Adjust your scale

Everything is great! This toothpaste is great! That phone company is great! People in advertisements are great! People on social media are Super Great! Being great is great. If you’re not great, maybe you need to get great. Get fit, get smart, get pretty, get real. Buy this, read that, watch this. Work at being great! Strive! Harder!

On the other hand, that could all be rubbish. It could be that everything is not great, and I don’t want to worry anyone but that’s probably okay. Without the terrible, the sad, the inane, the frustrating and the plain old depressing, nothing would be to scale. Without first dipping, what would it mean to soar? There are, it is always good to remember, little things that persist, despite everything, as a reminder that loveliness abounds.

Adjust your scale. Find the littlest things first. This is a public service announcement.

Find your favourite photo. Hold it in your mind. It’s yours.

Everything the worst? Have a shower. Wash your hair. Things might still be the worst but at least now you have clean hair.

Have a drink with mint in it. Seriously. How good is mint!

Remember the urgent, confusing, fraught, retrospectively excellent business of having a crush on someone you don’t know super well yet. 

If you have that feeling right now and you wish it would go away, remember this: movies steal your mind for hours and put it to work imagining. So do podcasts. And plays. So does exercise. And dancing. Fill your restless mind and know that one day you will feel transformed.

Google “puppies snoring”.

Think of a friend whose face watches yours while you speak, who listens, who uses your name in a way that feels like a compliment. 

There are more friends like that in the world. You might not have met them yet, but you will.

Recall your favourite teacup.

Consider the fact that humans have made the arrangement of flowers an art. That there is something universally uplifting about a bunch of outdoors in your lounge room.

Turn up the music. 

Listen to the conversation next to you. Feel the edge of someone’s life rub up against yours. 

Remember the feeling of cutting a piece of paper with scissors? Cut, slide, cut, slide. Now think of this: someone invented scissors! Before that, this simplicity did not exist.

Find a way to be generous. Not necessarily financially. Conversationally maybe. Ask questions. Be curious.  

Think of your favourite song lyrics.

Think of sand. 

Think of the smell of a sharpened pencil.

The feeling of being a kid, somewhere, upside down.

Think of someone laughing in their sleep.

Think of an orchestra. All the separate parts, working together. Think of the pauses.

Think of silhouettes. How pretty they are, how clear but inexact. How a silhouette of a pile of rubbish looks like the Taj Mahal. 

Find your favourite pen and a piece of blank paper. Give yourself three minutes with good light and maybe a cup of something with steam coming off it. Watch the ink flow from the pen onto the page. Congrats on being from the same species that came up with that.

Listen to Mozart’s clarinet concerto.

Consider the cartwheel.

Wonder at the majesty that is the shell. 

Parcels in the mail are usually excellent, even if they’re the contemporary equivalent of a nice package in the mail from someone you love, i.e. a nice package in the mail from yourself containing something you ordered on the internet six weeks ago and had forgotten about.

Snicker. What a word. The word snicker exists! Amazing.

When something happens and you urgently need to tell someone: who gets the message? Send that person a message now. For no reason.

Beanies are pretty excellent.

Ducks are nice.

Afternoon mist is okay.

Staring out a window for a bit can be useful. Windows are good like that. Doesn’t matter if what you’re looking at is ugly or boring. Just look. Let the universe spin on like a hard drive while your cursor blinks away for a bit doing nothing. Having a bit of a blink is sometimes just what the doctor ordered.

Also, never forget: toast. I mean really. Sometimes humans make mistakes, but then there’s toast.

So maybe you’re not so great. Maybe the universe owes you a break. That’s okay. Your time will come. Send yourself some mail from the internet. Turn up the music. Find the small and adjust the scale. This has been a public service announcement.  

This article is from a fortnightly column in The Big Issue. Support The Big Issue and look out for the next Public Service Announcement there.