Wishing your life away

There's a slightly irritating expression going round nowadays, when people say "I wish" or "You wish"

There's a slightly irritating expression going round nowadays, when people say "I wish" or "You wish". Suppose someone tells you you're looking great, you must have lost a stone and you answer "I wish" meaning, I suppose, you only wish that it were so.

Or else, you say in a lovely positive way that you're going to de-clutter your house and have lots of lovely empty creative space all around you, and someone says in a down-putting way "You wish", meaning in your dreams you're going to do this.

I think it's because I never liked the whole concept of wishing for things that I dislike this expression. You see, what people usually wish for is something they either have or haven't power to get. If they have power to get it then they should try to have it, and if they don't, they should accept that.

When I was 14 I wished I was smaller: not just thinner, but that I was actually five foot one inch and that people would pat me on the head and bring me to the front of things where I could see instead of leaving me at the back because I could see over everyone.

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And I used to read about people who were eight foot tall who had mighty operations to shorten their spines or their legs or whatever, and I wondered could I get one. I saved three pounds towards one once, which was mighty saving in those days.

I told my mother that if I was small and had curly hair I'd be the happiest person in the world. She said she could get me curly hair anyway and on Saturday afternoon we went down to a hairdresser in Dun Laoghaire and with a lot of torture I had a fairly unwise perm.

But she said there was nothing any of us could do about being tall except possibly pull our shoulders back and enjoy it. Which of course I didn't do.

And then when I was 17 I wished I had a duffel coat. That was possible - difficult, but possible. It meant living on half my pocket money for two terms, and taking sandwiches to town for lunch, but I got my wish.

When I was 18 I wished that a fellow loved me like I loved him, but he didn't, and there were no witch doctors with magic potions, so instead I wished that the girl that he did appear to love would emigrate or fail her exams at UCD or both, but neither of those things happened either.

There was a lot of wishing that year, I remember. I was in France, very unhappy on an exchange visit, but pretending to my kind parents who had paid for it all that it was great. I wished fervently that Monsieur would stop pinching me black and blue and he didn't stop. I also wished that Ballymoss would win the Arc de Triomphe Stakes at Longchamps because for some reason, bad communication with my hopeless French or something, the whole family I was staying with seemed to think I had the inside track on this racing business and they were all putting everything they had on him. And Ballymoss did win, God bless his or her little flanks.

But my wishing did no good in either case, they were just things that happened. Monsieur would have pinched the flesh off anyone who came into that house and Ballymoss didn't know that the fortunes of the whole of Compiegne and its environs were dependent on it winning that particular race.

And when I began teaching I used to wish that there would be no smart alec kids in the class who would know more than I did. But there was a solution to that, you had to prepare your lessons properly and get to know more than they did, so that wish could be granted.

There was no point in just wishing, like a lot of people did, that cigarettes were cheaper, that there was no school on Saturday mornings, that teachers were better paid, that there were more theatres in Dublin, that there wasn't so much poverty and inequality all around us. You could either try to change it or you shut up about it.

If I wasn't prepared to become a militant member of the Association of Secondary Teachers of Ireland, attend all the Easter conferences and march with a placard, then the alternative was to make do with what they paid us or work extra hours and get more.

If I truly cared about the unequal chance people got in life, then the answer was to do something, join a political party, stand for office, raise money for causes, help out on a practical level, or give it a rest and stop belly-aching about it.

Oh very stern, Maeve, someone said to me, when I said how much I hated all the wishing that's going on around me, very puritan, highly cut and dried. Why don't you allow people the indulgence of wanting the world to be a better place and their own lives to be marginally improved without insisting they rush out with a 10-point plan?

I suppose it's because people often think wishing is enough.

If they say over and over that the litter problem is out of hand and they wish so much that there was some proper recycling, they think they have somehow discharged their responsibility.

But they haven't really, I think that they have only added to the bleating.

In my stern book they would do much better to get a bottle-bank or paper collection going, and organise communal trips to the dump.

Through community councils and parish groups' local newsletters they could campaign for less wrappings in supermarkets and shops, more litter bins in the streets, higher pay for road cleaners and through the schools they could plead for more programmes on awareness of such problems. If all the parents in a school demanded it, you can be quite sure the school would provide it.

One parent concerned about litter is a well-meaning crank, 200 of them means the job gets done. But just wishing the place was better means only joining the head-shaking, finger-wagging brigade who have changed nothing over the generations. I'd honestly prefer the people who just stepped over or walked around great mounds of litter having decided that it's not their problem and therefore they are not going to mouth off useless platitudes about it.

What do you wish right now? Go on. This Saturday.

I bet you can divide your wishes into the things you can do some little thing about and those you can't. Better weather? No. But you could get wellies and a rain hat and go out all the same. To be thinner? Yes. You eat less. Win the Lotto? No, but you could think that if you didn't buy the weekly ticket you would save £52 by this day next year. Find a life mate? Yes, you could stop wishing and go out to places where such a person might lurk, such as dating agencies, pubs and the dogtrack. Change your spouse's way of going on? No. You have to change your own way of reacting to it or leave the spouse.

None of this is very new, nor indeed very puritan at all. It's all there in a prayer, apparently a grand prayer about wanting to accept what can't be changed, change what can and the wisdom to know the difference between the two. Now once you've taken that on board then you'll stop all this endless fruitless wishing. Won't you?