Rethink....

So…I was chatting with the very wise G this afternoon (to be honest, wise doesn’t really cut it. She’s actually one of the perceptive people I’ve ever met. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear she could read minds. Derren Brown eat your heart out!) She wanted to know if I’d taken some action to curtail some unhelpful activity in my life. I hadn’t. This really isn’t a surprise. There are some things in my life that I seem inexplicably reluctant to change. Many reasons for this exist that I won’t bore you all with now, but a fairly major one is the fact that I am lacking something we’ll call ‘inner peace’.

Now you’d think that at my age, this ‘inner peace’ malarkey would be something of a given. But it isn’t. I feel conflicted most of the time in various ways, I have many unanswered questions (and I hate ‘what if…?’) and many, many self-doubts. This makes me restless and discontent. A lot of the time. It’s not brilliant really is it? So I asked G; ‘This inner peace stuff….how do you get that then? I thought my WWMD? mantra would help with that…?’

‘Really?’ replied G. ‘Do you think she’s the wisest of What Would X Do? people?’ I was a little perplexed. Madge is kick-ass. I need some kick-ass. But as G continued to point out, she’s not sure she has this ‘inner peace’ thing down. Inner peace, G tells me, is a lot about acceptance. Hmmmmmm, I’m beginning to see where this is going. Acceptance is not really a strong suit of mine. I’ve pretty much only just accepted that I am now in fact a single parent (it’s only taken 3 years!). And Madge, according to G, has similar acceptance issues. ‘Michelle, do you think Madge has inner-peace? Really? I think she’s having trouble accepting that maybe, now she’s 50+, she shouldn’t really be writhing around stage wearing very little, don’t you? No-one wants to see that now do they?!’

So in short, I’m sort-of rethinking WWMD? I think I’ll keep it in mind for the things that require kick-ass (including my new health kick – obviously. I mean, have you seen that woman’s body?!). But maybe I’ll work on that inner-peace thing more. G suggests that I should start each day without expectations for what it holds, and that every day that I go to bed still a single parent isn’t a failure on my part. It just is.

And to all my ever-patient friend who may have told me this before (probably many times), apologies. It’s just that today I actually heard it.