I am starting to feel like a broken record and so have not posted for a while. I have been caught up in a cycle of disappointment in the public, political comment and events, including:
- my disappointment about the rejoicing at the death of Bin Laden. I have no sympathy for him or his cause and can understand, to an extent the reaction of the USA but cannot support our Prime Minister’s comments welcoming his death because we are a country with a strong anti-execution stance and do not believe we can rejoice at the death of any person no matter how terrible they were in life. I do not see it as justice but as revenge (again, however, I understand the desire for revenge and do not deny it to be a valid reaction). Having said all that I must acknowledge the wisdom of my clever brother who asked “what would we have done with him had he lived?”, created more of a circus perhaps?; and
- my concern about our government’s latest attacks on the most vulnerable in our society and continued race to the right of centre political perspective (aka the bottom).
So what am I to do? I have to refocus myself and remember that this is not actually how I experience life. Most mornings when Ivy wakes me up it seems to me that we are living in a wonderful and exciting world. Watching Ivy learn and wonder at this world of ours reminds me of Charles F. Kettering’s famous quote that “our imagination is the only limit to what we can hope to have in the future”.
Ivy’s wide eyed enthusiasm for our visit to the bakery or chat to the chicken inspires me to imagine a future that is as wonderous as she believes this present to be. Once I imerse myself in the playful world I can see the spiders on the roses and their beautiful patterns, I can see kind and generous people who give a little of themselves to my smiling child who draws them into a game of peepo across the cafe.
So I engage in imagining the world is beautiful and full of fun. But what happens when the imaging gives way? Well, wonderfully, miraculously, joyously I find that what I imagine shapes my reality and good old W.I. Thomas pops into my mind again with his statement that ‘If [wo]men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences’ (the Thomas theorem).
For me the consequences of defining these situations as exciting, challenging, fun and interesting are that this is exactly how my days play out.