When do we truly switch off and accept ourselves?

It's hard in life to believe that anything is ever good enough.
Verity LushVerity Lush
Verity Lush

We spend so much time thinking that our home could be improved, our car upgraded, or our wages increased.

We worry about our children’s exam results – could they be better?

Or our holiday – could it be more exotic?

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Are our clothes, or our televisions, or our computers the absolute best that they can be?

It might make more sense, on reflection, if we worried more about being the best that we ourselves can be.

Are we kind enough? Patient enough? Making enough effort?

Not to the extent that we put ourselves under pressure to do so, for that would defeat the object.

But maybe we’d all be that much happier if we didn’t always feel that we’re never quite ‘there’.

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It’s a positive attribute to always be striving for something, but that something could be a better level of health and fitness, as opposed to a larger level of materialism.

It’s so easy to spend life feeling that something is just out of our grasp.

We are wired to the nines anyway half the time, partly because of the lifestyles that we lead in an age of technology.

Just when you think you’ve sat down for the evening at the end of a long day, another work e-mail pings through.

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Just when you think you’re going to switch off and relax, your mind goes back to the webpage you were browsing on your phone and you pick it back up again.

Brain whirring, thoughts thinking and no real relaxation, or unplugging of ourselves.

This is a constant state of exhaustion to get swept up in.

When, these days, do we truly switch off and just accept ourselves?

Even if for only an hour a week, let alone a day.

Our 21st century lives are like pressure cookers; perhaps we need to go a little easier on ourselves?

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Maybe the size and model of the car or the TV is just fine, and we should actually relax enough to simply sit down and watch it?

Perhaps we are good enough already.

RECYCLING ARTWORK IS WHY WE CAN STILL SEE EACH OTHER

I cannot be the only parent who siphons the artwork of their youngsters to the land known as The Great Recycling Bin.

If I had not been doing this periodically for the past 11 years, then the Lush family would be buried beneath a mountain of paper scraps by now.

We would be entwined in sugar paper and old loo rolls, buried beneath cereal boxes festooned with PVA glue and other bits of general household waste that they have seen fit for construction.

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My children have caught me in the act often enough now to realise why it is we can still see each other’s heads above the 20 billion trees that they’ve turned into ‘art’.

No doubt another black mark against my mothering name.

NEW BOILER MEANS HOUSE OF LUSH IS POSITIVELY TROPICAL

We have had a new boiler fitted and I am just throwing this out there because I suspect what we had replaced may have been the oldest working boilers in existence.

Drum roll please, because they were a minimum of 35 years old.

Anyone like to see my antique boilers and raise me a copper pot and open flame?

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If you’re considering having such a vintage (that’s the on-trend term for anything old still isn’t it? Or perhaps retro? Or better yet, maybe they were artisan boilers?!) piece replaced, then I urge you to do so.

The difference (ie, actual heat from the radiators) has been astounding.

The House of Lush is positively tropical.

Right in time for spring to arrive.