A few years back someone told me, to my immense surprise, that I am a happy person, that even when I was weeping, I was still looking for the upside. Ever since that moment, talking to a decorator, in the hallway of what is now my home, while we were both deep in mourning, I have tried to do so consciously when it doesn’t come naturally. There’s always an upside is one of my (many) mantras.
This does not mean that I am a superior serene being.
It means that after I have completely lost my shit, panicked, freaked, admitted that I don’t know what to do, tried to do something, had that thing achieve nothing, freaked a bit more…I will make a
decision and just DO SOMETHING ELSE. Not necessarily the right thing, but a log-jam breaking thing.
I’m quite good at ranting. I’m not bad at stating the facts and expecting people to live up to their obligations. I’m not above a bit of manipulative reasoning, without actually lying. But I also know when I’m beaten. I know when (if not how) to retreat. Even if, yes, I probably will slam the door on the way out.
I especially know when I am beaten because I am actually on the losing wicket, when as much as I may be acting in good faith, those acting for me may not be doing so.
I should have been at the Stadium of Light this week. I should have been having the time of my life, despite the rain, at a Springsteen gig.
I wasn’t.
I wasn’t there because the owner of the apartment I should have been staying in had switched management companies and the one that he left did not cancel the booking I had, the one that he moved to didn’t honour it and booked someone else in, and by the time we’d worked out the balance of probabilities and the fact that neither they nor I was going to find anywhere else close that night and the next to sleep, I bottled it first. I called off. If I wasn’t in such a state, I would have flounced.
I couldn’t flounce. I was scared. Time was moving on. I didn’t know where I was going to sleep that night. I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be anywhere near close enough to the stadium to actually get to the gig, and it was so late that it probably wasn’t going to be possible to actually get home
either. I scouted around for hotels – nothing doing – not without a four-figure price tag anyway. I widened the circle, nothing doing, not that I could physically get to anyway.
Last time I was at a Springsteen concert, last year, Villa Park, there were people wearing tee-shirts that said E-Street Fans look out for each other. At this point I feel like calling ‘Bullshit’ on that.
Had I been the other party in my double-booked, no-one taking responsibility, apartment thingy – had I been part of a couple watching a single person so upset about the scenario, I would have said Look…on balance of the evidence ours is the legitimate booking, but we’re here for the same reason you are…have the sofa. It could have been a very different experience. I’d have given them a fair chunk of the refund for their trouble.
Didn’t happen. E-street Fans – stop selling the tee-shirt. It’s BS. Fact is: they don’t. Leastways not all of them.
All of that is downside, and that’s not what I’m here to talk about… where’s the upside in all of this?
I need to be clear that while I was in the depths of arguing about whose booking was legit, and all the shit, I was not asking that question. While I was wondering if I would have anywhere to sleep that night, I was not asking that question. Even after I had made the call to just cut my losses, let them have the place, with an ill-grace if I’m honest, and accept that this was a gig I wasn’t going to get to, I was not asking that question.
I was being human. I was being angry and upset, and for a while a bit scared about the next bit of
reality. All I knew was that time was getting on, I had nowhere to sleep that night, and whatever train I managed to get wasn’t going to get me home.
In my younger days, I might have worried less – back then you could actually hang around on a station concourse waiting for the first train out in the morning. They don’t let you do that anymore.
In my younger days, I might have thought that just kipping on the beach might work.
In my younger days, I was younger. In my younger days, I was rarely doing this kind of thing alone.
Older and alone make a difference to how you feel in your vulnerability.
But there IS always an upside.
Before I start sharing what the upsides turned out to be, let’s get clear on what an upside actually is and is not. It isn’t the solution to the problem - it is a benefit of having chosen whichever “solution” (or more accurately “action”) you have hit upon.
An “upside” is the thing about the way things played out, when they didn’t play out the way you wanted, that is in some way a good thing. It doesn’t mean that things have worked out better than the way you wanted, just a recognition that not everything about the outcome is bad.
