Do you fight Reality?

I’m hoping you all had a lovely half term….I most certainly did 🙂

My trip to Tuscany was not quite what I expected: the scenery was at times totally breathtaking, the people so welcoming and friendly, the farmhouse delightful, and we were lucky enough to have home-cooked meals using many ingredients they had cultivated themselves, even the red wine was made on the farm – organic and totally free from nasties – which of course means headache free for me 🙂

All that was exactly what I had expected…….but the weather was not! We arrived to lovely warm sunshine, quick change into something cooler and ate our fist evening meal outside – bliss.  Little did I know that the sun was not going to show up very often during the course of the week, in fact it was almost non-existent, the rain on the other hand graced us with its presence every day and drenched us on more than 2 occasions!

What I found very interesting though, was that some of us just accepted that that was how it was going to be, we couldn’t fight the reality of our situation, so why waste energy and time worrying over it.  Some however, were not impressed, they felt cheated, they felt their holiday was being ruined, they were sad, constantly trying to find out the weather forecast for the next day, fretting over when it might change, looking for someone to blame, this was not what they had come to Tuscany for!

Now, it’s not that I’m being flippant, of course I appreciate we all look forward to our hols, we work hard, we save hard, we want it to be perfect.  The reality is that often things work out differently to our expectations – that’s life.  So, it all boils down to choice; we can try and fight reality, we can spend our time feeling annoyed, cross, agitated, sorry for ourselves etc etc, but is that EVER going to change anything?

We can of course accept our reality and in this case, enjoy all the other aspects that were perfect, time to just BE, time in nature, the challenge of the steep walks, meeting new people, discovering new things, seeing wild boars (!), seeing wild peonies, seeing the most magical beech forest, eating delicious organic food, drinking equally delicious organic wine and spending time with someone you love without any phones, iPads, laptops….yes, without doubt I had a lovely time 🙂

When something happens that you have absolutely no control over, let’s not waste time fighting reality, you will never win.  It’s not always easy to accept what life throws at us, but we always have a choice….to fight reality or not 🙂