Last week I got caught in the rain with holes in both shoes. When I emerged from the tube station, the car had a parking ticket. When I got home, the cat had been sick on the carpet. And, even though I’d been ignoring it all day, it was unavoidably clear that my back had started hurting again. Normally – in the olden days anyway – just one of these things would have been enough to send me into a fury. But something has changed. I don’t think it’s me. I think it’s the context. I am suddenly grateful to be held together by all these micro-disasters. I rip a dress or scratch the car or spill something on the sofa or dye everything blue in the washing machine or stub my toe and I don’t howl ‘Oh God why me? Why now?’ into the vortex. I think… “Oh well. Never mind. Could be worse.” Why has it taken me all these decades to realise that things really could be worse? So much worse. Why have I always been such a bad person so that it has taken a war, an energy crisis, a cost-of-living crisis and climate change to really access the gratitude? Not spiritual practice gratitude where you sit down every night with a journal and grind out some thank you’s because grateful people are happy people. Not that. Real ‘organic’ gratitude. And I don’t think I’m alone – do you feel the same? The thrum of the benign mishap is suddenly comforting rather than equilibrium-threatening. Is this perspective? It’s weird and unfamiliar but it does feel right. Because the cat sick and the rain and parking tickets? In the wider scheme of things, maybe they are the good bits.
