As the days have got longer and with the weather kind, I have been spending more of my evenings in the garden cutting the lawn, tending to the plants or just sitting with a drink, relaxing.  Well, that’s my excuse for not writing in a while.

A couple of events earlier this week inspired me to pen something tonight.

The first was not so good. I happened to be at a desk that had lost its laminate edging strip along the part you would sit facing, thus exposing the rough chipboard underneath. In itself this wasn’t a problem as I have rarely found the quality of desk construction material to have a strong positive or negative correlation with my productivity. However, as I leaned across the desk to plug in the laptop, my shirt caught on this jagged surface and pulled a handful of threads leaving a series of tugged and uneven “tramlines” down the front.

Now I hate to spend money on work clothes – this shirt was a recent purchase and one of my smarter items of clothing. I was pissed off and let this nag at me all day. I even found myself absentmindedly picking at the lose threads in some of my meetings. Letting small things bother me is a recognised failing of mine but I couldn’t shake this and upon arriving home at the end of the day was still miffed, but at least I could now do something about it…

…so I got a very sharp pair of scissors and set to work trimming off the threads hanging from the front of my shirt, no doubt more prominent thanks to my fiddling. All was going well until I held the scissors away from the shirt to pull away the last offending piece of cotton when I felt the blade catch. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t have been a problem but this was no ordinary day and these were no ordinary scissors – they were made in Japan, the Land of the Razor-sharp. In an attempt to finesse the ever-so-slightly damaged shirt back to its original state, I ended up poking a dirty great hole in the garment. Many would not notice some irregular looking stitching, many would notice a hole. Needless to say, my mood did not improve.

The second, and more positive, thing that happened was that I started listening to a podcast recommended by a colleague called Richard Herring’s Leicester Square Theatre Podcast . This involved Richard chatting with some other comedians, probably at the Leicester Square Theatre although I couldn’t verify this from the acoustics alone. I had a flick through the guests and settled on Katherine Ryan, a Canadian-Irish comedian who lives in the UK. Stating the obvious, the conversation was very funny and helped to wash away some of my frustrations. I had seen Katherine’s stand up before but what I really liked was her humility, honesty and terrific outlook. In her own words:

“You can walk through life and just not really pay attention to the things that don’t matter. You really can and then you can be happy all the time.”

When I heard this, my initial reaction was this sounded like somebody who had everything they could ever wish for – she is an extremely successful stand-up comedian – but in response to being asked such a question we hear that she learned to be like this when she had absolutely nothing. In other words, it was a conscious choice and she used this to build her life.

I really wasn’t expecting to pick up something that I could use to improve myself and my reaction to the challenges that life throws my way, both big and small. As I dropped off to sleep, I thought to myself, “it’s only a fucking shirt, sew up the hole and forget about it.”

We often can’t change the things that happen to us each day but we are in control of the way that we react to these external stimuli. Be aware of what matters and what doesn’t. I have even found myself questioning whether something I thought mattered really did. It’s worth challenging yourself on that point as the fewer things that do matter, the less you have to worry about. Not sure I can be happy all the time but being happy most of the time is a prize worth aiming for.

The next time you splash water down your front when washing up, drop a glass, experience internet outage, hear someone say something stupid, run out of milk, bite the inside of your cheek when eating or catch your clothing on a piece of furniture just stop to think about how you will react.

In many cases a simple “so what” will do.