Archives: Random

There must be something about being tired and a little bit down on yourself that sets the inspiration glands working over time, as I napped this afternoon and got up to find myself sat in front of the computer churning out 10 pages of my screenplay.  Even I’m impressed.

I know that, technically, the tense of the title is wrong, since it was yesterday and not next week, but it was such a fantastic pun which came to me in my half-dead stupor in bed last night that I just couldn’t let it go, grammatically-challenged although it may be.

Anyway, to the point – I had the most amazing day yesterday, flying down to Ipswich to see my Godfather and his family. Yes – flying. To Ipswich. The only thing more remarkable than taking a helicopter down to visit friends and family in Ipswich is that someone who can afford to own a helicopter and fly his friends and family around would choose to live in Ipswich.

I love flying – I’ve done it a few times at school when I was a cadet in the RAF. The only reason I signed up, in fact, was that I heard you got to go for a buzz in a Bulldog – which, for those of you out of the loop on these things, is flying in a type of small, 2-man aeroplane, not unnaturally interfering with a canine.

Helicopters are so much more fun than planes, though, since they are infinitely more manoeuverable than their winged cousins. The float serenely up into the sky – well, as serenely as you can with two engines and four blades shuddering around above your head – and whisk you much quicker than you’d imagine to wherever you want to go.

My Godfather lives in the middle of Nowhere-outside-Ipswich, which is a very quaint little village which does, in fact, have a proper name, but navigation is much easier when you just fly straight into his garden. Road names are rather arbitrary.

They have recently been redoing their house – and by “redo” I mean gut and rebuild, basically – and I could go into immense detail about the 6 bedrooms, 5 en suite, chill-out room, grand staircases, floor-to-ceiling mirrors, televisions behind pictures on the wall and double-pool spa-complex with gym hidden behind a wall of mirrors at one end, but actually I think all you need to know to create a picture in your mind is the fact that you can land a helicopter in his back yard.

There are 2 things you notice about the East of England when you fly over it from anything ranging between 500 and 1,200 feet (we yo-yo’d a little bit, for fun and frolics): 1) East Anglia and Suffolk in particular, is incredibly flat and boring to look at, endless miles of monotonous fields and the odd semi-major road and 2) there are more stately homes or Very Big Houses than you can shake a big stick at. Mind you, your chances of finding anything as interest as a big stick in the landscape of Suffolk is close to zero.

Monotony aside, it’s a wonderful experience flying over everyone’s heads, seeing your shadow chasing across the fields below, spotting the rich areas by counting the number of swimming pools and tennis courts per x number of houses. Helicopter is way to travel. Even a comparatively boring 40 minute ride like ours was about 100 times more interesting than spending 40 minutes on the M1.

I could fly all day – even over Suffolk. I do it a disservice by knocking its dull flatness, because anything is fascinating from the air – watching the roads wind around the countryside, spotting the big houses, fields being ploughed, small country airstrips (of which there are far, far more than you would imagine).

Although we weren’t quite high enough to see things properly, there were times when you could even make out an interesting lie of land that would appear to indicate the presence of an old fort or similar – like being in a live episode of Time Team.

All of which is a very long-winded way of telling you that we spent the day with my Godfather and his family in Ipswich, which I completely and dearly loved every minute of. The fact is, without the convenience of flying pretty much door-to-door (we did have to drive 15 minutes to an airfield at our end), I’d never have been able to go.

It was a really, really wonderful day and it left me completely drained and shattered. Today’s been spent almost entirely in bed and tomorrow will probably largely be, too, but it was totally worth it. I’ve not spent time with them for absolutely ages and K’s never met my Godfather before, although she had met his wife, who’s one of the world’s greatest people when her scathing eye is trained on someone other than me. Luckily yesterday, her husband was around to deflect most of the attention, and I had K there so I didn’t have to endure the “when are you going to find yourself a decent woman” conversation, either.

In fact all she had to complain about was my lack of visits recently, which I assured her I’d make up post-transplant by using her house as my rehab centre. For one thing, it’s got a better-equipped gym than any NHS hospital and a good deal of private city-gyms too, I suspect.

It was great to get away for a bit and catch up with people I love to pieces and see far too infrequently. And to have the luxury of flying there and back, well, that just takes the biscuit.

Ooooh, photos!!

I have an unnatural love of Aaron Sorkin.  It’s really not very becoming for a man of my age.  I have a kind of giggly school-girl relationship with everything and anything he does.  Oddly, though, not many people actually know who he is.

