When I have a stinking cold or a nasty bug, I confess I have a bit of a tendency to mention it.³ Negatively, apparently. Well I’m not going to be positive about it, am I? However I really must learn to stop doing it. Not because it irritates other people, although I’m told that’s a thing, but because it makes me feel worse. Every time I mention it, it reminds me how rubbish I feel. I hear myself saying words like ‘I’ve felt better’ or ‘Pretty rough actually, since you ask’, and ping! I feel pretty rough. What a surprise.

My mother-in-law, who is beyond stoical, takes the opposite approach. When asked how her cold is, I’ve actually heard her reply, ‘What cold?’ She’ll insist she’s fine. The striking thing here, and the reason I must change my habits, is that she copes way better than I do with a cold. She either ignores it completely or tells anyone who asks that she’s fine. That’s what she hears herself saying, so that’s how she feels.

This is the kind of acceptance that builds resilience. She is much more resilient than I am in the face of colds which is, I admit, my loss. When you’re facing a much bigger challenge than the common cold, it’s even more important. Acceptance is not about giving up.

It’s not that my mother-in-law doesn’t ever buy a box of tissues or make herself a hot honey and lemon drink. She’ll do things to help herself. But if she ran out of lemons it would only be a minor irritation because she’s telling herself she doesn’t really need it anyway. The important thing is that she accepts she has a cold, she does what she can and she lets go of the rest of it. Railing, moaning, fighting, bitching, don’t help. The cold will be there until it has run its course and she lives with that.

You can’t deal with a challenge until you recognise it. If, in your mind, you’re trying to change the inevitable, fight the unbeatable, you’re stuck in that place. That’s a pain if it’s a cold and agonising if it’s something far more serious. Sure, change things when you can, but a lot of bad stuff can’t be changed. It’s unavoidable or it’s already in the past. In that case sooner or later you have to accept it before you can move to stage two. The one thing you do have some control over is how soon you do this. I often remind myself of the lines in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (as translated by FitzGerald):

‘The moving finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.’

You could see this as depressing I suppose, but I’ve always found it deeply reassuring, as I’m certain it was intended to be. It’s a waste of effort fighting so you might as well join the moving finger and move on.