Life is never easy... but you are not alone
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Em thinks that the answer to all (or certainly a lot) of life’s problems is a Roast Chicken. So, this website would not be complete without an easy Roast Chicken Recipe!!
You will need:
1 whole chicken
1 whole lemon
1-2 garlic cloves
Lots of butter and olive oil
Salt and Pepper (and mixed herbs if you are feeling adventurous).
Make sure you have a baking tray that you can fit the chicken into, with some additional room.
Pre-heat your oven at 220C/200C fan/gas 7.
Need help with the do’s and don’ts of problem solving? Every day we are faced with hundreds of questions, challenges or situations that demand consideration, answers or actions. If any of these are regarded as possibly unwelcome or harmful, you might say that they are ‘a problem’.
Problems come in all shapes and sizes. They cause worry and stress. They must be solved and overcome. No one wants problems. No one likes or needs them. The moment you realise that ‘you might have a problem on your hands’ most of us feel under pressure to find the answer and resolve the issue. Sometimes people feel completely overwhelmed with what they need to face. Em feels that if she can’t solve a problem immediately then she is failing. The truth is though that some problems do not have an instant solution.
So what to do – and what not to do? Here our Em and Milla’s top tips to help with problem solving
It is really important that you take your time. Unless you are in a truly life-threatening situation that requires an immediate response, you can take a bit of time. You do not need to come up with an answer the moment that the issue arises. Milla’s suggestion is that you breathe and count to at least 6 (preferably 10). There is a good reason for doing this.
When you are put in a stressful situation or under pressure to respond, the first part of your brain that reacts is the most emotional part. You automatically think ‘I have to do something NOW!!’ But you don’t have to do that. By giving yourself time to think about what you are being faced with, you will be able to make a more rational and considered decision. No matter what anyone tells you, nothing is so urgent that you have to decide there and then. Be confident that you can stop, take a step back and give yourself a few (or more) moments to consider what you should do next. If you do this, you might also discover that things are not quite as bad as you first thought.
To solve a problem, you need to understand what the detail of the problem is first. This might mean you asking lots of questions about what happened (What are the facts? How did it become a problem?). Just by asking those questions, you may find out that what you thought was insurmountable is actually easy to fix. Never be afraid to ask as many questions as you need to and share what is happening with others.
The reason what you are facing is a problem is because you’ve never come across anything like it before. We forget though that, none of us knows everything! We don’t all have the same knowledge or expertise. If you talk about what you have to deal with, you will find that someone you know has probably come across this before or been through something similar. Talk to people you trust to give you good advice. There is truth in the saying ‘a problem shared is a problem halved’.
If they don’t know what to do? There are other ways to find out the answer; you may need professional help or advice. You could do some research on the internet to see what you can find out. Do not forget there is a way to find the answer, but to find the answer you have to talk about it first.
Once you have worked out what the problem is about, one of the best ways to solve it is to break the solution down into smaller pieces that you can deal with one at a time. As Em well knows, the best way to eat a cake is just one spoonful at a time!
Think of the solution as a series of steps that you need to take. Decide what each one is, how you are going to complete it and how long each step will take to complete. You then have your plan and you can take some action.
Make sure that each step is achievable. If it isn’t, then break that down into smaller steps that are. Don’t focus on what you can’t do, focus on what you can do instead. Don’t worry about how long the steps might take. Just remember that every time you take one you are on your way to getting to the end and closer to a solution. If you are concerned that your plan might not work, talk it through with a friend or colleague and ask for help.
Once you understand the problem, have worked out a possible solution and have broken that solution down into manageable parts, you can then begin to take action. Carry on and do each part of the plan. When you have completed one part, start the next. This is putting your solutions into practice. As you complete each part, you move closer to the finish.
Know when you have solved your problem. How do you know once you have finished dealing with it? What does the end solution look like or feel like? It is important that once you solve your problem, you acknowledge that you have done it and feel really positive that you have reached the end.