Most people have never heard of him and fewer seem to have seen his TV shows.  The only thing most people know him for is A Few Good Men, the Tom Cruise/Demi Moore/Jack Nicholson movie, and even then most people only know it when they hear Nicholson bellowing, “You want the truth? YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!”

He wrote that.

He went on to create and write the immensely under-rated Sports Night, which ran for 2 seasons and 40-odd episodes in the States a decade or so ago, starring some proper actors who went on to big things in Six Feet Under and Desperate Housewives, but never really took off.  It got buried in the schedules on ABC1 over here a couple of years back, but I don’t think anyone noticed it.

After that he hit the big time (at least in the States) with the unbelievably brilliant West Wing, probably my all-time favourite TV show and multi-Emmy award winner.  Sadly, English audiences never really took to it and after the first series was broadcast to critical acclaim but rubbish ratings on Channel 4 it got shifted and bumped around the schedules on E4, More4, Another4, Someone Else’s4 and other such channels.

It was, however, consistently the best thing coming out of the States for 3 seasons, dropped a little in the 4th just before Sorkin left.  It carried on for another 3 seasons and was cancelled last year, ironically after its best season since Sorkin left.

So what did he do next?  The master wordsmith, the writer I most admire, the man, the myth, the legend went and created Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip – a behind-the-scenes comedy-drama about working on a weekly live sketch comedy show for a fictional US Network.

It’s inspired, sublime and completely riveting – I love the whole thing to pieces, even before you add in to the mix Matthew Perry (ex of Friends) in a role that let’s him loose with his very real talent, and two of the West Wing’s best regulars in Bradley Whitford and Timothy Busfield.

The only problem with watching the series unfold week-by-week on More4 as it is at the moment is the horrible knowledge that comes from following TV production in the United States.  You see, Studio 60 is SO good that the network (the real one, not the fictional one) pulled it after one 20-episode series.

Bummer.

Which leaves the tantalizing question of what it did wrong to get cancelled.  All shows have their bad weeks, especially when you’re working in the American system where they write the shows as they go (as opposed to the UK where all but the longest series like Dr Who or Robin Hood go into production with all of the scripts in almost final form), but Studio 60 has so far, in 5 episodes, hardly hit a bum note.

Did the American audience just not go for the show?  Did they just not carry on watching?  Or does it suddenly, mid-season, get completely rubbish.

I’m a Sorkin addict – I’ll watch anything he does because I think he’s one of the most talented writers on the planet.  And I know I’ll keep watching this to the bitter end (and you know already that the ending’s going to be bitter), but it’s kind of turning into car-crash TV, to be watched with your fingers over your eyes from behind the sofa.  Because you have to imagine that for a show this good at the start to get canceled after a single series, something BIG has got to go wrong with the quality of the output somewhere in the middle.

Ah well, you can’t win ’em all.  And even if it does get rubbish, I’ve got 115 hours of The West Wing on my DVD shelf to give me my Sorkin-fix.

Strangely for someone with the aerobic capacity of a small field mouse, I find reading sports books particularly fascinating and inspiring.

I don’t know if it’s the thought of hopefully one day being able to push myself physically in the ways I read of others doing, or if it’s precisely because I have no idea what it feels like to push you body to its limits in those ways.

One of my favourite books is Matthew Pinsent’s Lifetime in a Race, which is not only really well written and engaging but also brilliantly descriptive of the punishment Olympic sportsmen and women put their bodies through.  Similarly, I enjoyed Paula Radcliffe’s book and others too.

Recently, as you may have read here, I picked up Lance Armstrong’s book It’s Not About the Bike, the story of his struggle with cancer and eventual comeback and first ever Tour de France victory, a feat he would go on to repeat a further, record-breaking 6 times.  It’s a fabulous book, just as fascinating and inspiring as I’d heard it was.

What intrigued me about it was how interesting it was from the perspective of someone who knows nothing about and has no interest in cycling as a sport.  Despite numerous recommendations I had always sort of ignored the book before on the basis that, not being a follower of the sport, the book wouldn’t interest me.  It turns out to be much more than a cycling book, though, and it tells stories with a rare perspective and wonderful fighting spirit that I think many people with critical illnesses often share.

More than that, though, it actually got me interested in cycling.  So much so that in the spirit of trying to find more books to inspire me on my mini-quest for mini-fitness I picked up a copy of a book called Inside the Postal Bus by a guy called Michael Barry.

