One of the things that does frustrate me about Facebook (apart from the usual games invitations and unwanted advertisements) is the tendency of many users to pepper their posts with seemingly wise sayings. Now some of them are actually quite good, but most end up being just a rehash of something from the Bible or from wisdom literature of years gone by. without exception, they are all distinguished by the fact that they are expressed in far less convincing fashion than they were when first written, proving, if proof were needed, that the Bible’s quotation that there is “nothing new under the sun” is predictably true.
And, as a follow-on from that, I find it laughable when people include quotes on how one should live ones life from somebody who patently had no idea of how to do it themself! For instance, somebody had the temerity to post up some supposedly wise saying the other day that was by Janis Joplin. Now anybody who has any knowledge of history will know that she ended her life while still very young through a cocktail of drugs after “living” most of her life in a drug-induced haze. Quite how anybody can suggest that life advice from a bombed-out harpie could be taken any way seriously evades me completely.
However, in amongst the dross there is sometimes some gold and that’s what makes it worth continuing to look. I have included a picture from Funny Car Pictures today that I hope, will not offend anyone. I further hope that, should my son read this post, he will especially get a giggle out of it.
The picture is called “Obsessive Compulsive Car Valet” 🙂
And, it is on the subject of life, the Universe and everything that I would like to spend a few minutes today (and, yes, I know the answer is 42).
Do you know someone who always looks for the worst in a situation or in people? I think we all do. It is a frustrating thing to be in their company and one always leaves feeling that, somehow, their gloomy outlook has pervaded our own. It is the old “glass half full or glass half empty” conundrum. And here I would like to say that my years of experience (and it is from them that I feel I have some right to comment upon life and its vagaries) has taught me that whatever is going to happen will inevitably happen. There are some things in life over which we have a degree of control and choosing which decision to make in these situations requires care and thought. But the vast number of things that happen to us every day are outside of our control and how we react to them determines what sort of a person we are and dramatically affects our quality of life.
We live in stressful times, we are constantly being told that. I wonder how much of that stress is self-generated? I wonder how much of it would not BE stress if we learned how better to react to the situations of life over which we have no control?
As most lifers will know, life has been pretty stressful in the Hall household over the last few years. The deaths in close succession of my wife’s father and mother and her younger brother; her diagnosis and treatment for breast cancer and my major motorcycle accident and subsequent recovery. There is the on-going stress of trying to keep a roof over our heads on only a single income and the on-going uncertainty about my Third Party claim as a result of the accident (which was now nearly three years ago)
Taken all together, that seems a bleak prospect, but its is all about how you see it and how you react to it. I am proud to say that both my wife and myself are pretty optimistic people. They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger (there’s another of those “wise” sayings) but we have proven it to be so in our situation. Despite all the terrible things that have happened to us, I believe that we are happier now than we have ever been. Why? Because our reaction to the cards that we have been dealt has not been to let them get us down but to realise that they are a challenge to be met and that, out of them, good will come.
You don’t usually survive an accident of the sort that I had, so, when you do, you take it as a sign that there is still a lot of life to be lived and you relish and treasure life even more. A dear friend of mine is struggling with being the 24/7 carer of his wife whose health is deteriorating. Another long-time mate’s partner is struggling with the increasingly debilitating effects of Parkinson’s Disease.
And so it is that, whatever life throws your way, you can look on the gloomy side or you can look on the bright side. How we live, and the quality of our lives is not in someone else’s hands, it is in ours.