It is approximately week 47 of the school summer holidays.
Apparently it has only been six weeks, but I’m fairly certain that’s wrong.
We’ve been to Wales, London and Italy. We’ve seen ABBA Voyage, walked what felt like 47,000 miles around Rome in 37-degree heat, eaten a lot of pizza, spent a lot of money and had a really lovely summer.
And I am now quite ready for school to start.
Not because I’ve had enough of my children. I haven’t.
I have, however, had enough of the electronics debate.
I have had enough of discussing whose turn it is to walk the dog, why somebody shouldn’t have to walk the dog because they walked the dog yesterday, and whether five hours on a phone really counts as five hours if some of it was Facetime.
I would quite like to go back to being their mother rather than Head of Electronics Regulation and Dog Walking Enforcement.
But I was thinking about this the other day, because before I had children I remember looking at friends who did and thinking how wonderful it must be.
Having children was this huge thing.
And now I have two.
Obviously they are still a huge thing to me. I adore them. But having them isn’t extraordinary to me anymore in the way that the idea of having children once was.
They’re just my two.
They’re just part of my life.
We go on holiday. We have dinner. We laugh. We argue. I take them places. They tell me things. They don’t tell me things. I ask somebody to walk the dog. Nobody walks the dog. I ask again.
It’s life.
And then for some reason I remembered something else.
Years ago, I remember thinking how I would love a Range Rover. A mentor of mine at the time had said you had to act like the person you wanted to become. I’d heard about getting into the ‘feeling’ of driving your dream car.
So I booked myself a test drive.
But when it actually came to doing it, I was so intimidated that I practically ran out of the dealership. I’m not even exaggerating.
I didn’t feel like somebody who could ever afford to buy a Range Rover outright. And being a practicing insolvency practitioner at the time, I was not going to ever take out finance to buy a car.
I felt as though the people working there would somehow know that as well. Which is ridiculous when I think about it now – presumably Range Rover salespeople are generally quite pleased when people come in wanting to buy Range Rovers – but I felt completely out of place.
I didn’t even take the test drive.
Now I drive a white Range Rover every day.
I don’t think about it.
I don’t get into it and have a little moment of appreciation for the fact that I am driving the car I once felt too intimidated to test drive.
I get into it and notice that somebody has left an empty water bottle in the door.
Or that I’m running late (usually).
Or that I need fuel.
It’s just my car.
And I started wondering how many things in our lives are like this.
We spend so much time wanting things and imagining what it will be like when we have them.
Sometimes for years.
We want to earn a certain amount of money. We want a business. Or a bigger business. We want the house, the relationship, the promotion, the freedom to work for ourselves, the holiday, the car, the children.
Whatever it is, when we don’t have it, it can feel enormous.
And then we get it.
Initially, of course, it feels exactly as exciting as we thought it would.
But then we live with it.
And gradually it stops being the thing we wanted and becomes the thing we have.
Then, after a while, it doesn’t even particularly register as something we have. It’s just life.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this.
Actually, I think it’s probably quite important.
I wouldn’t want to still feel intimidated every time I got into my car. And it would be slightly strange if I looked at my children over breakfast every morning in complete astonishment that they existed.
We’re supposed to get used to things.
What I find interesting is what that says about “normal”.
Because normal feels incredibly real when you’re inside it.
The amount of money you earn feels normal. So does the kind of house you live in.
The way you spend your days feels normal – and the people you’re surrounded by feel normal.
The things you think you can afford – feel normal.
Even the things you think somebody like you would or wouldn’t do, become normal.
And because they feel normal, it’s very easy to assume that they’re somehow fixed.
I certainly did when I stood in that Range Rover dealership.
At that point, “I can’t afford a car like this” didn’t feel like a temporary description of my circumstances.
It felt true.
I wasn’t consciously thinking any of this, obviously. I just felt uncomfortable and left.
But that’s what interests me now.
The things we experience as normal don’t announce themselves as beliefs or assumptions. They just feel like reality.
Until reality changes.
And then, remarkably quickly, the new reality starts feeling normal too.
I think money is particularly interesting in this respect.
There are amounts of money that can feel almost unimaginable until you earn it. Then you earn it once and it feels enormous. You earn it repeatedly and eventually the number loses some of its emotional charge.
What once felt like a lot of money becomes what you earn.
Then you start thinking about the next number.
This is not about being ungrateful for what we’ve achieved. I think we’re just constantly adjusting to our own lives.
And actually, I rather like that.
Because if something that once felt completely outside your world can eventually become so normal that you barely notice it, it raises an interesting question about all the things that feel outside your world right now.
The amount of money that seems ridiculous.
The business that seems too big.
The house you’d feel uncomfortable walking around because you couldn’t imagine it being yours.
The opportunity you’d currently assume was for someone else.
Whatever your version is.
Maybe one day that could become boringly normal too.
I’m not suggesting you should spend the weekend staring lovingly at everything you own and forcing yourself to feel grateful for it.
And I’m certainly not suggesting we should stop wanting more. I have an extremely long list of things I still want to achieve. I think life is meant to be enjoyed fully.
‘Do more of what makes you happy’ as the saying goes.
But I do think every now and again it’s worth looking at your life and asking:
What has become so normal to me that I’ve forgotten it once wasn’t? When was this something I really wanted – but seemed so far away from what was normal to me at the time.
Because there will almost certainly be something.
And maybe remembering that isn’t only useful because it makes you appreciate what you have – but because it reminds you how unreliable “normal” actually is.
My normal once didn’t include children.
It didn’t include driving the car I drive.
There are lots of things in my life now that at various points would have seemed improbable, unaffordable or simply not for me.
And yet here they are, requiring new school shoes and petrol and arguments about screen time, and feeling completely ordinary.
I think the biggest mistake we make with our current reality is assuming that because something feels normal now, that’s just who you are.
And perhaps being effortlessly rich is partly about that too.
And a reminder here that being rich isn’t just about money, it’s about being rich in life, in experiences, in the people in your life, in your happiness.
So it’s not about choosing between (a) appreciating the extraordinary life that has already become ordinary, and (b) wanting the next extraordinary thing.
It’s about both.
Because your normal has changed before, probably far more than you realise, so there is absolutely no reason to assume that the current normal is where you’re destined to stay.
Free Your Mind.
Expect Extraordinary.
Until next Saturday,
Guinevere