There were a few reasons I chose this out of all the books lining the sports section of Borders when I was browsing.  The main one, though, was the promise from the blurb of the book to get an insight into how a cycling team operates within the Tour de France itself – how the other riders in a team work to support the lead rider in his bid to victory.

The book covers the 2004 racing season from Barry’s perspective as a rider on the same team as Lance Armstrong – the US Postal Racing Team, named for their sponsors, the US Postal Service – riding in the races with him and on their “tour bus” between events and stages, the titular Postal Bus.

The blurb itself proclaims: “Journey across Europe with US Postal – from the first workouts in the winter to the intense intra-squad competition to make the Tour de France team selection.”  It tells us Barry had “The hardest job in sports: riding for Lance Armstrong in pursuit of a Tour de France victory.”

What a brilliant idea for a book I thought – cycling from the perspective of a regular athlete, rather than from the point of view of something of a super-human success story.  I was really interested to find out what it was like for a semi-mortal – and the rest of a winning team – to go through the rigours of such a massive event.

There is, however, one big flaw in the book, which I’ve just uncovered.

Ignoring the fact that the “intense intra-squad competition” promised in the blurb actually amounts to about 3 paragraphs telling us that since there are 20 riders in the squad, not all of them will make the 9-man Tour team – a pretty big fact to ignore, I know, but wait for it – and getting past the fact that it is actually quite sketchily written, with paragraphs that jump all over the place and often fail to hold a cohesive thread of thought (not something I can really complain about given the nature of my ramblings on here), there is one pretty major, single issue that stands out above all the rest.

Michael Barry didn’t ride in the 2004 Tour de France.

He wasn’t injured, he didn’t crash, he wasn’t taken ill.  He didn’t make the team.

The publishers – in their infinite wisdom – commissioned a book (in 2005, no less), one third of which concerns the 2004 Tour de France and Lance Armstrong’s record-breaking 6th victory, from a rider who spent the 3 weeks of the Tour watching it from his home in Spain in his boxer shorts.

He even say it himself – he watched in his underwear, on the telly.

Just how much insight did they expect him to be able to give to the goings on in the tour party?  Honestly, it’s not hard.  I know nothing about cycling save for what I’ve read in Lance’s two books and the first third of this one, but I could tell you just as much about the 2004 Tour if you gave me the broadcast tapes and let me catch up.

His analysis of the race as it unfolds amounts to, “They looked really tired after that stage, which was really long.  I think that the long stage made them really tired.  Actually, I spoke to one of them and they said they were all really tired because the stage had been really long.”

The mind boggles.

So, if you want to read an interesting book about cycling, buy It’s Not About the Bike or Every Second Counts – not only inspirational, but interesting too.  If you want to stop in your tracks halfway through a book and stare at the wall thinking, “What the….?”, go for Inside the Postal Bus, by Michael Barry.  Who wasn’t.

You know, living from day to day gives a weird perspective on life. I’ve said it before and doubtless I’ll have plenty of opportunity to say it again in the future, but this bumpy road called life certainly throws up a few of those Yank-loved curveballs.

Today, I’ve done hardly anything more than I have done for the last three weeks – I took K to work (possible on a good day, not an exceptional event), I worked on the computer (and have just remembered the one thing I had to do that I forgot to – hooray for me), I had a cup of tea with my Mum (she was having withdrawal symptoms, so had to swing by on her way off for the weekend) and went for a bit of a drive in the sunshine when I picked K up from work, which is about the only difference to my days of the last month or so.

But I did all of this while feeling absolutely brilliant. My chest felt open and clearer than it has in ages, I only stopped to grab my breath a couple of times in the whole day. At no point did I get overwhelmed by tiredness and I didn’t have to have a snooze after my afternoon dose of drugs. It would not be an over-statement to say that today I’ve felt amazing.

It’s all relative, I know, and compared to “normal” people, or even to how I was six months ago, it’s probably not much cop – I’m certainly not bounding up staircases or thinking about giving my oxygen the heave-ho – but to spend a day without the burden and weight of lugging around a stroppy chest and cloudy head has been truly indescribable.

(There’s an irony here about an entire blog entry trying to describe something which I can only describe as indescribable. Maybe there’s a hint at how I can cut down my word counts, too…)

I’m also aware that this feeling may not last for long. By tomorrow, the updraft could have floated away on the breeze and I’ll be gliding gracefully back down to sofa-dom, but interestingly I think it’s made me appreciate and enjoy today all the more. I have so many truly rubbish days these days that to have even a sniff of a good one is beyond compare.