Don’t forget to read our Blogs to find out more
Long for a positive mental attitude? It can be hard work. When you have a lot on your mind, a lot to do and life is feeling tough, you can feel as if the whole world is against you. You might feel that all you are trying to do is survive the hours/weeks/days.
It’s easy for everyone to tell you to ‘cheer up’ or that ‘it will be ok’. Not so easy to believe it.
Milla has faith in positive affirmations. Defined as ‘positive statements that can help you to stop negative thoughts’, these are the things that you tell yourself that might well help you to tackle the difficult things that you have to face, whatever they are.
There is some science that backs up the use of positive affirmations. Telling yourself that good things can happen and giving yourself some encouragement, can open the neural pathways of your brain. This makes you happier and more positive. The more that you repeat these, the more your brain will learn to be more positive. It becomes slower to fear those things that come to test us.
Even if you doubt that this can possibly true, why not try it? It is just as easy to think a positive thought as a negative one. Next time you find the voice in your head saying, ‘I can’t do this’, change it. Here are a few positive statements to get you started.
This is one of Em’s personal favourites. It is useful to remember that if you are feeling threatened (maybe at work or when finding yourself in a situation that might become confrontational) that you are not about to be eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger.
This is Milla’s own creation! There is a time in everyone’s life (well mostly everyone) when they tell themselves they can’t do something. This is either because they don’t know how or they find themselves dealing with something that they see no solution to. By changing this to ‘I can do it – there is always a way’, you are confirming to your brain that whilst you can’t do something now, you will look for the answer.
When you are low, struggling, worried and anxious, it is easy to forget the good things that you do have in life. That can be as simple as your family, your friends, a good book to read, a fiver in your wallet to get you a coffee. Focus on what you have got, not what you don’t have – yet!
Work can be overwhelming. Everyone wants you to do something and everything is urgent. The focus is always on what you have still got to do. But what about the things you have done? Ok, so you have a lot to get through. However, it is really important to remember what you have achieved – and shout about that to yourself!
Problems that are big and insurmountable can feel impossible to deal with. The challenge can feel way too much. Instead, look at how you can break it down, so you can resolve it bit by bit. Telling yourself that you are going to deal with what’s bothering you in smaller pieces can help to stop the anxiety that you have and make you feel more in control.
You don’t have to follow these; they are just ideas. Do some research to find more or make up your own. The important thing is to make them believable, realistic and most importantly to practise them.
Sunday mornings can be complicated in our house. Whether I get a lie in depends upon the kid’s schedule. More often than not, you will find me running about, frazzled and confused again, taking my son off to his rugby match, freezing on the side of the pitch or going to pick up my daughter from her sleep-over. Sometimes though, I do get a bit of peace. On those days, I listen to the radio, sing along very badly to it and potter around. I rather like those days. I still have jobs to do but I can do them a little more slowly and with a little more thought.
One Sunday, as I prepped the dinner (a joy given that normally it is a race to see what I can get defrosted and throw together), over the radio came the comment ‘…and this week, some questions that never have an answer.’ It got the rusty cogs of my addled and sleep deprived parts of my brain turning.
The example questions that were put were ‘Why can you never find the TV remote?’, followed by ‘Why does the top of the ketchup bottle always get bunged up’. I laughed, realising that they are very pertinent. Our TV remote regularly disappears, even when I am the only person who has been using it. There can be days (not often) when I have been the only person in the house and still the TV remote will turn up in the most bewildering of places. As for the ketchup bottle, I regard it as a miracle if it is still functioning after three uses.
A few more simple questions that I would love someone to provide me with answers to are:
And finally:
Why do I do the same things over and over again and desperately hope for a different outcome? Even though it never does. And I know that it won’t.
Then there are the bigger questions in life; the complicated, philosophical questions that if you think about too hard just end up giving you a headache:
Recently, we tried to do the perfect parent thing by giving the kids an inexpensive experience. This was to show them that doing enjoyable stuff should not cost an outrageous amount of money and can be fun. We took the kids out to a forest for a walk. We thought it would be good to amble along, pointing out the trees and the birds, whilst feeling the peace and the harmony of living things being as one together. I wanted to be mindful and feel that I was in the moment. I didn’t want to be reminded of the things that I had left at home, the emails to return, the problems to solve and the work to be done.
