I wake up feeling a non-specific blah, heavy in my chest. It’s a bit scratchy and a bit jangly and it’s so undifferentiated that I cannot untangle the various strands. I give it a name, because I like giving things a name, but I suspect it may have been the wrong name.
I say to myself: I am grumpy. I’m having a grumpy day.
This could very quickly have become official. I could have looked for confirmation bias all over the shop - I didn’t sleep very well last night, someone said something disobliging, I’ve got idiotic amounts of work and I’m not being very organised about it. I’d have added all those up and decided that of course the logical response would be grumpiness. If I’d let that build, I would have ended up having to do some hard-core emotional processing by tea-time.
Instead, an old friend came along and blasted the whole thing to the sky.
We were due to speak at 9.30am. She is my oldest and dearest friend but she is also currently my client, because she is writing her first book. We move seamlessly in our sessions between the professional and the personal. Today, we started with the book. I apologised right off the bat. ‘I won’t be singing show tunes,’ I said, explaining the blah and the grumpiness. She took this in stride, doing the thing that real friends can do so beautifully - not judging or trying to fix, simply accepting.
We got a ton of work done, and then we started skipping off on the tangents we love so much. At one point we were talking about email and social media and tone. She observed that so often we attribute tone to a string of words we read on the screen. (By we, she meant the two of us, but I also think it is we humans, because this is a fairly universal trait. Which might explain why people can get so cross on Twitter.) It’s so easy to read a sentence which is, on its face, as neutral as Switzerland, but to give it a tone of sarcasm or disdain or belittlement. As one reads those words, one hears the imagined tone, and one feels wounded or put down. And all the time, the person merely meant what they said.
This was the same brilliant friend who gave me the Expectation Dial. This has changed my life. In difficult situations or with difficult people or even sometimes with complex horses, I simply set the dial to zero. (It can go up to a Spinal Tap eleven.) Then it doesn’t matter what happens. If the thing or the person or the horse is proving difficult for me that day, that’s fine, because I have no unrealistic expectations. My analogy is that I wouldn’t get hurt or cross or disappointed with a fat, farty Shetland pony because it could not do Grand Prix dressage. On the other side of the ledger, if there is even a hint of goodness and kindness instead of difficulty, then it’s a day of jubilee.
Now she had given me another marvellous life tool: never attribute tone. I suddenly realised how prone I am to doing this, and how much unnecessary angst it causes.
I became acutely excited. ‘A life tool!’ I yelled. (I tend to shout when I get excited.) The vicious circle I had woken up in reversed itself on a sixpence, and became a virtuous circle. I was so thrilled about her words of wisdom and she was delighted to have given them, and we threw loveliness back and forth at each other, and every sentence led to another feeling of delight and connection.
What I especially loved about this was that she wasn’t trying to be wise. She wasn’t giving a TED talk or gearing up for a world-changing podcast. She was just musing on something, with her good mind and her good heart, and she hit on something dazzling, and I took it and held it up to the light and saw all its facets glittering and gleaming.
All the scratchiness and crossness fell away. We had reckoned the work would take about an hour, but we stayed on the telephone for another forty-four minutes, laughing and musing and talking of cabbages and kings.
(Speaking of which, I do sometimes forget that not everyone will get my references. I am a child of the sixties and seventies, and I grew up in an English village, and I was a bookworm from the age of five, and I throw all that into my own writing. It makes vivid sense to me, but it might be baffling to you. So, I should probably pause and say that cabbages and kings comes from The Walrus and the Carpenter -
The time has come,' the Walrus said,
To talk of many things:
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —
Of cabbages — and kings —
And why the sea is boiling hot —
And whether pigs have wings.
I think that people should be talking a lot more about sealing wax and flying pigs.)
So there it is: a simple, beautiful transformation, in one telephone conversation. I am smiling now as I write these words and feeling passionate gratitude that I have such a friend and looking out at the sunshine and thinking of how I shall go down in a while and stand with the red mare and think of spring.
I suspect that everyone has the scratchy times and the grumpy times. I can’t work out whether the world is madder than it was when I was young, or whether I just see more of it because of the social media. But it sometimes does feel madder, and more confusing, and more baffling. Of course our human emotions and our human systems are going to get stretched thin from time to time. It would be strange if they didn’t. The key, I think, is to have sturdy, steady, gloriously reliable restoration points - places where you know you will get perspective and ease and a lovely sense of resetting. Then you can start again.
That’s what the dear friend gave me today, with her generosity of spirit and her wisdom and her kind, clever heart. I feel ridiculously lucky to have her.