Hi and welcome!  My name is Cassandra.  Glad you stopped by… You will be back for more… Soup, of course!  What else?

To those of you, sick of hearing me say: “I must start a blog”, here it is at long last and quite an accomplishment for ‘no tech’ me.  It really was a daunting prospect and my computer learning curve has shot to vertical in the past few weeks!  It all began when I decided to ‘take on’ Timeline (Facebook)… Right yeah, can hear those guffaws from here!  Thought… if I can tackle that, this outta be a piece of cake.  THAT was the piece of cake… relatively speaking.

Anyway, enough frivolity.  I do get down to serious stuff… so soup spoons at the ready!

‘Expect the unexpected’ could be my motto

but don’t expect the words: bankers’ bonuses, the recession, global warming or ‘whatever’s topical’ to show up here.  Yup, I don’t really ‘do’ newspapers (too much doom and gloom); tend to glimpse headlines instead… so don’t ever invite me to that pub quiz!

So let’s get down to the possible business of a ‘little black dot’ in yer soup, aka: The fly!  Actually no…

Wisdom can come from an unusual source or when we least expect it. This anecdote unfolded some time back when I went to post some urgent bumph* to the same company I’d mailed to, the week before… Yes, ‘Snail Mail’ can still rule and is guaranteed not to be lost in cyberspace!

*On checking the spelling of this, discover it’s also slang for loo paper!

Anyway, I was speaking to Haydn… no, not his past life incarnation but a charming man, now retired from the local P.O. and who, incidentally, doesn’t mind me repeating this… “Fees to be negotiated later!” he said… and explaining how delighted I was that Royal Mail had managed to deliver the previous package the next day despite my late posting.  He went on to tell me about the majority who grumble and who forget the millions of occasions when items are delivered safely and on time by those hard working postmen/women (or do we call them post persons these days of political correctness?) despite often atrocious weather.

Speaking in his delightful Welsh lilt, he told to imagine that Royal Mail is a very large white piece of paper, demonstrating such with a wide sweep of his hands, and that in the middle of this very large sheet of paper is a little black dot.  This dot represents a ‘hitch’ in the delivery system but what does the general public do?  They focus like mad on the little black dot ignoring the expanse of white, and the more attention they give it, of course, the bigger it gets.

I’ve since pondered this gem and wondered its application to our everyday lives.  How often do we zero in on the bad, ignoring the good?  We could, for example, berate the rail system for a cancelled train, collude with fellow passengers, then later our co-workers and still be moaning about it when we get home.  Of course this invariably expounds into a wholesale diatribe against the rail network as everyone pitches in with stories to back yours.

Well, let’s make that dot bigger and bigger, so big in fact, that it now fills what was once a white page, so we forget there ever was such a thing.

We conveniently ignore the majority of uneventful train journeys… Or maybe it’s only Network South-East which runs a mostly efficient service whenever I use it.  Just maybe!

We could instead focus on the positive aspects of a cancelled train… The chance to meet those we wouldn’t otherwise meet; maybe someone who will in some way change our life or be the catalyst for the chain reaction which ensures that we do.  Of course you might not be the sort of person who speaks to strangers.  I strike up a conversation with anyone, even if it’s only a cheery “Good Morning” or “Nice day, isn’t it?”  This cancelled train could give us more time to catch up with a friend/colleague by phone/text or via email/Facebook/Twitter/whatever’s next for those of you with ‘Strawberries’…

Only joking, have heard of ‘Blackberries’ though the buzz now is iPhones.  Shall stick with my reliable brick for the present.  I digress, as per… Do a lot of this you’ll have noticed.  Often lose the plot completely and always have, so advancing years (ahem) have nowt to do with it!

Sooo… back to the train, remember?  We could console ourselves with the fact we’ll still get paid for the time spent admiring the view and if it does mean working late, we’ll not then have to travel back in rush hour.  It could even result in a dry walk to work.  The list is endless.

If only we could embrace instead of resist, an apparent setback.

Such a principal can be applied to our relationships.  How easy it is to find fault with another, and focus on this to the exclusion of their good qualities; to conveniently forget that we too have difficult aspects of our personality that need bettering… Linguistic laziness thrown in here.  Some things are difficult to change though… You’d have to gag me to stop talking.  Good job there’s no word limit here, eh?  When I was little, I was called a ‘pratkvarn’.  Nothing to do with being a prat, I hasten to add, but Swedish for ‘chatter box’ and this digression, folks, will have to wait for another time.

So how often do we bemoan an event or situation which with hindsight, turns out not to have been so bad after all or which has given birth to an opportunity that would otherwise have passed us by?  We hear about people whose often ‘difficult’ lives have been shaped by circumstance yet who go on to be successful.

Can we liken ourselves to a lump of clay, waiting to be transformed into a thing of beauty and purpose? 

We have the choice to remain useless lumps (‘couch potatoes’ spring to mind: listless, apathetic, unmotivated… ) or rise to our challenges.  Years ago, I met a chap at some protest rally in London who’d lost both his limbs after falling out of the train in which he was travelling.  It was rush hour and he was squeezed up against a door (nothing’s changed there then, has it?) which hadn’t been closed properly.  Doors then were slammed shut, not like today’s automatic ‘lock-in’ which I find somewhat unsettling.  Wheelchair-bound, he’d told me he was doing more with his life than he’d ever dreamed possible and this included a passion for fell ‘walking’, something he’d taken up after his accident.  Did he allow his ‘dot’ to take over his life?  Or did he embrace this new challenge, I ask you?

We must try not to focus on our little dot or one that’s maybe bigger, but to blend it into the white as might an artist, so it’s more a tint of grey, and continue till it’s part of the canvas/integrated into our life.  Yes, it is easier said than done when it’s you who’s experiencing ‘the whatever’, this all-engulfing black dot, but months/years down the line, we may re-evaluate the event/situation and find it was that ‘blessing in disguise’ after all.  We may even laugh about it.

Derren Brown once said that when we’re told NOT to think about a black cat, we find it difficult to think of anything else.  So perhaps I should end by saying:

‘Whatever you do, don’t dwell on that large white sheet of paper’ (and I won’t even mention a ‘black dot’).

COPYRIGHT FOR IMAGES:

‘Postie on bike’: copyright owned by Harry Page and published with his permission @ www.harrypage.com

‘White butterfly’ image courtesy of Neil Rhodes @ www.thephotoretoucher.co.uk

The Black Cat silhouette image licensed to me from www.123rf.com