Whilst there, I asked my daughter to consider what I think is one of the greatest philosophical questions – if a tree falls in a forest but there is no one to hear it, does it make a sound? I’ve often considered this one. I don’t know the answer. Is sound only sound because you can hear it? Will the tree only be real because you can see it? Is there a difference between the way that something looks and how it appears? If you are not there, does the forest really exist at all?
As my daughter and I walked along, I pondered all of this again with her and asked her for her opinion. I thought that maybe she would have some insight that I was missing. I hoped to hear the genius answer that only the young can provide. Being 12, she rolled her eyes at me and told me that she hadn’t really heard any of what I had said. Frankly, she was more concerned that she couldn’t get a phone signal.
My son (14) grumpily informed me that he really didn’t know. He couldn’t see the point of the question either. Instead, he asked me what we were going to have for lunch and when were we leaving to get it. Feeling completely defeated, tired from trying to stop the bickering between the kids and starting to be rather hungry ourselves, we gave in and headed off for a quarter-pounder and fries.
I recently got asked the ‘why’ question by a friend. It was in the context of ‘why are you doing this?’ Truthfully, I don’t know. I feel as if I have been asking why for at least half of my life. I can’t answer it this time and I’m not sure that I ever could or if I ever will. Then again though, maybe I shouldn’t concentrate too hard on the why and just do the things that I want to do. I feel as if the ‘why’ is getting in my way and holding me back. It’s as if trying to work out the why is putting an obstacle in my way and preventing me from doing. Why do I need to work out why? Would it make a difference if I did? Sometimes this sort of interrogation of my own thoughts is just tiring.
I still want to know what the answer is to the question about the tree. I suspect though I never will as there are so many responses. Perhaps that is the thing about questions. It isn’t that they don’t have any answers; it’s that they have too many of them.
I am not a winter person. My struggles with this begin every year, from the end of November to around the beginning of March. First there is the dark. I’m not a fan of the dark. November brings the dark. It is dark in the morning when you get up and it is dark in the evening when you get home. Even during what is supposed to be daylight, it’s dark.
Then there is the cold. I don’t cope well with the cold. If I’m truthful, I’m horrible when I’m cold. This year it has been even worse, what with the cost of fuel and energy becoming ridiculous. I’ve been huddled in a blanket for months, whilst the heating has had to be endlessly rationed. Whilst we have been turning down the thermostat, we have also been re-discovering the joys of hot water bottles and fluffy socks. I’ve been permanently wrapped up in a shawl. Yes, a shawl. I’ve resembled something out of a Charlotte Bronte novel.
And of course, there is the weather. Cold, wet and dark. Or icy. With snow. Or worse gales. We’ve spent a lot of time in recent years holding our fence up. On occasion, it’s all weather conditions at once and then some clever person at the Met Office goes and gives it a name. Last year we had Storm Eunice which brought with it wind speeds of up to 122 mph. I feel for every single Eunice out there, who must have felt complete outrage at the idea that they were akin to a travelling storm.
I find the lack of sun and the lack of warmth arduous. It feels never ending. The days are long and the nights are even longer.
I’m sure that there are some great things about the winter (I do promise that in the future I will research this and, for the purposes of balance, publish every wonderful thing about winter) but I find it difficult to find them. Obviously, there is Christmas. I do love the sparkly lights. However, the best day of winter is still 21st December, when we have the shortest day and I know the nights are starting to draw out once again.
Spring slowly starts to come with the Snowdrops beginning to show. Then the Crocus begin to arrive. Bright spots of colour on what are endlessly dreary, cold, grey days. Sometimes there is even a glimpse of the sun. With the arrival of March, I always breathe a sigh of relief as I know the end is in sight.
