What a Difference a Day Makes...

Straight away I have to start by confessing that the difference in the photographs is, in fact, two days; this does not alter the basic sentiment of the post, so stop complaining already.

 This was the image at Paddington Recreation Ground (known familiarly to locals as Paddington Rec) on Monday morning, the 19th of March, and it was far from spring-like; by London standards it was positively deep winter, a direct result of the second (and, hopefully, final) Beast-from-the-East, the mini one, coming straight from Siberia and giving us more to blame on the Russians and Putin, as if we didn't have enough already!

The snow which fell throughout last Sunday and overnight into early Monday was nothing like as bad as the snow of about three weeks ago, so covering on the ground is thin, but Monday morning was bitterly cold with a bit of a wind blowing. The day continued cold but then, as if a magic wand had been waved, Tuesday was a good deal warmer and Wednesday, when I took the next set of photographs from more ore less the same position, was truly

lovely, a proper English spring day. Why even the sun was shining!

My purpose for bringing this to your attention was not simply to state the obvious by means of some photos but to use it as a metaphor for life. One day life can feel unbearable with our problems weighing us down, strangling us and robbing us of the joy of being alive - we all have days when everything seems cold and joyless, and we feel truly miserable, unable to see how things could possibly improve. It can be a cold, empty feeling, often leading people to do desperate, sometimes irreversible, things.

Yet look at the bright, joyous photographs so full of colour and vibrant life, taken such a short time after the bleak snowy ones. They show a different world, like the one we would see if, when having a bleak moment of our own, we give ourselves the time to recover, to see things in a different light, to breath again with the realistic understanding that life can and will get better and is rarely entirely and completely desperate anyway.

Use the 'good' days to imprint the wonders of life deep in your essence so that you can drag them out during the 'bad' days to remind yourself, to show yourself that there are things that make life worthwhile, however small. Colours and brightness always help us to feel better, feel alive - it is no coincidence that our blackest thoughts come during the hours of darkness, during the night.

Look at how bleak, almost black and white, the top two photographs seem, then look at the bottom two depicting virtually the same scenes and taken from more or less the identical spot - they are just full of colour, with life just bursting out of them!

If only our life could be full of vibrant colour every day, making us feel good, but that may be unrealistic. So remember that brighter days are on the way and take courage to survive the bleak times - survival is the name of the game!