Give me some sugar

Nobody said life would be easy, we have all been aware of this from the time we were old enough to acknowledge the existence of life outside of the home our parents built (and not necessarily good homes at that).

So going out into the unknown, to a degree we expect hard times but we also expect good times. We hoped the good times would be more frequent and would outweigh the hard times by far. Yet as we go along we tend to find out that it really is more the other way around.

And things can be harder than we expected, nobody had warned us about that happening! Not even our parents.

So we learn to grow from those hard times and learn, as an animal gathers nuts when getting ready to hibernate for winter, that we must gather our strength in the good times. We gather strength when we can because we know subconsciously that something bad might happen when we turn the next corner of our lives, and probably will until we make the situation work for us, this is one of the natural consequences of facing change.

When will life give way and give us rest. Do we have to wait until the end of it all before we find peace? Or rather do we just get used to drinking lemon juice while hoping for lemonade.

Let’s be positive for a moment… Now this is a hard exercise!

Well if I can’t be positive, let me go through a few facts.

It is midwinter here for me. This means, as it should naturally happen, that brain chemicals have changed for everyone, causing a natural state of stillness. The reason for this is so that we, as humans, don’t over exert ourselves and can naturally gain weight for our bodies to be safer from the cold, of course the gods have forgotten we have created an array of winter clothing and credit cards so the extra weight isn’t needed all that much these days.

However for us poor souls suffering with chemical imbalances within the brain (and the numbers are growing), we get SAD, not as in “unhappy”, well kind of.

SAD or also known as Seasonally Affected Depression is when the brain chemicals over compensate for the change in the seasons, so instead of becoming chilled (pun intended) we become depressed, sometimes severely so.

Throw into the mix a whole bunch of crap. A truly tough time that life just wants to throw at you. But you haven’t gathered all your nuts for winter, so that’s what you become, and psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies are the only ones left smiling.

Where to from here? We can put bright lights in our homes and fire up the heaters to try and convince our brains that it’s spring, and let our wallets suffer, or we can find the spoon full of sugar to help the medicine go down.

A spoon full of sugar can be a good friend and a glass of wine or a purring cat and a good book.

Block out the world, block out everything you don’t NEED (including the cellphone, there’s a silent function for a reason) and have your sugar. Indulge if you can… why not!

So if you take anything away from this (hopefully none of the depressing stuff) it’s that life happens and we can’t always deal with it but if we try to bring something good into our lives and can take time to light incense and a candle or two, perhaps we can find something else that we didn’t know was there. A hidden stack of nuts, which is what we’ll be the next morning when we face life again, but more importantly what those nuts represent, a little bit of hidden strength we had forgotten about.