To celebrate the arrival of Spring, I thought it would be good to write about the five best things that this season brings with it – and here they are:
Suddenly, we have more hours in our day! Now I do know that we don’t; it’s twenty-four and that is the limit, Spring or Winter. It feels as if we do though because suddenly the light comes back. It is no longer dark in the morning when you trudge out of the house and no longer dark when you trudge back in. You can spend more time outside and a lot more time indoors without the electricity bill costing you a fortune because you can see without turning on the lights.
It is a fact that more sunshine or at least more natural light is good for you. Plus, you get a boost of Vitamin D that makes you feel better. It helps your bones, your muscles, makes you feel less fatigued, improves your immune system. The sunshine (though be careful and don’t get burnt) makes your body produce it. Even without it, I find that having that little bit of sun and warmth just makes me want to smile and makes even the most miserable of jobs to be done that little bit easier.
Show me trees that are coming back into leaf and Snowdrops arriving and I am very easily pleased. Spring brings new growth and new life and it is great to see after months of grey days and shrubs and grass that looks half dead. You begin to feel that maybe there are new possibilities out there and that it is a new time to start again.
I barely go out in the winter. If I do, I am wrapped up in about ten layers. Needing somewhere to put your coat (and your hat, scarf, gloves, your three jumpers and your two pairs of socks) becomes something of a chore when you just want to nip out to a restaurant or the cinema. This year of course I have also become far too attached to my shawl to go anywhere. With more daylight, more warmth and weather that doesn’t threaten to freeze you or blow you away, going out to do things becomes more tempting.
Now I realise that we are not in a great place in terms of food prices and the importation of food into the UK now. I can also say that, no matter what government ministers say about the situation, I shall not be subbing any of my veg for a turnip or two. Please do not call me out for being nasty to turnips. I have nothing against them, they just aren’t for me.
Traditionally, Spring is a time when what we have available to us to eat should improve and we can either buy more fresh food (fingers crossed) or learn about the joys of growing your own. Getting into the garden (or planting up your window box) is truly joyful thing that you can do. I still find it fascinating to watch little seeds grow into amazing plants. I find them even more amazing if they can produce something for us to eat and reduce our shopping bills.
So there you go. I am sure that there are many more reasons to love the Spring but those are my best ones. Of course, the real reason to love the Spring is because it gives you the knowledge that the Summer isn’t far behind it.
Today I won at life. Not massively. Nothing miraculous happened. I wouldn’t describe that afterwards I felt any form of unrequited joy. It wasn’t that exciting. I just felt a little bit better and slightly more content.
First thing in the morning, after the chaos and pandemonium that is the school run, I like to try to go for a short walk before I begin work. It’s a tiny thing but it makes me feel better. The best place to walk around is the local park. I get exercise and daylight. For a whole twenty minutes (provided I can force myself not to look at my phone) I get to be away from a screen. I see the leaves on the trees changing as
they go through all the seasons. If I am really lucky, I walk myself to a coffee shop where I open my laptop and start my first hour of work for the day from there.
Despite how minor doing this one thing might sound, you should hear the arguments that I have with myself as to why I shouldn’t be doing it. They range from ‘I don’t have enough time’ to ‘the weather is awful’, to ‘the car park is soooo expensive’. If there is an obstacle I can put in my own way, then I will do it.
Well today, I won. Because I did it. But most importantly, it didn’t rain whilst I was doing it. I didn’t get cold and end up with drizzle running down my nose. And it felt good. Not great, amazing or marvellous. Just good.
These days, life feels as if it is more about the little things that we do to make ourselves happy. It’s the things that get us through the day, so that we aren’t just surviving through the time that is passing by, but actively living in it. More and more of us, perhaps in part because we have just been through a major pandemic that has caused so much upheaval, are learning that we need to appreciate the little things in life just a bit more than we used to.
Dr Michael Mosley has written a book called “Just One Small Thing: How Simple Changes Can Transform Your Life”. In it he advocates doing just little things that bring you happiness and making this routine in your life so that those things become habits. In this one small way, each day you can create tiny wins for yourself. There is a list of things to try and none of them cost either any or only a little money and only a little bit of time.
