I grew up playing music, singing, performing. Weekends were often spent driving to various performances or competitions around Sydney. Eisteddfod weekend was always hectic, sometimes you’d be lucky and at least have the singing and piano ones on different weekends but sometimes they overlapped.

But even without the overlap it was still pretty hectic. In a weekend I could have 4 different singing ones and some would need costumes.

One year I had to be little Cosette from Les Mis (‘there is a castle on a cloud’) dressed in her almost homeless street urchin dress. Then turn around the next day and become Pocahontas (‘can you paint with all the colours of the wind’), the powerful Indian princess with her authentic native American dress.

Wow.

So for this memorable outfit change, mum made basically a reversible calico sac. One one side it looked like a Tunic which we grubbed up and made look like the little Cosette. Then once that was over, we went home and turned it inside out. She left big seams hidden on the inside of Cosette dress so we could cut and fray it for Pocahontas. Painted up with earthy browns and some reds and blues and teemed with a head tie with some feathers attached that we found around the streets…

Both looked amazing and so professional. She has a lot of talents my mum, one is just knowing what the task is, conceptualising it, and carrying it out well no matter what skill is needed. She can pretty much do anything. She’s very versatile and damn good.

Anyway, I think there’s a point to this. There must be an analogy hidden in here somewhere. Always be adaptable and flexible like that dress (or my mum for that matter). My goodness some crazy things happen in life. We’ve all seen it, we’ll all see a lot more of it. And you’re going to be far better off if you’re already mentally prepared to just take any new advancement and work out how you’ll make it work for you. Yeah it might seem pretty bad at the time. But you get that brain working and thinking and you turn whatever bad thing you’ve got into something that you can make good. Try it. Try varying your Mindset when something happens that you don’t like. Change isn’t always bad, even if it often seems it at first (like my pharmacist leaving, right? I’ve been told his replacement is taller. He’d better be awesome).

As Victor Frankl wrote in his book ‘Man’s search for Meaning’, ‘The last of the human freedoms is to choose ones attitude in any given set of circumstances.’

So hold onto that. It’s your right. And make the right choice.

Much love.