On Monday I am starting again. Beginning another new thing. I seem in my life always to be starting but I've come to accept I'm just not so good at finishing, at following through. It's a bit of a trademark. Or maybe "That's Life", as Esther Rantzen would have said back in the day.
You see I start meditation (bliss) or anti-gravity yoga (the second most fun you can have in a hammock) or eating quinoa (surprisingly tasty) or drinking kombucha (an acquired taste) and while some of it makes me happier and lifts my spirits, I don’t keep it up. I return, like the imprint in a memory foam mattress, to that which I was before. A person who likes pasta, sandwiches and wine and not really moving around that much if she can help it.
Anyway, on Monday I am starting again. Again. It’s the first day of a nine-month programme called Be Your Best, which has been developed by a company called Potentialife. Be Your Best. Three simple words that scare the bejaysus out of me.
Out of hundreds of entries, a dozen or so Irish Times readers have been selected to take part. One of the applicants quoted Marianne Williamson in her submission: "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure."
Williamson reckons that it is our light and not our darkness that frightens us the most. And maybe she’s right.
Be Your Best. I look around and I see everyone trying to do that in their own unique way even if it doesn't look remotely like our own version of what we think is 'best'. Maybe even I am doing my best although I suspect not. I found out there is a word for what I've been experiencing lately. It's clinomania, from the Greek apparently, meaning "excessive desire to stay in bed". I feel like that a lot at the moment. I am in love with my bed. I don't want to leave. It has become like a raft I clamber into and I don't want to ever alight even though the sun came up ages ago and the raft has long since bumped gently into the far shore.
I'm sad. Maybe that accounts for the clinomania. For Christmas my daughters got a game called Perilous Penguins. It's got this plastic iceberg which wobbles slightly when touched. What you have to do is balance these little penguins all around the iceberg except they keep falling off which is the fun and frustration of the game. You think they are fine, all huddled there together at the tip of the iceberg, but place the next one on and it causes one or more of them to tumble down to the crevice below. The object of the game is to get them all to stay on the iceberg but we haven't managed it yet. I'm beginning to think it's not possible.
My lovely, kind, gorgeous, talented, creative young friend and former Irish Times colleague Brian died on Christmas Eve. I can't stop thinking about him. I have this memory of a long coach journey we took late into the night, him sleeping, the motorway lights shining intermittently on his beautiful face. He was a person guaranteed to make me smile just on his approach. Although he was 20 years younger than me and I'd only known him a couple of years, we clicked. We talked a lot about his family. About his funny father, his loving mother, his brilliant sisters and brother. About his great circle of great friends. I slagged his rural accent and he slagged my lack of knowledge of the Kanye West ouvre. The last time I saw him, six days before Christmas, we had one of our deep and meaningfuls and I told him all the great things I thought about him and we hugged but not like it was the last hug. Not like that.
I feel lucky to have known such a special person how ever briefly but I’m sad. I lie in bed long after the children have been delivered to school thinking about how we are all perilous penguins and how most of us are trying our best and what does it all mean? I go deeper into the belly of the raft and I think about being powerful beyond measure and about being inadequate beyond belief. I’m starting something on Monday. I’m starting so I’ll finish. Or maybe I won’t. And that’s just life.
roisin@irishtimes.com