If it goes a little way to making this journey a little smoother, to making me a little happier, to making these blowers last a little longer, then I can plough through the rough and enjoy the hell out of the smooth.

Tonight, aided by Happy Feet (go rent it now, it’s brilliant) and the unmistakable rhythm of life, my heart and my head are vibrating with the energy of the world and an old African proverb has just sprung into my head:

“If you can walk, you can dance
If you can talk, you can sing.”

Let the sun shine, let the music play, let the world spin on and don’t let it stop. In the words of a much wiser lady than I, “This is my life and I choose to love it”.

I like to think that I’m a nice guy – I’m friendly, jocular (wow – now that’s a pretentious sounding word when you put it down in black-and-white), fairly unimposing generally and keen to get on with people.  I’m also always keen to make a good impression when I meet people.

Imagine my dismay – nay, my horror – at putting my foot so spectacularly in mouth that I could almost taste my kneecaps.  Not only that, but doing it with one of the lovely, friendly, wonderful and caring transplant coordinators, in whose hands – more or less – my life may rest.

The coordinators at Harefield (there are 4 of them) have changed around over the last year or so, meaning that I’ve actually only met 2 of them in person.  I’ve spoken to all of them and know them to talk to, but it’s still very different meeting someone in person.

So it was a delight to meet one of the disembodied voices at the clinic I went to yesterday.  In fact, she even shared my sentiments, telling me, “It’s nice to put a face to a name – to finally get to meet the person you know down a phone line.”

How lovely.  Being the self-depreciating chap that I am, I countered with a swift, “I’m always a bit disappointing, though.”

Only I didn’t.  The first word didn’t actually appear to emerge from my mouth when it should have been the most prominent part of the sentence, leaving merely, “Always a bit disappointing.”

It was one of those wonderful moments when you realise you’ve sunk yourself so deep into a giant well of not-very-niceness, when your stomach lurches and your brain races to catch up to say something to hurriedly recover the situation, but all the while you just know that nothing you can say is going to make it sound any better.

I drifted off into a daze of internal arguments with myself of how best to back-track, while the vast majority of my head is telling me not to say anything more as I’d only get more and more David Brent with every passing word.

By this time, of course, I look like I’ve just hurled and insult and shut up shop – even better!  Not only do I knock the lovely lady down, but I then ignore her completely.

I tell you something, my brain is in a LOT of trouble, not to mention my mouth for running off and starting the whole escapade before it’s communicated properly with the up-top.

Cringe-worthy introductions aside, and ignoring the fact that I spent the majority of my trip to Harefield yesterday waiting (appropriate, I suppose, given the subject of the visit and the hospital), it actually went rather well.  I think they could see that I’m no where near as well as I was last time I saw them and probably consider me a more important/urgent case than perhaps was their perception before they caught up with my  for my review yesterday.

So, provided the mortified coordinator (who shall remain firmly nameless) hasn’t sent a memo round telling everyone that I’m the last person on earth who should be given a second chance, I’m hopeful that my habit of getting through things almost exactly 6-months behind our Emily means that I’m due my new blowers any day now.

We can but hope.

What seems to consume me more than anything else at the moment is an overwhelming desire to “do” something – anything really. I spend so much of my time sitting around, either watching TV or surfing the internet looking for articles and information which may interest, entertain or educate me that I just crave the normality of “doing” something.

It doesn’t help that my favourite films and TV shows are ones showing people with high-powered, mile-a-minute jobs which demand 100% attention from them at all hours of the day. I think I’m a frustrated workaholic. There’s so much I want to be doing which I just can’t do because my energy reserves are lower than an Iraqi oil refinery once the US has taken it’s “share” from the depot.

It’s one of the sillier frustrations with my life and I suppose it’s only natural when one is confined within the same four walls 24/7 with barely a break for air. I guess it’s also the attraction of being well enough not to have to think about whether I’ve got enough energy or if I’m well enough to do a job or make a trip or take a meeting – a pleasure I’ve not enjoyed for a good few years now.

When I think about it, my situation now isn’t all that different to how it was a few years ago, it’s just that all my timescales have telescoped. Whereas when I was at work I had to think about whether I had enough energy to do something on both Tuesday and Wednesday, I now have to wonder whether I can do something at 10am and 11am. All that’s changed is the timescale and the size of the task.

When you look at it like that, it takes away a touch of the rougher side of life. It’s all too easy to dwell on the things you miss most when you’re pretty much invalided out of life. But making the fight seem familiar somehow lessens the blow and makes things more comprehensible, even if it doesn’t necessarily make them any better.

