From our 15th May edition
HOW many of us do things because… well… just because?
We have what we have for breakfast because that’s what we always have. We go shopping or play golf on a particular day and we can’t really remember why it’s then and not later or earlier in the week.
We change the beds or the curtains or wash the car at certain intervals because that’s what we have been in the habit of doing. Whether they need it or not.
In our house we pay a certain satellite television company to access channels we have never watched since the ‘children’ left home about seven years ago. We barely watch television at all. The other half enjoys the American football in the winter and my mum watches any and every sport when she comes to stay, but it hardly warrants our paying the monthly fees.
In fact what the box is used for is (wait for it) helping my homemade bread to prove! I sit the bowl on it and wait for the dough to double in size.
Now there’s one intention I doubt the company ever envisaged for its equipment!
It seems it’s not only our cupboards that could do with a spring clean, our lives need one as well, to save us from continuing to do what has "aye been done" just out of sheer habit.
And just as it can be refreshing to have a clear out of the wardrobe, it can be invigorating to let go of habits and practices we don’t need to hold onto.
Imagine the freedom from realising that just because it’s Tuesday the washing doesn’t need to be done. It means that if it’s a lovely day we can head out into the garden or go for a walk, or get out the bowls and head for the bowling green.
The washing will still be there when we get back but this way round we, and not the washing, are deciding what we are doing with our own lives.
Such clear outs happen everywhere: from football teams, to board rooms, schools, councils and even churches. It often results in new blood and new life being breathed into proceedings.
Just because a thing has been done in a certain way for years, doesn’t mean it needs to go on being done that way forever and ever. There are times when certain things need to be seen as having come to the end of their useful life and they need to be let go of so that new ideas and approaches can be pursued.
The thing is though, that while for every person who finds that refreshing, there will be another for whom it is enormously unsettling and even upsetting. Change can be so hard to deal with. It reminds us that nothing is fixed – not even our views, if you have a belief, of God because they too are constantly challenged as we discover more and more about him.
Hard though it is, we have to remember that still water stagnates. It dies. We can’t stand still as people, as parents, in our day jobs or our leisure activities. We can’t stand still in our faith or in any aspect of life. Life goes on.
Always.
And some of us even believe it goes on forever – she says, buttering a slice of homemade bread, courtesy of Sky –
Susan Brown.