Not all the ideas are for me. For example, I will not be taking a cold shower. I find the idea of plunging myself into icy water akin to torture. I also don’t think that I will be leaping out of bed to try and do press-ups every day first thing. My knees wouldn’t allow it, never mind the protest that my hips would put up. But both might appeal to others, far more adventurous and hardy than me. There are other things though; taking a short walk in the morning; reading a chapter of a book every day; letting your mind wander for five minutes.
People have also been sharing the things that they do for fun for free on social media. The cost of living has meant that we are all cutting back and trying to find things that are inexpensive to do. The suggestions were: re-joining the library; spending time in the garden and tracking planes that were going overhead with an app; researching places to visit in the future; joining tester panels to get free samples to test; putting on music; doing a big jigsaw.
Admittedly, again, some of these things are not for everyone. I don’t mind a jigsaw myself but I can just see the eye rolling that my husband would do if I asked him to join me. However, he sits and scrolls through YouTube researching camping holidays a lot more these days. If he gets more than five minutes to do that in the evening, that is his little win. It isn’t my idea of fun but if it makes him happy, so be it.
Of course, little wins aren’t just about the habits that you make. They are also about the things that happen that make you think that life is going your way. It’s getting through traffic lights that are all on green when you are running a tad late. Or, it’s finding a good way to use up your leftovers for dinner. Sometimes, it’s finding the last tea bag in the caddy when you were sure that you had run out. It’s getting the last parking space, when you thought it was impossible. It’s realising that you have one more episode of that drama to watch when you thought there weren’t any more.
I have many days when I need to find a reason to smile. The answer seems to be in the simple things that I could do every day and in appreciating the things that go my way as not just being trivial but as having eased my path. It’s time to stop arguing that these things aren’t important and to do more of them every day. So, if you want to and you can, go and look at the planes flying overhead, take a quick walk in the sunshine and sit and have five minutes with that coffee.
At some time in your life, you will find yourself dealing with an emergency. Now, we all deal with emergencies every day. However, these tend to be more of the ‘Emergency Chicken’ variety. The type that is known as a ‘Crisis Management’ issue. You know the ones; it’s the catastrophes that happen which require quick thinking and improvisation. It’s this kind of thing:
“Today, minutes before the most important job interview I have ever had, the jacket I was wearing split from top to bottom at the back, just as I was getting out of the lift.”
Or
“I was delivering the cake to the wedding reception and I fell down the steps of the hotel and the cake was in bits all over the floor.”
Or (in my case)
“It was 7.00am on a Monday morning and my son suddenly remembered that he needed to cook Chicken Pie in his Food lesson that afternoon and had forgotten to tell me again. We had none of the ingredients. I was left with a choice: let him face the music and probable detention at school or drive like a lunatic to Tesco, belt around the shop like a maniac and get home for 8.00am, with the requisite food just before he had to head off.”
Speaking of which…
I have two children. One is a fourteen year old boy. He is the eldest. He is at that difficult age where he gets spots and has become a bit smelly. My boy loves rugby, his handwriting is appalling, I can’t get him to do his homework and he doesn’t understand what a romantic relationship might be (thank goodness). He is now taller than me but he will always be my baby. He still wants a cuddle but not for too long.
It was a Thursday. Thursdays in our house are important because my husband has Thursdays off. It’s his day to be on ‘’Kid Duty”. He does the school runs. Most importantly, I get a day off from being responsible from the parental stuff and making the dinner. Well, in theory I do.
This Thursday, it meant that I was going off for a business meeting. I was looking forward to it. Working from home means I don’t get out much these days. I was going to a place that did lovely coffee and where I would be speaking to people who were not members of my family. I had a smart dress on. The sun was shining. I left earlier than anyone else, shouting that I loved them all and then practically skipping to the car to go out on a journey alone. It was great.
It was great until 10.30am. That was the moment I looked at my phone. It hadn’t even rung. The signal must have been poor. I had a voicemail, left at 9.51am. I thought it odd and listened to it. It was school. My son had not been marked in as present. Could I ring them back?
