Not just getting by.

This is cheap as chips because I’ve been working my arse off all day and my brain has gone into its traditional fugue state. But I’ve decided to dedicate myself to the blog again so the Dear Readers, who were so incredibly kind yesterday, must have words. And it was a lovely day, for all that the Scottish monsoon rains came with sullen determination. I don’t mind about the rain. I simply put on my special hat and install sunshine in my heart.

The red mare did something ravishing this morning. I had a friend who needed cheering, so I handed her the grand thoroughbred, knowing the mare would do the trick. I can nod and empathise and listen and smile, but the mare works miracles. She was the one who got me through the death of my mother and there are no end to her powers. She did her work. I watched it in slight amazement. Even though I know she can spread her peace like balm, it always amazes me, every time.

The funny thing is that would have been enough, for one day. If that was all that had happened, I would have made this rainy Friday count. But I seem to be entering a newly galvanised state, as if all the griefs and sorrows and worries of the last two years are finally coming into their easy place. (There’s a point where you accept that the thing is the thing and stop fighting it. I know I should not fight, but I sometimes do. I wail, like a child, ‘I want my mum back’.) I have a novel determination to make things work and get things done and not be getting by on sixty percent capacity. I even made a special green drink for breakfast, which I haven’t done since I can remember. Since I can’t turn into a perfect person overnight, I did have bacon and eggs after, but still. Special green drink! With kale and ginger and everything! I shall now live until I am ninety and be roping imaginary cows like Tom Dorrance. Although of course his cows were real.

I plunged into all my work – work work and HorseBack UK work and making the red mare an internet star which is part of my secret plan. The secret plan is so secret that I don’t really know what it is yet but it’s to do with many, many horse books. (Are you amazed?) It was that kind of work storm where you don’t know what the world is doing. Donald Trump could have sent his armies to North Korea and I would be none the wiser.

So that all needs to be recorded. My mare made someone feel better and I did my work and I drank my green drink. This sounds so absurdly basic that even in a blog called The Small Things it might be barely visible to the naked eye. But for me it feels like a vast achievement. I have been, I hate to admit it, getting by. Getting by is not bad. Getting by is something. But I’d like more than that. I feel perhaps it is time to come back to full strength and force.

Unlike the Whig School of History, this will not happen in a seamless upward curve. I’ll fall back again. But I have the hope of it now, of that whole-hearted living in my small way, and that feels like a present when I least expected it.