked and saddened by today's attack at Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester. We know that this will be felt deeply by Manchester's Jewish community, their families and their wider communities, particularly on the holy day of Yom Kippur.

We stand for peace and oppose violence in all its forms.

An attack on any place of worship is an attack on all who value freedom of faith and conscience. Places of worship should be sanctuaries; safe spaces for reflection, community and spiritual life. As Unitarians, we are committed to interfaith solidarity and to building communities where people of all faiths and none can live without fear. That commitment matters most in moments like this.

Rev Cody Coyne, minister of Cross Street Unitarian Chapel, Manchester City Centre, and President of the Manchester District Association, said: 'It can feel so much like hate is winning; but I think how each act is met with people running in to care for the victims, give solace to the bereaved, and in some cases placing their lives on the line for the sake of others. For each person committed to violence there is an overwhelming chorus calling us to act for peace and support.'"

This is how chains of connection are built - by standing up for what we know is right and refusing to allow hate to win. Every time we stand up for love and oppose mindless hate, a new link is forged.