Not My Circus, Not My Monkeys!

You may have seen this phrase roaming around social media recently; it seems to be popping up all over the place. There's even a couple of pages by the name now - which is where this pic came from:-

As you can see, it's a Polish proverb, so I asked a Polish friend what it means, so I got the sense of it right (though, to be honest, it's pretty straightforward). She told me it's basically the same as 'none of my business'; though much more expressive. Which may tell you something about the English character.

Anyway, the phrase kind of stuck in my head and made me think about monkeys. I went to Kenya a couple of years back now, and when we were there, we saw plenty of monkeys. They weren't everywhere, but they were quite common, and there was one feature of monkeys that soon becomes obvious - monkeys do what they want to do. They're pretty much uncontrollable; and completely chaotic. So, what does that say about life? If the 'monkeys' are our circumstances, our feelings, everything that goes to make up our personal situations, does that mean that life is barely controlled chaos?

After all, even though circuses are made up of well rehearsed performances; they're still bright and colourful and explosively eye-catching, with what look like incredibly risky close calls sometimes. Certainly sounds like a much better description of life than business. Relationships should never be treated just as a business transaction. Ever. Relationships mean treating people as people, seeing them as interesting unpredictable individuals who can be worse than you fear and kinder than you dream - which will definitely be chaotic, and probably messy at times. But that's the difference between love and tolerance - which I also wrote about in this other post involving Polish people.

(And apart from the fact that God wants us to love everyone - not just tolerate them - there's always the fact that if you help others deal with their monkeys, they may just help you deal with yours...)

Two Months Gone!

Well, where does all the time go? It flies when you're enjoying yourself, and even when you're not, it still - somehow - disappears. And once it's gone, it's gone; you can't get it back.

Just about two months back I decided to take a break from writing this blog, because I was getting a bit stressed with doing it. Not because I wasn't enjoying it, but just because I couldn't keep up with doing it. The busier I was, the more interesting things I had to write about, and the less time. When I wasn't busy, I struggled to think of things to post on; but when I had things to write on, I couldn't do it. So I decided to stop temporarily.

I didn't know how long it would be, but I was thinking it would be about a month. Clearly, as you can tell, it was longer, and it could have been longer still. I didn't have any idea of how long it would be when I started to stop, and that made it more difficult to stop stopping, as it were. It did get to a point where it felt like it was starting to get harder and harder to think about starting again; so, I kind of had to decide I was going to, or I could have continued procrastinating forever. I'm good at that.

 But when I started this blog, I wanted it to keep going on. If it does ever come to an end, I want it to be a proper end - i.e. that I decide that this ends for this reason and this other thing is started instead. Which may happen in time, who knows. But what I don't want is for it to just stop.

Like that. So, I've finally started again, thank God. I thank Him anyway, because I'm pretty sure I would have continued to struggle if He didn't help me. I had plenty of ideas, but somehow never got around to writing any of them down. And then I had a week off, and I really wanted/hoped that I would get something on the blog this week.

However, I still didn't know whether I actually would. I know what I can be like. But here we are - I've written this and you're reading it. And it's not actually the first new post - this is.