Sunday 11 November 2018

Impossible

The late, great Sir Terry Pratchett wrote that:

"It's OK! I'll keep it clean!"
"The way to deal with an impossible task was to chop it down into a number of merely very difficult tasks, and break each one of them into a group of horribly hard tasks, and each of them into tricky jobs, and each of them..."


What Sir Terry didn't then expand on was that, to steal another (unrelated) Sir TP quote: "the process is called living."

Life is impossible at times. If you tried to look at it as a whole it would swiftly overwhelm you. And fortunately, the human brain knows this and does it's best to help you. When you get to the point in life when - terrifyingly - you could just about work out how the rest of it will pan out, you'll have forgotten so much of what you previously knew that you're still only getting the Executive Summary*.

That was a slightly morbid opening to a random word that could have had me talking about breakdancing unicorns and talking soap. And I would much rather be in the mood to discuss pirouetting elderberry fish, even if it meant looking up how to spell 'pirouetting.' But it's been a tough few weeks and I'm feeling like it would be impossible to be entirely lighthearted. 

But if the soap could talk, perhaps it would offer some wisdom. And if one breaks life into a series of horribly hard tasks, and then into tricky jobs, and then into merely tough moments, and then finally into grains of time, it's entirely possible that some of those grains will be happy, and dust your life with enough joy to make the big picture worthwhile. 

Because while it's sometimes tempting to conclude that it's all not worth the effort, it's impossible to know. 

* I forgot the name of someone I've known for more than 8 years today. I had to look them up on a website to put the name back in my brain. It was fairly humiliating, but - based on this evidence - I'll have forgotten about it by Tuesday.