Annus Mirabilis

There are days in this life, that are sent I think, to try us. Days when husbands are preposterous, children are relentlessly child-like, cakes burn, money is squandered, you can’t stomach another glass of good-for-you green juice  and you hibernate, feeling battered by the ugly stick and ready to shoot down in flames, anyone who dares to argue otherwise.

Heck yes: Mama, who is occasionally right, said there would be days like this. What she didn’t know is that sometimes days turn into weeks and weeks into months and once our poor dear Queen had an entire annus horribilus and I very much doubt that even her sweet faced Mama could have have seen that one coming!

It’s such a bummer.

Yesterday I was talking to a lovely friend. She seemed sad. She was having a crisis of confidence and problems with a ludicrous man, and Mother troubles and nothing felt right and everything was wrong and she was worried and doubting herself and exhausted and failing, absolutely, thoroughly to understand that from where I was sitting, she was, in actual fact, an inspiration.

Sometimes I pretend to be wise, so I tried to offer advice. I tried to make her feel better: but in the end there is only one bit of advice any of us need when we feel as thought the whole wide world is swinging out of control and that is to do what we can about the things we CAN change and accept the things we cannot. Because this I know for sure, battering our head against other people’s brick walls only leads to migraines.

You see, here is the thing: some things CAN be fixed. Even when our whole live’s have fallen down, we can still take ownership of that we are absolutely capable of changing. While we cannot affect change for other people, we can look at any given situation and ask ourselves, what can I get to work on, right now, this minute?

Action is therapeutic don’t you know? We can sit around fuddling our pretty brow about the state of the house, or we can stand up, tie and apron on and flood our senses and every surface in the room with lemon scented elbow grease. We can tell difficult people to go swing from a tree, while we get on with turning our business round, teaching our children that which they cannot teach themselves or grabbing a hammer and finally getting around to hanging the picture that has been leaning against the landing wall for a year now. And we can lie awake at night worrying about the impending arrival of the debt collector, with workhouse keys swinging from his belt, or we can wake up and resolve to get our heads down and create enough money to pay him off once and for all.

Fear and loathing and exhaustion and doubt immobilize us. They render us impotent and unwilling. But action creates miracles. Action has us believing that everything will be ok, and that we are not so bad after all, and that if we can hang a picture all by ourselves, we can almost certainly change our world.

Life doesn’t have to be our own version of one annus horriblus after next. Take action and we could in fact be enjoying an annus mirablis.

And if all else fails, we can always, always phone a friend.