All of it

I’m sitting in the sun under a tree, drinking hot chocolate and just being. So, a pretty standard appointment with myself! Virginia Water is busy, it’s the Christmas break.

A man walks past holding the hand of a young girl, say 7 or 8. Her brightly coloured hair ribbons bely her mood. For she is sad.

‘Do you know what I do when I am sad?’ the man asks, hope rising in his voice.

No reply. The girl is sullen and possibly disappointed by being made to walk so far in a pair of wellington boots. Undeterred, the man forges on.

‘When I am sad’, he says, I look after other people. I am kind to them. Then I don’t feel my sadness and it disappears!’

No reply.

What does this little girl make of this advice? To hear about other people being kind always warms my cockles, and no doubt his acts of kindness did the same for him. That’s the contagious nature of compassion.

But does his sadness really disappear? Was he really being honest with her?

His coping strategy may be doing more harm to himself than the good he’s doing for others. Rather than dissipating into thin air Willo the Wisp stylie, the sadness is filed away. Absorbed by the depths of the subconscious brain and the cells of the body, only to reemerge when we least expect it.

I would have loved to hear that man say something like ‘it’s ok to feel sad sometimes. Let’s talk about what has made you feel so sad’, instead of brushing it under the crevices of the brain that likes to spit all sorts of stuff out at 3am, when we had hoped it would just shut up.

Our bodies and brains are like black box recorders, and they are always on. Recording all the blue-sky smooth flights, as well as all the turbulence and even the crashes. Nothing is deleted. We are a high-tech piece of kit!

The best we can do is to try to process as much as we can in real time. To stop adding to the already overloaded storage and to start allowing whatever is here to be here. No more, no less. Not only does that mean that we have less to deal with later, it makes space for all our new thinking and experiences.

Aspirations only flourish when they have room to do so.

So, sit with the ‘good’ stuff, and the ‘bad’ stuff. All of it. Create the room you need to be the best version of you. The one with the light behind your eyes, big dreams that become your reality, and a generous heart that others gravitate towards.