Yikes

Remember when it was the start of the year? Remember how things felt new? Well, welcome to winter. Welcome to never feeling like you’re quite on top of things. Welcome to yikes.

Yikes, it’s bin night. Yikes, that huge payment is due. Yikes, no day off in sight. No long, languid evenings in the slowly setting sun. No time left! Where did all the time go?

For centuries, people have been running out of time. For decades, people have sprinted out in their socks to put their bins out as a rubbish truck turns the corner out of the street and the bin juice runs down their pyjama leg into the kind of puddle it is impossible to see at 6:30am.

To prioritise these moments in the narrative of human existence, though, is an injustice to the good things. For there are good things. Here are some good things. This is a Public Service Announcement.

Treehouses are nice.

New socks are lovely.

How amazing is it that water is reflective? Imagine how dull life would be if lakes didn’t show you the upside down world.

Notice when a piece of music unfolds something in you. And how, in that moment of recognition, somebody is communicating something to you. How do humans know how to do that to each other? Good on us!

The dark silence in the country at night. Nothing like it.

How great is it when incongruous food tastes delicious? Salted caramel: what weirdo thought that would be a good idea?

The tingleingle of a teaspoon on china from another room. Delightful.

Sometimes, when you’re doing something, there might be a little moment where you catch yourself feeling like someone you love, and it feels like a secret between the both of you. Like for just a moment you got help being you. 

Similarly, maybe you see someone in the distance and you think for a moment that it’s someone you love. Whether that person you love is overseas, long gone, or just across town, it’s significant that your mind subconsciously managed to sort through all the people it saw and borrowed from one of them to give you what you wanted. A sad little trick, sometimes, but a way of reminding you that the people you love are a part of who you are.

Reading a book that gets you so involved that the feeling is very close to having something you urgently want to tell someone. There’s nothing like that feeling. 

Having your lap chosen by an animal: is there any greater achievement?

Everybody has somebody in their life who has been their best teacher. Have you been somebody’s best teacher? Have you thanked your best teacher? Was it someone who taught you in grade three? Or was it your mate Dave who taught you how to light a fire so that it actually starts every time? Thank a teacher. It’s a good way to be in the world. 

Pomegranate: the best named fruit? I put it to you that yes. Someone really thought about the pomegranate. It might not be the most practical fruit but it’s basically an apple with lots of cupboards in it full of perfect pink tears, so it feels like maybe it knows its own strength.

Sometimes being up high is cool. Like, maybe you get to take the dude who’s fixing the air conditioning onto the roof at work and you see everything from up a bit higher and you have to try and concentrate on what he’s saying because you’re actually trying super hard to figure out what that bit down there is and why you’ve never seen it before.

And lastly, here’s to tiny luxuries that are hardly worth mentioning. Like when you go somewhere for a coffee and you get a little square of chocolate slice on the saucer. You didn’t ask for the slice, you didn’t pay extra for the slice, you didn’t know you wanted the slice. The coffee, though, has now become a decadent treat. Expensive hand soap in wooden bathrooms in cafes. Better still: hand moisturiser! Sewing kits in your hotel bathroom! The glee one experiences at such joys will hopefully never diminish. Not with age, nor riches. Congratulations on being basically royalty. Well done you.

Enjoy it. It’s all there for the taking. This has been a Public Service Announcement.