Philip Larkin wrote that ‘days are where we live’. Even in the bleakest of times, there are things you can do to improve yours. Former children’s laureate Rosen has some suggestions …
It hardly needs saying but I’ll say it anyway: we live in hard times. Things that some of us thought could and should have been solved haven’t been solved. Things that some of us thought would show signs of progress haven’t progressed. In many ways, wherever we look – locally, nationally or globally – there are things that have got worse. I don’t need to list them.
I’m going to make a big claim: we can’t do anything about the things that bring us down if we are oppressed and depressed by them. We have to have hope. We need to be hopeful creatures in order to live. No matter how much events seem to point towards despair, telling us to be pessimistic, I think we have to find strategies and techniques to be hopeful. In spite of everything, we have to find reasons to go on. As someone once put it in a book, “We can’t go over it, we can’t go under it, we’ve got to go through it.”