S’funny, how things work out. Some pretty awful shit has happened in my life, particularly in the last couple of years.
But, viewed from the right perspective, even the bad stuff can (possibly?) be ‘made good’. Not in and of itself. But dint of the overall picture.
I’d been wanting to stop teaching for years. And now I have. The way my teaching career ended was most emphatically not the way I wanted it to. But the overall outcome, in part at least, was.
On a whole other lesser level, yet equally fundamental – pardon the pun – the recent breaking of our toilet, by a pal/regular guest… (further poor punning alert), well… that didn’t pan out as we’d wanted it to, either. But in the end; we’d long needed a new toilet. Now we have one.
I mention these two things, one that very nearly destroyed my whole life, and another that, whilst much more mundane, was still of great importance, to bring in a third topic.
Work and health, right now.
When we took our recent break, a short while back, I could often be heard saying – to anyone who’d listen – that whilst one week was very nice, what I really needed was at least six months time out.
Well, once again, I’m being forced to do what I both want and need to do, not out of choice, but circumstance. On returning from our hols I couldn’t work. My driving license had expired. That lead to the one week off expanding to three weeks.
And now, having only just resumed work, I’ve come down with a cold, flu, or something. Today, Sunday, if I manage to summon the energy to read for half an hour, it knocks me out completely, such that I then sleep an hour or so!
I certainly won’t make my minimum £300 a week, in this, my first week back at work. Indeed, I’ll be lucky if I make £200. But I’m being forced to take time off work just to survive.
It’s as if mind, body, even the goddamn indifferent universe, are conspiring to force my hand.
I’m not quite there yet – or mayhap I am? – with Voltaire’s Pangloss: ‘all being created for an end, all is necessarily for the best end.’ But I guess I’m fishing in the same lake?
What is Optimism?” asked Cacambo
‘Alas!’ said Candide, ‘it is the mania for insisting that all is well when all is by no means well.’ And he wept…
I guess I’m trying pull something from the fire? I’ve been to Hell, in gasoline pants (thanks, Tom), and I’m not dead yet.