March 12 2018 No. 549
If You Think It's Unavoidable...
We are what we think, our lives are the creation of our own thoughts - although, they are not our own really! So, if you think you're suffering from stress, you are... plain and simple. Now, you can't just get up one morning and decide "I'm not going to think that way anymore!" - but, all the same, that is what you're going to have to do.
Stop, look around you, note and appreciate where you are - you will never have this moment again.
You don't have to be in a place that normal people consider beautiful to see beauty.
Appreciate the unique, one-off experience of this here and now. Immerse yourself in it if only for a few moments. Get in touch with the reality beyond today's thoughts and worries.
It's a horrible Monday morning here in the Alps - grey, the sky on the ground, rain splashing against the window... hard to imagine that the view of Mont Blanc that I mention in today's Normal Crazy People story is somewhere in those clouds. A wet Monday morning with all the ingredients for a grim day.
Or is it? First of all, what has the day of the week got to do with it? I'm forever bemused by people who don't like Monday and love Friday... people who tell me that preparations for the weekend start around lunchtime on Wednesday... people who are wishing they were somewhere else early in the week and looking forward by the time they get to the middle of the week... missing what's going on now. Those same people, of course, slide into a mild depression come Sunday afternoon because... well, tomorrow's Monday.
Secondly, the fact that I can't see beyond the end of the road this morning for the cloud and rain doesn't make it horrible... it is what it is. Again, I'm forever bemused by people who worry about the weather... not something over which we have any control whatsoever (apart from the fact that our global use of carbon might be having something of an impact!). But on an ordinary everyday basis, wishing it was bright and sunny just doesn't do the trick.
So, in fact, it's not a horrible Monday morning here at all - it is wonderful and beautiful to be here, at my desk, feeling the tips of my fingers on the keyboard - alive and excited to be so. As someone recently told me "I have a problem with your exuberance". As I replied "That's your problem!".
I'm standing in the sunshine in the shopping centre carpark - a pretty grim probably thirty year old building with one of the most magnificent views on the face of the earth for, stretched before my eyes is the whole of the Mont Blanc range, white as the name would suggest, with the mountain itself dominating... all glistening and shimmering in the bright winter sun.
Beneath this beatiful a top-of-the-range car pulls up across four disabled parking spaces... not an easy thing to do but achieved with pinpoint accuracy. Out get two well-dressed foul-mouthed people shouting abuse at each other - a husband and wife or boyfriend and girlfriend here, no doubt, for a weekend's skiing... the majesty of Mont Blanc clearly lost on them.