Lifestyle Choices

Make your own decisions: Althoughspecialists may be useful to analyse asituation and suggest solutions, theycannot run your life for you. Onceyour choices are clarified, use yourcommon sense to make your owndecisions. Then force yourself to bepessimistic, to look for the snags inthe arrangements and face them.

Don’t opt out because you don’tunderstand your position. Make your adviser explain it all again until s you do understand it, and so can be b responsible for deciding which path e you want to take. Be prepared to be f responsible for your own decisions. y Life is a risk. Nothing is certain inthis world and there is no guaranteed le security, financial, intellectual or d emotional. Security lies in your own st self-reliance to deal with the problems of life. You will make some right decisions and some wrong ones. Pay the penalty for the wrong ones, cut your losses and start again.

Make a rule never to take a decision if you are upset. Wait at least twenty-four hours until you can think more clearly. Also wait twenty-four hours before sending an emotional letter. Then tear it up.

The Advantages of a crisis

Acrisis can be a blessing in disguise if it makes you stop and take a long look at your life, and then cut out theclutter.

Cut out waste: Don’t waste money, resources, time or friendship. You can now stop feeling obliged to do things just because others expect them from you. There are now plenty of reasons and excuses.

There are a lot of things in life that you needn’t do. You don’t have to cook a hot lunch on Sunday or return the Jones’ invitation, or attend parties if they make you nervous, orfunctions if they bore you.

Don’t waste time: And if you’ve suddenly got more of it than ever before, try to look upon it as a life- enriching bonus. If you’ve wished f more time in the past — now’s our time to use it.

Use that time for more creative leisure, active sports and hobbies, doing things with your children in-stead of for them, or taking an expensive, stimulating course.

Think of something rewarding to do and start DOING IT NOW.

Stop wanting things: Are you wasting time, effort and money doing things and buying luxuries that you don’t really need? After all, your grandparents got along without a Teasmaid or an Instamatic. Try switching off the sound on the TV commercials for a start and then start trying to tell the differences between a wish and a want. A wish is not a true need, but an artificially stimulated status symbol. In other words, unnecessary.

In a Community Crisis

Share your troubles and share the solutions to them, whether it’s grouping together to buy groceries in bulk or passing on a good recipe. All over the country people are having the same problems. Pool your resources. Start lending things, the way people did in the war.

Advertise in your local tobacconist’s right now for a swop baby- sitter; babysitter-swopping is far more liberating than wife-swopping.

Profit from a crisis

If one person answers the ad you can take turns to sit for each other. If two or three people answer it you might as well be a bulk babysitter if you’re stuck doing it anyway. You could each of you look after three babies a morning, or afternoon or day and have the rest of the week free. Wouldn’t that be nice for a bit? If more than one person answers the advertisement, start a rota. Don’t wait for someone else — you do it. Nothing gets started unless somebody starts it, and if nobody else seems to have thought of it, why shouldn’t that someone be you?

Today we are threatened on all sides by financial, industrial and political crisis. However, you aren’t the Prime Minister or the President of the US. Let those people continue to shoulder all their responsibilities. What you can do is mind your own business, check the store cupboard and the hot water bottles (crises are always cold) and start digging an allotment. Voltaire said, Il faut cultiver notre jardin’, and I’m sure that if that sensible man were alive today he’d tell us to turn it over to vegetables.

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