I bought a pair of shoes a little while ago. They’re red. They’re great. They were the last pair in the shop, my size and on sale. Perfect.

Well, not quite, actually, because they pinched a bit when I tried them on. But surely not too much. Surely they’d get better with time… I’ll take them.

But when I tried them on again at home (after wearing them around for days with thick socks on to stretch them), and they still pinched, I thought:

“What planet was I on when I bought these?”

And, instantly, I knew:

“Planet Wishfulness.”

Have you ever been there?

It’s a trivial example, but it can happen anywhere – in relationships, in your work, in pretty much any part of life. Wishing that something would fit you, when it just doesn’t … not quite.

For wishing can clash with reality; it can hide what’s really going on; it can get in the way of you making decisions that might be really important to make.

Anger. It’s got a pretty bad reputation. And we’re often told what to do with it: be careful with it. Suppress it. Vent it. Override it. It’s like anger’s some kind of volatile, toxic force to be harnessed or defused.

But maybe there’s another way of looking at it altogether.

Maybe you can actually learn from anger. Listen to it. See what it has to tell you. Get curious about it.

The sticker in the photo (above), in a cleverly vandalised train carriage I travelled in recently, has another suggestion for how to respond to anger:

“If anger is present
rove to another age”

So let’s take another look at anger for a moment.

It’s easy to be seduced by the idea of “later”:

• I’ll do that later.
• I’ll fix that up later.
• It’ll have to wait until later.
• I’ll have time for that later.

(I think I’m slightly addicted to it, myself…)

And the thing with this “later” business is that you have to believe that there always will be a later. That maybe you get some kind of say in how much “later” there’ll be (a lot, thank you). That your time – your life – can be controlled, planned, predicted.

Yet, existentially, none of us can really do that.

For the end of our days – the end of all our “laters” – will come when it comes, and however much we procrastinate, it seems that’s something that just won’t be put off. One day, it will simply be too late for your “laters”…

So then what?

Where does that leave you with “later”?

(And where does it leave you with now?)

Written in careful chalk along the the bare brick walls of a house a few streets away from where I live, these words (in the photo) seem to form a kind of urban haiku:

“Love

is a

place”

Does that feel true for you?
Is that how you could perceive of love?
If so, where is this place of love in your life?

Time does so many things in our lives (or at least our conception of it, and relation to it does).

Some think it ‘heals all wounds’.
Or that it’s ‘on their side’.
Or that it moves too quickly.
That it ‘conquers all’ (as the photo suggests).
That it rules our calendars with appointments and obligations.
That it frames our very lives…

Who knows what this time stuff actually is?..

But one thing it seems to do (at least in our experience of it) is,  it moves.

So do you move with it?

Or have you been left languishing somewhere in the past, re-living what you used to be or know or have or aspire to? Are you lost in times gone by?

This photo is of my study. See the chair? It’s a brand new (old) one, bought only hours ago from a junk shop down the street.

Though I’ve been doing a bit of a clean-out lately, and didn’t want to buy anything new for a while, I just couldn’t walk past it. For something about it speaks to me of the stuff I love – old, weather-worn stuff that’s lived a full life. And it whispered to me that it could be a great chair to write in.

And that’s the key, really. For I’ve been trying to build a space for more writing in my life. I’m not really sure why, or where it could be headed; I just love doing it, and that’s enough.

So what are you building a space for in your life?

What are you like with endings?

Just cast your eye over your shoulder for a moment and have a look back at some:

• Endings in relationships
• Endings at workplaces or in your career
• Endings of places you might have lived in
• Maybe even endings of the lives of loved-ones

Are there any similarities to be found here – any patterns you can detect in the way you handled these times?

For instance, do you tend to anticipate endings long before they actually happen, and spend time building up to them (perhaps silently noting a stream of ‘lasts’)?

Or maybe you get caught up in the lure of the new and gloss over the ending altogether.

Or perhaps you wish it didn’t have to be this way, and do all you can to ignore the warning signs, either reviving or re-living what you secretly know is lost.

Whatever your style of coping with loss, it can be important to get to know it better – because it could be an insight into how you are with your life. A doorway into what it means to be you.

So let’s peer through that keyhole for a moment…

They say the eyes are the windows to the soul.

That’s a long way to see in…

But the thing about windows is that they work both ways. So they’re not just about seeing into; they’re also about seeing out of. (Or not).

And that’s sort of what happens with another kind of window – your “worldview”. It’s also like a window, but one that frames what you see in the world, and how you see it. It influences what you imagine exists. What meaning you make of it all.

So it can also shape how you react to that world.

And who you become.

It can feel so ‘normal’ to just look at the view from our window, that we forget to see the window, itself. Forget to wonder if it’s framing things as clearly or supportively (or perhaps even ‘objectively’) as it might. Forget to question if it’s in the right place, or if it could use a bit of renovating. Forget to notice what our window’s actually like, or whether, like the closed window in the photo above, we might sometimes open the curtains a bit more often to expand our understanding of the world.

So how long is it since you’ve checked out your window to the world?

How long since you’ve even noticed your worldview?

And how might it unwittingly be shaping who you are?

Have you felt stuck lately? Going ‘round in circles? Trapped on a treadmill? Caught in a vicious cycle?

There are so many ways of describing this kind of experience.

And so many ways to get caught up in it.

Lured by the daily grind of repeated schedules or habits, it can be easy to feel your whole life is stuck on repeat… like you’re locked into an endless loop. So you scroll around to ‘yet another Monday,’ or you find yourself having ‘the same argument,’ or you catch yourself reaching for the same ‘solutions’ that have never quite worked – and the whole cycle ‘begins again’.

Or does it?

“YOU CAN”

How often do you hear yourself thinking this?

Or does this kind of thought feel a bit out of place in your mind? Like it sort of doesn’t belong there. Doesn’t sit comfortably.

(Maybe you’re more used to being visited by its darker twin: “you can’t”…)

Either way, if Henry Ford (1863-1947) was right,

“Whether you think that you can,

or that you can’t,

you are usually right.”

What if that’s true? What if it really matters what you think? What if your mind’s not just some private, secret palace where your inner critic can run rampant, but a kind of place that helps sets the very tone of your life? The possibilities. The dreams. Maybe even the realities.

Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) thinks so. But it’s not alone. For the idea that maybe our thoughts influence our lives isn’t new (or just some new-age notion). In fact, it dates back hundreds of years, across many cultures.

So how can you draw upon all of these centuries of thought to enhance the life you’re living now? Lets wander back through time a bit and find out.