Irritated that I am always the first person the school contacts (being Mum) and immediately annoyed that my day was interrupted, I rang my husband and told him so. Had he had a phone call from school? No. Had he dropped the kids off ok? Yes, he’d watched them walk into school and then driven off. Were they late? No. Where there any problems? No, just the usual gripes and grumbles. Could he ring school back and let me know everything was ok? Yes. I hung up, bad tempered that my peace had been
shattered, breathed deeply and put my smile back on.
Half an hour later, I hadn’t heard anything from my husband. My meeting having ended, at 11.15am I got in the car and rang him again. My husband said he had called school and been told that our son was not there. The person he needed to speak to wasn’t available and they would ask them to return my husband’s call in five minutes. Forty-five minutes later this still hadn’t happened. Rolling my eyes and swearing, I told my husband that this wasn’t good enough. If our son really wasn’t in school we needed to know now. My husband, being the very reasonable, laid back and calm person that he is, told me not to blow things out of proportion, it would be a mistake and all would be fine. Disagreeing, I asked him to phone school again.
Slowly beginning to panic, I drove home. I knew our son would not go off. I’ve had that conversation with him. He’d promised me that he wouldn’t do that and even if he did, he would tell me where he was. He would never go off and lie about it. So where was he? All we knew that he had walked towards school but that was better than nothing. He had to be on school premises. He had walked in with our daughter and there was no mention of her being absent. There was also the after school rugby match he was playing in and looking forward to.
By the time I got home (11.40am) I was angry and feeling sick. I’d realised that if school had not found our son, we would have to call the Police and report him missing. We were now nearly two hours from the initial phone call that I’d had. I walked through our front door shouting to my husband. He told me that he’d called school. School had confirmed that our son had not been marked in as present by his form tutor and that he hadn’t been marked in as present in his first two classes. But he was still waiting to hear from the person who was dealing with it. Swearing again about how unacceptable this all was I rang school. My husband (who had been texting our son since 10.30am) began ringing his phone.
I don’t really remember the next ten minutes. Time seemed to stop. I know I phoned school and told them very clearly that I wanted them to check to see if my son was in his third lesson. I wanted to know if he had been seen or not. If I didn’t get a call back in five minutes, I would be calling the Police regardless and going to school to find out what was going on. I remember crying (a lot). My husband told me that I wasn’t doing anything or going anywhere because I was likely to be arrested if I did. I remember thinking that was the least of my worries. I clearly remember thinking it was possible that my son was now lying dead in the school toilets, in a puddle of his own blood.
At 11.50am, my husband’s phone pinged. It was our son. The message was rude and abrupt. Phones aren’t allowed to be used at school. My first thought was, how did we know it was from him? Had someone got his phone? My husband asked him where he was; ‘School’. ‘Which lesson?’ ‘German.’ He gave answers to each question correctly. My son was alive, safe and exactly where he was supposed to be.
School didn’t ring back until just after 12pm. By this time I was sobbing hysterically and furious. We were told that my son was safe, they had no idea how this had happened but would find out. I was so angry that I could barely put a sentence together. I had to ask for a call back the next day, when I felt better. So shaken was I, that it took me about four days to do that.
So, how did we get to this? How did we get to our son being in school for a period of three and a half hours and to all intents and purposes being thought to be missing? The answer is simple. My son’s tutor incorrectly marked him down as absent. The following two teachers did not mark the registers that they had correctly. The school’s safe-guarding procedures broke down quite spectacularly. I’ve had many apologies. I’m now trying to forget it all and look at the positives. I still have my boy.
My son played his rugby match and his team won that day, sixty odd points to nil. I cuddled him very tightly when he got home. He told me to get off. He was definitely more than a bit smelly.
At the risk of sounding like my mother, about thirty years or so ago, I learnt to type. Now, just to clarify, what I mean by ‘type’ is being able to use more than two fingers. There is no way you would get 100 words a minute out of me. Sometimes, I can look away whilst typing and sometimes I can’t. I also have a nasty habit of getting my ‘from’ and ‘form’ mixed up. It was a skill that I learnt. It might just become more useful in the future. How little we really knew. These days I spend most of my time tapping things out on a laptop/tablet/phone. The tech feels permanently stuck to my hip, and I use it far more than I actually pick up a pen.
