Triumph and Disaster

It was Rudyard Kipling who suggested in his poem “If” that we should treat triumph and disaster “just the same”. Treat them, he said, as though they’re both imposters. Rudyard was a racist old coot but his old-fashioned poem makes a few solid points. On one reading of this bit, for example, he’s urging you to deny yourself the emotional rewards of success and bottle up the depths of your despair in the face of disaster. Well, we’ve all watched enough Hollywood movies to know that’s a terrible idea. But there is another way to interpret what Kipling is saying. Maybe the point is that you should enjoy your success without allowing it to define you, to shake you out of yourself and become such a crucial part of your identity that when it fades you feel a little of yourself fade. That you should not let the experience of disaster shift you too far from who you are in yourself. The flip side of this is that while success and failure are extremes, the matter in between triumph and disaster is small. So if we absorb the small, normal, everyday stuff into who we are; when triumph and disaster come along, we’ll have a map reference that says YOU ARE HERE like on those signs at the zoo. Do you think? Does anybody understand what I just said? Look, this might make sense later. This is what studying poetry is like. Just go with it. Absorb the small things. The blissfully normal. Remark upon the unremarkable. This is a public service announcement. 

Did you know that the two simple, perfect acts of elevating your feet and walking on grass in bare feet both create actual physiological reactions in your body that make you feel better?

While we’re down this way, isn’t the expression “put your feet up” lovely? Particularly, “Have a cup of tea, put your feet up”. There’s something so old time homey about it, something so ridiculously simple, that it almost convinces you that you already are putting your feet up. Extra points if it’s said to you by an older Australian and the last word of the phrase is “darl”. 

Hot air balloons in the morning sky are just ludicrously joyful to behold. They look like something out of a Dr Seuss book, or something Roald Dahl dreamed up. Silent lollies, floating through a fairy floss sky.

Fairy floss. There’s a noun other countries are missing out on. Fairy floss. Other countries call it cotton candy! How embarrassed must they be? Fairy floss. Simple yet evocative. Whoever thought of that should have a national holiday in their honour.

 Sometimes the universe does that thing where you learn a new fact or a new word or meet a new person and then that fact/word/person turns up three times over the next two weeks and it feels like serendipity tipping its hat to you in a bar. 

Serendipity is a word. I mean really.

The sound of a bell bird, clear and sharp, in the Australian bush - go and find it if you haven’t heard it recently. It is calibrated to slow down the pulse of the human adult.

To really bolster your experience of the joys of the everyday, try and hang out with someone new to your language. A child, say, or a visitor. Listen to the way they speak but also see the way you speak reflected in them. Feel your perspective shift just slightly.

Stand in a second hand bookshop and breathe in the smell. Notice how quiet it is in a second hand bookshop. So much more quiet than in bookshops selling new books. Why is that? Are they more densely packed? Are we more reverent around older books? Are the words better?

Bookshops are great when you know what book you want, but here’s an idea for a trip to a second hand bookshop or a library: don’t plan at all. Go freeform. Leave with whatever tickles your fancy. Although do be careful. I know someone who fell asleep reading poetry in a second hand bookshop with his back against the poetry and philosophy section. He had to be woken by someone who needed a Paul Satre book for her uni class.

Look, feel all you want to feel about triumph and disaster. When it comes to the bits in between, though, enjoy them while they’re not triumphant or disasterous. Those two imposters sound like hard work to me.

An edited version of this column appeared in The Big Issue. Please support The Big Issue and their vendors. They're an excellent collection of humans.