2017 did not get off to the best start. On the night of the 29th Dec, while in Johannesburg with my sister, my father fell over a glass table. My sister’s birthday the next day, was spent waiting for x-rays and sonars to assess the damage to his shoulder. It’s bad and to cut a long story short, my father is booked for shoulder surgery this week.

Of course, this could only all be arranged once the New Year long weekend was over and the relevant doctors back from leave. So in the meantime, after securely strapping my dad’s arm in a sling, (which, btw,  takes an engineering degree to figure out!) we headed off to  my sister’s surprise birthday lunch with a rowdy bunch of her fabulous friends. It was such fun!

I’m a natural born ‘catastophizer’. Words like disaster, fantastic, terrible and fabulous are as much a part of my vocabulary as ‘and & but’ are. When something like this happens, it’s easy for me to talk about what a disaster our holiday turned into, but that’s not actually a true reflection of our ten days away.

One bad thing absolutely did happen and yes, there were a string of ramifications including having to cut a much-needed holiday short. However, we also had a wonderful Christmas, relaxed with family and friends, shopped, welcomed in the New Year on a gorgeous farm with dear friends and, all in all, had a really good time.

The tendency to focus on what goes wrong is habitual for most of us. We think and talk about bad stuff far more than we do good stuff... unless we’re in love... and for as long as that lasts! The more we focus on what’s wrong, the more bad stuff we see and the worse we feel. It’s an easy trap to fall into. We trick ourselves by thinking that focusing on what went wrong is a solution somehow. It isn’t. It’s a can of worms that turns into a Pandora’s box of negativity.

Applying the same principle to positivity is just as flawed, it’s as much a lie as focusing exclusively on the negative. We are far better served by reminding ourselves of a more balanced approach. Our holiday was neither fabulous nor a disaster but had moments of both within it. People are usually a mixture of awe-inspiring and soul-destroying in one confounding package. Remembering this paradoxical simultaneity is the tricky bit.

There is so much more to the world than it appears, things are often not what they seems and we cannot always trust our own impressions. Bridging the gap between things being either ‘like this’ or ‘like that’, is a world worth investigating.

Which brings me to my plan of action (POA) for the year, to hold life gently in the palm of an open hand and let it unfold. What’s your POA for 2017?