Accepting our humble lot can be good for us

THAT'S MEN:Wishing our lives away breeds dissatisfaction

ONE MORNING a couple of years ago I was standing on a platform at Preston waiting for a train. I had spent a week at a writing workshop in Lancaster University and was not at all pleased about returning to the daily grind in Dublin.

If I hadn’t had to earn a living for all those years, I found myself thinking, I could have done great things: the people I’ve been studying for the past week might have been studying me.

And then a revelation hit me. If I hadn’t had my specific life to live, and my specific duties to perform, I would have lived an ordinary life anyway. I would have had other duties to perform and no doubt would be imagining in that other life that but for these I could have been a star.

Remember that famous phrase spoken by Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront? “I could have been a contender.” The phrase is famous because it speaks for all of us. In some strange way we comfort ourselves with it. We use it to tell ourselves that there is more to us than this ordinary, humdrum, grind of living.

But some people, I think, get no comfort from it. I have met men and women like this (probably men more often) and I bet you have too. As far as these people are concerned, they have been held back by the work they do, by the grubby necessities of life, by their kids, by having to deal with you.

Such people are normally a bit fed up and dissatisfied and not much fun to deal with. They look cross. They prefer to turn away from you. They only look you full in the face to tell you that whatever you need done cannot be done.

I feel sorry for them. We are all shaped by circumstances and have far less control over our lives than we like to imagine we have.

Some capacity to accept this fact with good grace can make all the difference to whether we are miserable or tolerably happy.

You might think my revelation on the platform at Preston was not a comforting one: it meant that no matter what my circumstances, I would never have written the great Irish novel, would never have had the multitudes hanging on my every word.

I would always have lived a little life of some kind somewhere. But it comforts me, as does my little life.

Addendum: It’s easy to sneer at the internet and to say that the connections we make online are shallow. But we might be wrong.

Research in the United States, based on surveys of nearly 8,000 men and women aged 50-plus, showed that depression was almost one- third less likely among those who used social networking than among non-users, according to a report on psychcentral.com.

Social networking helps those older adults whose mobility may be reduced to keep in touch with family and friends.

Indeed, according to Nichola Adams at the University of Surrey, the internet helps older people to lead independent lives and to make better informed decisions about travel, health and so on.

A US think tank called the Pew Research Centre has found that one-third of people over 65 in the United States use social networking sites.

Researchers at the University of Illinois found that 5 per cent of people aged 70 suffer depression and this rises to 13 per cent at age 85.

The older you get, the greater the risk of loneliness and lack of emotional connection. Here, too, the internet can help.

Lots of research shows that strong social connections can protect against some of the ills of old age including dementia. Social networking via the World Wide Web can help to maintain and perhaps even create valuable social connections.

And that, unquestionably, is a major part of the good side of the internet.

For more information, go to bit.ly/surfingisgoodforyou

Padraig O’Morain (pomorain@ireland.com) is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His book, Light Mind – Mindfulness for Daily Living, is published by Veritas. His monthly mindfulness newsletter is available free by email.