You enter the bar. You perform a reconnaissance of the place, just like the Terminator. (Yes, it’s an old reference.) You approach a table next to the window. The only one that still has five chairs around it. You sit. Your friends sit down. At the same time, you and the person opposite you place your elbows on the table. So far, so good. After a few minutes, that friend gets up because he wants to take off his coat. And you spill the glass you were about to raise to your mouth. The table is wobbly. Again.

There are days during which you find yourself with 5, 6, even 20 wobbly tables. Lately I feel like I’m always sitting at one. Everything seems fine until one little thing suddenly arises and messes everything up. They are not big problems; we have more than enough of them to overwhelm us. I mean your day to day life. A complication can end up spoiling what could have been a perfect day. There are no perfect days, you tell me. Maybe not, but there are days that could have been normal if it hadn’t been for something stupid that turns them into a nightmare.

The wobbly table can be any everyday invader into your world. Maybe you wake up and you don’t have running water. Perhaps your computer crashes. Someone you appreciate badmouths you. The seat of your trousers rips when you’re out in public and you don’t realise. Yes, unfortunately it happened to me.

The most that the majority of us can hope for, very occasionally, is perfect moments, not entire days. And we cling to those little rays of light to get through the day, or the year, given that those rays are often conspicuous by their absence.

I have been lucky enough to experience a perfect moment. And I will never forget that feeling of pure joy. Without any cloud on the horizon, without any doubt in your head, without anything more in your mind than that moment, you feel it, experience it, enjoy it, you take a mental photo with the intention of keeping it forever. Actually, writing this, I now remember three. (In my defence, I usually forget to bring along my mental camera, and then I have to try to reconstruct the moment, which never works.) And no, I’m not going to tell you what those pearls of my life were. If I recount them, the bubble will burst, and I will end up soaked from head to toe and the damned wobbly table will have messed everything up again.

The dilemma for me is: how much should I let myself be affected by the day’s setbacks? Don’t get me wrong, I continue to function as a human being (more or less) despite the obstacles that may arise. Usually. But what if they are signs? What if I should listen to them? I believe, (and hope), that the universe is not working against me. More than that, who am I, and who are we to think that the random things that happen have anything to do with us? Navel-gazing is a slippery slope. It would be quite fun, though, and would make life easier, to think of Zeus arbitrarily tossing around thunderbolts to mess up our mere mortal lives and that could be an explanation we could turn to in our wobbly table moments.

Since I’ve written all this, I wonder, (apart from whether I’m totally crazy): Could it be the floor and not the table? In other words, could it be our foundations, principles, that are wobbly, and we, cowardly, blame the innocent table for all that befalls us? After all, she’s only trying to do her job under difficult circumstances.

In short, we are responsible for ourselves. The things that happen to us happen just because. If we could go back in time, we would live exactly the same way, because the information we had up to that point would be the same. We would make the same decisions that we have made because we are a sum of experiences, events and upbringing. We can’t blame the wobbly table or anything else. The only thing we can do is ignore the silly signs, ignore the small obstacles, fight for what is ours here and now, because the future is not done. What happened today should not affect the promise of tomorrow. Our destiny’s in our hands, grubby though they may be.

Tomorrow awaits.

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Episode Twelve Resolutions