Today’s advent calendar is not a plum pudding or Good King Wenceslas. I open the window on a picture of a collection of scrunched-up tissues, because I have a cold.
This is especially enraging because I officially Don’t Get Colds. (I eat far too much garlic and ingest way too much Vitamin C for a cold ever to get purchase. Besides, my immune system is rocking. Oh, the stories we tell ourselves.)
The tissues actually are officially a good thing, and I can make something festive out of them for you. They are all a very fetching, rather elegant shade of pale dun. Dun tissues! What could be more chic! I also have dun loo paper and dun kitchen roll. This is because I get them all from a smiley eco-operation called Naked Sprout and they make all their paper products from sustainable bamboo or some such (can’t quite remember with my stuffed up brain) and don’t bleach them, because of course bleach is Death to the environment. So out goes all the pristine white Andrex - thank you to the adorable puppy, for the years of service - and in comes the saintly dun. I get to buy things I need anyway, and feel like a Good Person whilst I do it.
This is business at its best. The people who set up this company are clever and enterprising and clearly very hard-working. They’ve seen an opportunity to make the world a slightly better place, and they are taking it. I know how tough it is even to run a minuscule, hardly-visible-to-the-naked-eye enterprise, so my hats are always off to people who have to do manifests and shipping and spreadsheets and employee relationships. (Very important to tend to the team.) These people look exceptionally nice and I hope they have a massive success. Naked Sprout, everyone! It’s the way forward.
So there, even through the thick head and the snotty nose and the hacking cough, I dug out something hopeful. I’m smiling as I write these words. My hunt for silver linings sometimes strikes me as faintly obsessive, but it works for me. I’m not one of those unicorns and butterflies crowd. I don’t believe I can do affirmations and manifest all over the shop and make everything magically lovely. Life sometimes is rubbish. I have a very firm relationship with reality and I’ve trained myself to look it straight in its flinty eye. My thing is: sometimes stuff comes at you and you’ve got to let yourself have a little wail, but then - then - there is the casting about for the tiniest glimmer of that silver lining. Almost every cloud has one. Sometimes, you’ve got to dig it out with two hands and a spoon, but it’s worth the effort.
I saw a video of a woman this morning whose child had died, ten years ago. She was asked about what it is like to lose a child. She sent me into profound awe. She said it was the worst thing that ever happened to her and the best thing that ever happened to her. She said, ‘I said yes to the grief.’ She let herself howl on the floor and collapse in the street and beg for her child back. And then she started to see this catastrophic heartbreak as a gift. She said that she carries her child with her everywhere, through the world, and that the memory and the loss helps her to be kinder and more empathetic and do some good.
I don’t know if my Silver Lining Practice will ever get to that level. That’s some serious business. But that extraordinary woman, with her brave heart and her inner strength, gives me something to aspire to. We all, I believe, need something to aspire to. That is a very Christmassy thought indeed.