Pessimistic vibes about trying to be an optimist

Country Living with Francis Farragher

I’m kind of worn out with every Tom, Dick and Harry telling me that I should have a more positive and optimistic outlook on life’s travails. This optimism ‘kick’ is kind of hard work especially on days like we had last Friday when the lashing rain reduced by motorway by at least 20km/h to 100km/h such was the intensity of the rainfall.

We did get a bit of a raw deal this August. All of the meteorology buffs tell us that out eighth month is the last one of the Summer, but this time around August made it very clear to us all that it wanted nothing whatsoever to do with the Summer season. By the middle of the month it had plunged into the midst, and mists, of the Autumn season.

Despite a reasonably settled routine of sleep, it is that little bit harder to maintain the same ‘get-up’ time when the mornings start to close in and when a 6.15 curtain pull reveals a very grey and gloomy backdrop on an eastern sky. As the saying goes: “it’s probably all in the head”, but once the change in the seasons arrive, the snooze button on the phone alarm clock tends to get pressed that bit more often.

Of course, there is a medically well documented condition known as SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) which is now estimated to affect one out of every 15 people to different degrees, or something that we might more commonly refer to as the ‘Winter blues’.

This condition is practically non-existent in what we might call ‘Middle-Earth’ namely those latitudes with 30 degrees of the Equator, where daylight hours are long, constant and bright. But as you push further north and south, the prevalence of the SAD syndrome increases dramatically during the Autumn and Winter periods of the southern and northern hemispheres.

The trick is of course is to bottle this thing they call optimism and we can all help to do this by listing out all the things that are good in our lives like family, health, a modest level of income over expenditure (now that’s a tricky one), and probably not worrying too much about the things that we will never be able to change.

We have the old health rhyme well off by this stage: don’t smoke, drink less alcohol, eat healthy food, take regular exercise, laught a bit more, and don’t get into a tizzy when a driver hogs the outside lane of the motorway while never passing 100km/h. All kind of basic stuff. For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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