I was also taught correct typing etiquette. For me, this was one space after a comma and always, ALWAYS, two spaces after a full stop. It’s what we did. I had it drilled into me. I still do it as a habit. That was until my automatic grammar and spellchecker decided to tell me that every gap at the end of my sentence was too big and an error.
Completely confused by this, I did what we all do. I frantically searched for what I was doing wrong on the world wide web. My search results caused me to gasp in complete horror. Two spaces after a full stop (or ‘period’ if you want to get all United States about it) is apparently ‘so before 1990’. Microsoft now deems it to be so out of date that they regard them as automatic mistakes. To quote one article, ‘double-spacers are a rapidly disappearing demographic’. There is a whole debate raging on about why we must keep the double space. One space is the future.
This news upset me. Such a profound revelation has completely passed me by. I feel just a little disappointed that I am now regarded as a ‘disappearing demographic’. I read on and discovered that there are so many changes that I had no idea of. Let’s look at messaging. For years I had texted, only to find out that WhatsApp was the way forward. Now there are so many ways of communicating that cannot count them. And then there is the language. I’m pretty sure that text speak came about because in the beginning phone companies used to charge for texts by the word.
This lead to the abbreviations that we now all love to hate. We mostly pretend to understand when we have no clue what they might mean. Lol. Fomo. B4. Cwot. I’m confused. Don’t even get me started on emojis though. Here was me thinking that thumbs up meant ‘ok’ or ‘yes, thanks’, only to read this week that new generations regard this as a ‘passive/aggressive insult’. So now I have no idea whether I am upsetting someone or not. I thought sending someone a picture of a peach was sending a pretty drawing of a piece of fruit, not bottom cheeks. Living like this, is it really a surprise that communication in this world is so poor and getting worse?
I think that we all like to believe that dealing with change is something we embrace. Inn reality though, it is difficult. At the moment, change is coming at us very quickly and from all directions. This has now been happening fairly relentlessly for the past two years or so. There is a constant influx of things I have to do differently. I’ve become jaded and tired by it. Every time I switch on the TV, the word ‘unprecedented’ is being used and bandied around. Frankly, it’s exhausted me. Boredom has never looked so attractive.
Part of this is because we have not been at all ready for the changes that have come about. Covid 19 came from nowhere. Out of the blue we were forced to face a life that we had never seen before. The changes that have been driven by this have left us with uncertainty not seen for many, many years. That uncertainty has left us with fear and insecurity. There is a feeling of not knowing what will happen next or how to cope with it.
In itself, acknowledging change is not easy. This is particularly because the changes that we have gone through and still face are and continue to be momentous. Expecting to merely accept them and skip on without any care is not therefore really reasonable. It’s all very well saying that we have to ‘move forward’ and ‘forge ahead’. What about if you just can’t do that? Humans (including me) are actually creatures of habit. We all have our little routines and structures. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to function properly. With the removal of the habits that we know so well comes unpredictability and risk. This isn’t easy for anyone to manage. Sometimes, it just is overwhelming.
I find that I am struggling with the changes I need to make in my life. I have no advice as to what to do or how to do it. I’m guessing that we are probably all very similar. I feel that the changes that we are going through need us to be a bit braver and more courageous than ever before. We also need to remember that humility and kindness needs to play a part. None of this is easy. What one person finds simple, another finds daunting. So, the next time you read my writing, before you jump to criticise, I want you to remember this. Two spaces was a thing once, even if it isn’t the same now. And maybe I’m just not as quick to cope and deal with change as you are.
I’ve been wondering if happiness is an inside job. To find out, here’s three questions for you. Do not over think them:
Happiness is an odd concept. It is an emotion or a state to be in. Very clever people have spent hundreds of years trying to understand it and measure it. But no one (at least not according to Google) has worked out how you calculate just how happy you can be. The only answer I can find is that ‘happiness cannot be measured’. I do suspect that there are some very rich Psychiatrists out there who are happy with the money that they have earned from trying unsuccessfully to find the solution to the happiness puzzle.