It’s all about perception – something I know I’ve written about on here more than once – and the advantage of perception is also its curse, namely that it’s easy to have when you’re feeling OK, but it’s the first thing to abandon you when you start to slide backwards.

Here’s hoping I can cling to this little slice of perceptive thinking for at least a few days and keep myself in an upbeat mood. I much prefer me when I’m like this.

It’s been pointed out to me that my last post was a touch to the darker side of happiness and light.

In the spirit of remembering the title and inspiration of this blog, I wanted to post to clarify that I’m not living a world of utter blackness with no mirth or merriment whatsoever.

I’m not going to edit or delete my prior posting, because I stand by not only what I said but also the sentiments expressed in it.  However, I wanted to add that I can still see the funny side of life, swinging as I do from mood to mood like a restless teenage monkey trying to impress the girls with his feats of daring in the tree tops.

To illustrate the fact, I’ve just giggled my way through nearly all of Punch Drunk Love – I don’t mean I watched nearly all of it, I mean I was giggling at most of it, but not some parts (the bits that weren’t funny), because those of you who know me will know I can’t just watch a bit of a movie, it’s all or nothing.  You will also notice I’ve lost none of my pedantry in the process, either.

Still, I’ve just giggled my way through most of Punch Drunk Love, which would be a great illustration of my current access to the fun-sensors of my brain, were it not for the fact that only a very few people can I imagine extracting the same bizarre glee as I do from this quaint, weird, surreal little movie.

I would encourage all of you to go and seek it out to see what all the fuss is about (check out my ego too, thinking that my little mention in a blog which barely 100 people read counts as “all that fuss”), but I’m fairly sure that 90% of you (so, erm… 90 of you) would not only not see the same thing as I see in it, but in it’s place see something incredibly dull, surreal and very, very odd.

In fact, I think you might lynch me.  90’s a good number for a flash mob.

Anyway, I just thought I’d write and say, honestly, I’m OK, really.  Kind of.

So I’m back at the flat now, enjoying a wonderful, 2-person existence with K and my own space with everything in easy reach.  (2-person existence meaning K and me, not 2 versions of me in a crazy Jekyll & Hyde kind of way).

Before I left the flat, we’d been trying, ever-so-hard, to sort out our internet connection, which had been thrown into disarray when we discovered that neither my nice new, shiney Mac Pro, nor K’s nice, new, not-quite-so-shiney lap-top with Windows Vista-poo, would work with our current Broadband modem.

Don’t ask me why – it’s some kind of computer conspiracy between Microsoft, Onetel, PC World, Maplins and computer telephone helplines that would take years to unravel if anyone ever bothered to, which they won’t because no one understands enough about things to unravel them enough to make sense of anything to work out who did what to whom and when and why and what.  Ish.

It just doesn’t work.

So, I went out and bought the doofer they told me to buy, thinking I was being very clever and techie and would sort it all out in a flash.

Sadly, the one I bought was, frankly,  poo.  Sometimes in life, you get what you pay for and what I paid for was a cheap piece of rubbish that no one on any helplines had heard of, not even the people on the helpline for the company that made the modem product that I’d bought.

So I took it back.

Fast forward through a month of not being at the flat (see other post) and I arrive back at the flat knowing exactly what I need to get and roaming the internet to find it, order it and get it delivered.

And today, it arrived!

So I leap (stumble) out of bed and run (walk) to the study, throw (plonk) myself down in the chair and busily set about slotting (ramming) cables into the various slots they may or may not fit into.  I do all of this with the authoritarian air of someone who knows exactly what they’re doing.

To my delight, I turn on the computer and nothing explodes.

So, I jump into the software settings gubbins, which I now know inside out having messed around so much trying to make the other lump of rubbish work.  I’m entering long strings of complicated numbers and letters and passcodes – sorting my DNS from my IP from my PPPOA and other wonderful collections of letters.

And my computer loves it!  “Connected,” it says.

It lies.

Nothing will come up on the web browser.  Nothing doing.  The light on the modem is red. I’m no rocket scientist, but even I know that a red light on a piece of technology is never a sign that things are all fine and dandy.

So I phone Apple customer support, who have up to now proved to be consistently clear, concise and totally helpful on all related matters to my purchase.  Indeed, they are again.

We run through a number of things and they tell me that everything on the Mac is working perfectly and all the settings are as it should be.  They suggest I contact my service provider as it’s most likely that a) they haven’t activated my account or b) the network is down.

