Life’s Little Victories

Often it is life’s little victories that can carry one through when the doldrums descend. Mundane days when the small wins (as opposed to winds) lift you lightly like a kite. When you are on an errand in the car, maybe cutting it fine to get where you need to be for a certain time, and you hit a run of green lights – yeah! When you go into your favourite café and ‘your’ window seat is free, the sun is pouring in and it warms your back for the next 40 minutes while you take your leisure making great inroads to the next read for the book group. When that very book you are reading was not available at the library except via a reserve list that wasn’t giving you much time to get it read, until you stumbled across it in a charity shop for 99p. When the forecast tells you that it’s going to chuck it down all day (giving a 97% chance of rain) but you decide to walk to the pool anyway, steeling yourself for the dripping mess you’ll be both indoors and outdoors, but you make it there and home again without so much as a drop having fallen on you. When you arrive poolside and see that the medium speed swim lane is empty, no elbows and feet in your face today. When the tulips you had forgotten you’d plated at the end of October suddenly have a growth spurt and two-inch swirls emerge triumphantly from the earth. When you have pored over google maps to find that the Royal Mail depot is five miles on the other side of the city, you’re about to hop into the car to retrieve that parcel that couldn’t be delivered when you were away and you glance at the chit only to discover a box is ticked to say that it has been left at the post office across the road. When you go into Boots for multivitamins and realise you have accumulated enough points on your loyalty card to cover the cost of them, no cash exchanged. When you manage to get to the bakery just before it closes because you want to get the nice bread for the visitors coming and they offer you a free loaf, besides the one you are buying, because in a few hours it will be yesterday’s bread. When you have to go out in the car on a night when the football is on (I live next to a very large stadium), come home during the match yet still manage to get that perfect parking space. When you put on a lighter weight coat that you’ve not worn since last October and find a smiling tenner folded alongside a crumpled Kleenex. When you get home late at night from a long journey and find that there is a little milk left in fridge so you can have that cup of tea before you go to bed. Is it just me? Do you have your own list of life’s little victories or do I need to get out more?