Pulling yourself together

It has been a while since my last pseudo philosophical musing and so I am going to allow myself some further pondering in this post.

Have you ever noticed how attached we become to everyday things and everyday actions? We tend always to do certain things in the same way and not because that is the best way but because that is the way we have done it for a long time. I guess that is what we call habit. Well I fell into a habit recently and only when I started to question it did I realise that therein was a worthwhile lesson for me to have and to share.

It concerns the curtains in the main bedroom. There are two large window separated by perhaps a metre of wall, and the curtains are in pairs in other words a pair for each window. Inconsequently they are in a sort of swirly endpaper patterned material bought years and years ago in Alders in Croydon.

I digress. The curtains are hung on rails and have a pulley type open/close system via a loop of string. Both strings happen to hand down in the centre between the windows. For weeks I would attempt to choose the right strings to open the curtains in the morning so that with a simultaneous pull of both the curtains would swish open. I also, somehow, managed to persuade myself that if I succeeded in doing this then it would be a good day. In other words what I was doing was setting myself up to fail albeit on a very minor and insignificant task. If one set opened and the other did not then the day would be OK. If both remained stubbornly closed then, well, let's just say it was unlikely to be a red letter day.

One day last week, as usual I had made the bed and went to open the curtains , the very minor revelation occurred to me that in fact I should be looking at this in a much more positive way. If neither curtain opened then I had the opportunity to try again and the likelihood was quite high that I would succeed before very long, if one set opened then I had at least half succeeded and only had half the task to complete, and if both sets slid open then let there be light!

The point of this little fable is that we very often focus almost exclusively on our failures, on the things that didn't turn out quite right or were for some reason a disappointment. Far better to look for and to enjoy the successes in our lives that are there simply waiting to be noticed.

Did you hear the joke about the man who went to the doctor saying he felt like a pair of curtains..... Of course you did.