I’ve been thinking about being happy a lot recently. I’ve been wondering why I do certain things, even though they make me miserable. Why do I say ‘yes’ and commit myself to do particular tasks, when doing so puts me under pressure? Why don’t I say no? These things do not make me happy. Yet I do them anyway.
Mostly, I’ve been listening to my daughter. She is eleven but she is the most perceptive person I know. She drives me mad because she asks endless questions. I have of course bought this on myself. I’ve encouraged her to have an enquiring mind and I teach her to have curiosity about everything. These days, the questions are mostly of the financial variety. For example, ‘can I have that very expensive pair of trainers?” Or can I just order this extortionately over-priced bit of tech off Amazon’?. Every now and again though she says things that make me stop in my tracks. Recently it was ‘Mummy, why are you doing this when it just makes you so angry?’. Good point. Why do I put myself through this stuff???
So how do you know when you are happy? It’s ok wanting to be happy but surely you can’t go around all the time with an inner feeling of joy. There are things we all have to do that maybe we don’t like but that we know will make life a little better or easier if we just get on with them.
I get up early every Saturday morning and sort out the house (or at least I try). I make it cleaner, tidier, try to find the kitchen surfaces, that sort of thing. Now, what would make me happy would be for me not to do this. Happiness for me would be having a lie in. Then get up slowly, have a nice coffee and a pastry and watch the world go by for a bit. Instead, I get up at the crack of dawn, go to the supermarket when its quiet, just so that I can park and avoid everyone. I then race back home to vacuum like a maniac.
I suppose that the reason that I do this is, is in the hope of making every day life a bit simpler. For me, it is always a bonus if you can actually find a pen that works or a matching pair of socks without having to turn our normally chaotic house upside down and make it twice as bad as it was before.
I’ve been realising for some time that (to use a good old cliché) life really is too short to be miserable. I have also been realising just what the effect my being under stress and unhappy has on my family. When I’m calm, things tend to run far more smoothly then if I’m sad and struggling. The kids don’t argue as much. We have a better routine. We eat better. There is a general feeling of peace and that we can cope with whatever life happens to be throwing at us. The best feeling I have, which I think must be happiness, is last thing at night when I know that we are all in bed, fed, safe and warm and everything is quiet and still.
I am learning about happiness is that it isn’t about having lots stuff and things. It’s actually about having the basics. I put this knowledge down to getting old (I am not telling you how old). However, the more stuff I have, the more I realise that what I have is just becoming clutter and then all I do is worry about how I’m going to recycle it. I actually don’t need it. Let’s look at life at the moment. It cannot be any coincidence that collectively, as a country, we are all unhappy knowing that our food prices are going up and we are worried about putting the heating on.
We need to be warm, with enough food and people we love to be happy. Another pair of shoes or a fancy phone isn’t going to change the state you are in or magically improve it. I often think this must go back to our times thousands of years ago in caves. I’m now willing to bet that, if I had been alive then, as long as I had a fairly clean animal skin (unbranded would do), could get the fire going, were able to put something to cook on the spit to eat, all with the knowledge that the sabre toothed tiger would never find me, I could have been pretty content.
I’ve been reading that one way to measure happiness is to get to the end of every day and see if you can name three things that have been good about it. I’ve done this exercise and have found that what makes me happy seem to have three things in common. They normally involve having more time to spend with the people I want to be with, being able to eat so I’m not hungry (food does seem to play a disproportionately large part in my life) and me achieving something I’ve been wanting to do. The one theme that runs through all of the things that make me happy is how simple they are. They don’t cost a lot. With a bit of effort, I can manage them.
So, if you can’t buy happiness (though money undoubtedly helps) does that mean that happiness is actually a state of mind? Can you choose to be happy? Is it possible to decide that, not matter what the challenges of each day are, that you are going to be happy, no matter what? Is being happy actually a skill to be learned? I’m going to try and see.
*As well said by William Arthur Ward