PMA (aka Positive Mental Attitude)

2009 has finally arrived and after a long weekend in Yorkshire visiting my dad and various other family members, I’m feeling (you may want to be sitting down before you read the next bit, gentle reader) as fresh as a daisy! Yes folks, the impossible has been made possible, and Belinda is feeling well rested in preparation for the year ahead. It was touch and go there for a while, granted (the 8am finish on New Year’s Day, which saw Beth and I smoking and drinking Baileys whilst everyone else had either found a corner to pass out in or accepted defeat and gone home, being a particularly pivotal moment) but I’ve clawed success back from the jaws of defeat and it feels good!

Even the ludicrously named ‘Big Freeze’ (Sky News, yesterday. Tsk) is failing to dampen my spirits, and as I sit here surrounded by a plethora of miserable and/or ill colleagues I find myself categorically refusing to succumb to the January gloom (in spite of the fact I’m rapidly losing sensation in my extremities). After all, it’s a new year, the sky is blue and the sun is shining (well, it was yesterday). As a friend of my stepfather’s used to say, everywhere is ‘challenge and opportunity’ just ripe for the taking. We make our own fortunes in this life, so it rather follows that without a positive mental attitude the only people we are letting down are ourselves, no?

To my mind January is an ideal time to take stock of life and see all the good things in it. When all around us there is news of death and destruction, poverty and hatred (the recent bombings in Gaza being a case in point) it’s hard not to realise how lucky we are in the Western World to be relatively unscathed, and have the luxury of continuing to live in a civilised society where freedom of speech, religious and political leanings are not just tolerated but positively celebrated. As a twenty-something female living in London I truly feel the only limitation I’m up against is my own slothfulness, whereas in some parts of the world women are persecuted simply for being women, denied jobs and basic human rights – hell, in China many female babies are slaughtered to make way for their more highly regarded male counterparts because their vastly overpopulated country can supposedly not handle more than one child per family.

Such situations are almost beyond the realms of our imagination as we sit in our cosy lounges watching Celebrity Big Brother and mulling over our weekend plans. Not that we don’t have our own problems in this country – the Credit Crunch is no laughing matter, certainly, and even those at the top will soon be feeling the pinch if they haven’t already – but my point is that compared to the problems of the wider world, I don’t think we’ve got it too bad.

So yay for this sudden, inexplicable burst of positivity! Though I fear the true root of it may lie in my hysteria at having formally signed up for the London Triathlon in August…..