I hang up the phone despondent.  I’ve been on the internet all morning on my old computer on the same account, so I know none of those things is true.

I phone the modem manufacturer’s freephone customer service line.  It’s no longer in use – it’s now an 0845 number, which I’ll have to pay for.  Nice.

I talk to a nice man in Delhi.  He tells me everything on the router is working fine.  The red light is because my Username or password is incorrect.

I hang up the phone despondent.  I check and recheck the username and password I’ve entered.  It’s all correct.

I phone Onetel customer service.  I may or may not be talking to exactly the same bloke I just came off the phone with.  He tells me I need a load of settings to set up the modem.  I tell him I have them and I’ve done that, but he takes 15 minutes reading them to me anyway.

He starts to read me my username and password.  The username is 32 characters long and he’s spelling it out letter by letter, then using the phonetic alphabet with it.  I cut him off and reel it off to him from my notes.   As I get to the end of the line of letters and digits, everything slips into a momentary pause as a sluggish dawn swims smugly across my consciousness and I realise that the 1 I’ve entered as the 27th character is, in fact, an L.

If anyone wants me, I’ll be the one in the corner with the pointy hat on my head.

With little fanfare, and no candles, I quietly passed into my 26th year yesterday.

Whether emailing all of your friends, posting a Myspace bulletin and blog piece count as “quiet” is perhaps a debate for another day, as I like to think it was peaceful and respectful.

My little idea of raising a hundred or so pounds for the Trust by asking for donations in place of gifts has blown me away ever so slightly. At last check, justgiving.com/oli25 was running at a massive £320, with pledges of more to come from a few corners.

It has truly over-whelmed me the number of people who have donated – especially people who I know wouldn’t have been buying me anything anyway. It means so much to me that they donated something anyway, I’ve been really touched by everyone’s response.

Thanks also to everyone who sent me birthday messages and good wishes.

I had a great day, being spoiled rotten by K all day long, with breakfast specially prepared fresh from the shop, all fresh and delicious, plus a spectacular act of rule-breaking in the most fantastic fashion including a furry orange book about the making of Avenue Q, the puppet musical I’ve become slightly obsessed with.

For the first time in a really long time, I’ve got new DVDs to add to my collection, including a few I’ve wanted to see for a really long time and a classic I really should have seen but have never got around to.

Birthdays are amazing things. They serve to remind you of all the joy you have in your life, all the people who mean something to you and to whom you mean something in return.

So many people complain so much about reaching another birthday – I guess fearful of the on-coming of old age. I don’t know where it comes from, other than an age-old, in-built fear of getting closer to losing something, whether it be your faculties or your life.

It’s always struck me, though, that people look at birthdays the wrong way. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been forced into a position where every passing year counts as a true blessing, but I don’t understand why people choose to fear their birthdays rather than embrace them.

Every year of our lives brings new adventures. It brings new experiences, new people, new wonders we know little of when we celebrate the passing of another 12 months. Every day that goes by we learn something new, we grow as a person and we extend our life beyond what it was the day before.

Surely that’s an amazing thing – so why don’t people see it and appreciate it for what it is? Is it that every year that passes we slip into more of a groove of comfort wherein everything blurs together into one homogenous experience? Do we learn over time an inability to distinguish the wood from the proverbial trees?

The saddest thing in life is when a person stops seeing the beauty that surrounds them and the experiences they are open to. Childhood is seen as the happiest time of our lives, because that’s when we take in the wonder of the world and see things for the first time – the time when we don’t think we’ve seen it all before and are eager to take it all in.

Adulthood shouldn’t be about getting bored of the same old things around us, it should be a time when we can use our years of experience and perspective to take hold of the things in life that really matter and put aside the thoughts of the things that don’t.

We should take each passing year as an opportunity to do the things we want to do, go the places we want to go, see the things we want to see, but more than anything, to not let the world blinker us to it’s beauty and ever-changing wonder simply because it’s become familiar to us.

Tomorrow morning, I want you to look out of your window when you draw back your curtains and really notice the things you can see outside it. If it’s dull and grey and there’s rain falling down, don’t let your heart sink, but turn your thoughts to the amazing way the falling water changes the way you see the street, the way the light falls differently. Take note of the things you see everyday, but look closer and find a detail you’ve not seen before.

And when you go downstairs and you greet your loved one(s), take a moment to appreciate what they bring to your life. Take a moment to think about what they’ve brought into your world that’s made you who you are. As Alfred Lord Tennyson once wrote,

“I am part of all that I have met.”