Looking for the upside doesn’t involve evaluating the balance between the downside and the up. It is merely about noticing and acknowledging that it isn’t all down.
This week’s upsides:-
The major upside in all of this is that a good friend rode to my rescue. Before I even asked he said, "If you decide to do that, just get as close as you can, and I will come and pick you up." When ‘as close as I could’ was over 70 miles away, he simply said, "Of course." And he was there when I got off the last train, in the rain, on a double-yellow, calling my name in the dark. He was there with food in case I was hungry as well as the ride home. The upside is knowing that this person cares enough to have done that, almost without having been asked.
There was another upside in that the ride home through the night, in foul weather, just talking about life, the universe and everything, about place names, and maps, and what we think and feel, and football, and where we were, and what that was on the side of the road, and things we did, was something I actually enjoyed for its own sake…outside of the reason and purpose for it.
He told me I could put the seat back and sleep, that I didn’t need to watch him drive…but actually I wanted to watch him drive, watch the countryside in the night, be present. It brought back memories of other drives through the night, with other people: my late partner, my parents, friends in Germany. We saw a muntjac by the roadside, and I remembered a night with a whole herd of deer crossing the road, and the scent of a pea harvest drifting on warm summer night air. I remember family trips – going on holiday, going to funerals, going somewhere – crouched or
curled in the back, listening to my parents talking when they thought we were both asleep, my brother and I. And how often I would be asleep. A purring engine is a lullaby.
It created a new memory – one that is still emotionally resonant. I will remember the rain. The signposts, the wondering where we were. I will remember river crossings and market towns and the RAF station all lit up. I will remember looking at him in the slow flash light of on-coming trucks. I will remember feeling safe. I will remember wishing that we could do this again, without reason.
Upside: sometimes calling on someone to help is a gift to them. We always think we are being kind when we help folk out, but sometimes the balance of the helping gets out of kilter…and the other kind of gift is to allow ourselves to be helped. To ask for help, and accept it gratefully.
Upside: knowing I am loved.
And then also:-
Upside: not prancing about in the rain for three hours, getting soaked, catching whatever chill-induced un-well-ness, maybe.
Upside: the non-accommodation was refunded quickly. I’d intended to be up north for a week, so it was a reasonable sum. I’ve spent a third of it on a series of poetry workshops. A little of it covers the non-claimable expenses. The remainder is extra spending money for my next trip. Money I thought I had already spent is being used to bring me different experiences, other joys.
Upside: I was home when I didn’t intend to be and we got to work in the garden, painting decking
on the one dry day of the week, digging out bamboo, cutting back the dead-wood.
Upside: two swims I would not otherwise have had.
Do any of these balance-out missing out on the gig? Possibly not, but they certainly help me move past the disappointment. They reinforce my way of looking at the world. I was listening to Sue Stone being interviewed the other day and she said, “There can be benefits to not being on the journey you wanted to take.” I like that.
It is easy to say that every experience is either a positive thing or an opportunity to learn (which is also a positive thing), but when we’re caught up in the drama of the moment, that is the last thing we want to hear. One of the things I remember saying on the drive back was, “I’ll write my way through this tomorrow, and then I will start looking for the lessons.”
For me, I have to get through the ‘thing’ before I can begin to start sifting out of it, what it is I am meant to learn. The upsides are not the lesson. The upsides are the compensations, the not-so-bads, the actually-pretty-goods, about the situation. They help me to put down the down-sides, in order to carry something more positive forward.
And then, only then, can I – if I think it’s worth it - start revisiting the situation to see what (if anything) I can learn from the experience. For the record, I don’t believe that every experience does have something to teach us. I believe that sometimes “shit happens” – and the only lesson is learning how to let it “have happened” and stop walking back to wallow around in it.
Sometimes the only lesson is the reinforcement of the mantra there’s always an upside – the reminder to go look for it.
