Waiting for the storm to pass
Over the many years that it has hung on my kitchen wall, I have rarely given the plaque, with its cliché slogan, a second thought. We had bought it at a London flea market. It had sounded and looked good at the time. We had returned home and hooked it up and there it has remained since.
We live busy lives. Some say our lives are needlessly packed with busyness. But that is a subject for another day. We live busy lives, and the one we –my family and I — lead is no different. As the working parents of two pre-teenage daughters, our weeks are action packed with office work, schoolwork, before school chaos, after school clubs, laughter, tears, arguments, and the usual potpourri of meaningful and meaningless activities. We are also of a generation for whom nothing is ever enough. I read an article recently that reflected on the differences between our generation and that of our parents. As post war boomers, they had seen the world step away from the precipice and were happy to just be. Do an honest day’s work, put food on the table and bask in the mellow contentedness of family life. I grant you, that might be looking in retrospect through sepia-tinted glasses. This generation — ours — is the one of the perennially dissatisfied. Always wanting more, nothing is ever enough. This unquenchable thirst for more is made more acute by the social media phenomenon. As if it was not enough to begrudge my neighbour their well bloomed hydrangeas, I now have a telescope into well-manicured back gardens and perfectly curated lives in every corner of the globe. My wife and I haven’t been immune from the ubiquitous contagious bug of ‘wanting to do more’. As such, we layer and load our already crammed lifestyles with even more projects. These past few months have been no different.
The more we cram into our lives, the greater the opportunity for friction, for events we run late for, or payments that miss deadlines, or tasks that aren’t completed on time. In our haste to get to the next thing on our schedule, we start to dip into the red zone on our internal fuel tank. As we run from pillar to post, our patience thins and tempers fray. And this is just supplementary to the business of running a house and a family and the myriad transactional duties that presents. In an ironic twist, we long for simpler times when schedules were not this clogged and our needs not so sophisticated. I crave ‘me-time’, which is nothing but that elusive oasis of calm and quiet.
When Eunice took London by storm this weekend, an event that last happened more than three decades ago, I was on the brink of being at my cantankerous worst. It had been a busy week. I was irritated and petulant. Eunice tipped me over the edge. Fences came down. The tiles and capstones flew off my neighbour’s roof like projectiles and crashed against the wall of our house. The trees in our yard swayed, some buckled under the relentless strain. We isolated a pitter patter sound to a leak in our new roof. The frustrations of the week bubbled to the surface, and I had a Krakatoan moment: sudden, rare, explosive and momentary. I settled into an aftermath of seething grumpiness. I wasn’t pleasant to be around. As has happened on similar such occasions in the past, I descended into a quicksand of frustration and saw everything through gloomy grey lenses. Nothing in my life was going right, said the chimp in my head. Everything was wrong. Problems all around.
My younger daughter entered the room and sat beside me as I lay fretting on the couch. She was not unlike an innocent toddler nonchalantly crawling up to an eight hundred pound hungry and furious gorilla, oblivious to the imminent danger and blissful in her ignorance.
‘Its not all that bad, Daddy,’ she said, soothingly, with the hint of a smile on her lips. ‘Not half as bad as you make it out to be. It’s the storm of the century. These things are bound to happen. Look at the positive side of things, we are safe, all of us, that’s what matters. You have a happy family. Yes, you can be grumpy at times, and you complain about putting the bins out and doing the dishes.’
She rolled her eyes and winked.
‘You’re ok. You’re a good dad. Life is not going to be all smooth sailing. You told me so. There will be bumps along the way. We should enjoy the good times and deal with the bad times as best we can.’
She clasped my hand in hers and squeezed. The chimp in my brain retreated. Not for the first time, her kind, wise, and timely words, surprised me at first and then heartened and comforted me. I smiled. It was still gloomy and overcast outside, but the sun shone in the living room and my frustrations melted. The knots in my head loosened. She tugged and escorted me to the kitchen and pointed at the plaque.
‘Its just an old cliché, daddy. I know that. But so true, dont you think?’
I looked at the plaque. The words rang true, given meaning and gravitas by a ten-year old. They said:
‘Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass. It is about learning to dance in the rain.’
