Finleys Footprints

I thought about good and bad a few months ago, I wrote about it in my diary. I decided that I did not believe things were good or bad.   A thing is just that - a thing.  A bed is a bed, a car is a car, a cup is a cup, a TV is a TV.  It is the judgement that we place on the thing that makes it good or bad.  But still a bed is not good or bad, it could be too high, or too low, comfortable or uncomfortable but a bed is not inherently good or bad.  I am sure my hubby would argue with me but a TV is not good or bad, it’s a TV.  It might be 1080p (see I was listening when you told me why we needed a 42″ TV), or it might be 520I (or some other number).  It is our judgement that makes the TV bad and the bed good. 

I decided that I would be careful about using the words good and bad.  I noticed that other people referred to days when I was upset as bad days, then I started to call them this as it was easier for other people to understand.  If they called and I said I was having a bad day, I did not have to say anything else.  Then I noticed bad days started to feel like even worser days, then words like hard, and terrible have to be used.  Then where do you end up?  You end up in a space where you run out of enough gradually declining terms to describe them and the neutral days start to look like bad days too.  So I started acknowledging the day for what it was, simply a day.  I also started to pay a bit more attention to my feelings when I found myself saying I was having a bad day.  I found that the days I was describing as bad days have various feelings attached from fear, sadness, and guilt to anger and hatred.

I have had my beliefs shaken this week.  I don’t believe that bad things come in three’s, or that bad things happen to good people. However this week it has been incredibly hard to not start to suspect something.  My hubbys Grandad died and then his Mum became unwell.  What would the 3rd thing be?  However these are isolated incidents, and do not signifiy the beginning of the end, or that another unwanted thing will occur.

However I do wish to believe that we will have some good news and better fortune soon thankyou.  And I will allow myself to place the good and better judgement on things, as it is helpful to me!

This is the first blog on Finleys webpage.  Today has been a strange day.  I have felt that life is very turbulent around me, it is starting to settle.  As our new life is settling, I am beginning to realise how much life has changed in just 6 short months.

6 months ago we were impatiently waiting to be parents, excited and a little nervous.  Today we are parents, we have motherly and fatherly instincts, but nobody here to focus them on.  The cats have been fussed over no end, and I am sure the people on facebook feel very nurtured.

Things no longer feel certain or constant.  Things change all the time.  Just when I think I have worked it out it changes again.  This reflective mood I think has been enhanced by not having a car.  Today I went somewhere on the bus.  Once I had gotten over the shock of the £5 fare (the last time I went on a bus for a similar journey it was £1.70!) I noticed things I had not noticed before.  The fields were covered in what is left of last weeks blanket of snow and the journey was transformed.  This changed my state of mind.  Then as I got of the bus at the bus station I got to thinking.  The last time I used buses regularly I was going to college.  I was doing rather badly on a health and social care course, which eventually I passed.   I wandered through parks I had spent weekends in, and realised the last time I had been using buses was probably 14 years ago.  It is actually quite scary to realise I am that old, and days that feel like yesterday are actually years ago.

Looking back I realise how much life has changed in those years, the people that have come and gone.  This is a different life – now is very different to then.

How different will the future now of 2024 be to the present now of 2010?  Who knows?  Not me – but as the pieces of my life settle into some sort of recognisable pattern I am willing to find out.