Counting the little serviettes

You need to lighten up.

Life is heavy enough,” my friend tells me under my vine after our fourth glass (my self-imposed booze ban is out the window).

My hunched shoulders instantly straighten. He’s right. My life is good.

I have abundance…

Well, oldest will argue that getting a serviette or three when you’re low on toilet paper isn’t exactly abundance – but it is.

For me, in any case. I can’t just shake it off like you, I have to drip-dry. So yes, thank you, universe, for sending four serviettes.

And my mind goes back to the psychic I couldn’t afford to map a future path for me hardly four serviettes ago.

“Just chant for 21 days: whatever I want and need, I have in abundance,” was his free advice when I cancelled.

I did chant it. I even believed it – but now I know: you have to count the little serviettes. They count. Big time.
Like running out of good coffee and refusing to touch the little emergency tin of Ricoffy just before pay day, you find a hidden pack of teabags.

Good tea. Not the bush kind contaminated with bat shit. Abundance.

The empty fridge still holds one carrot and a green pepper from the days when we were flush. And isn’t there still a big pack of spaghetti in the corner of the bare pantry cupboard?

We dine like kings with a sprinkle of the last bit of olive oil – abundance.

I find two blue notes hidden (why, I wonder?) in a book I picked up again after months of ignoring it.

Petrol is sorted for a week and, bonus, I discover Margaret Atwood’s powerful words again. Forget petrol – not that I’m not thanking the universe – that is my kind of abundance.

Or maybe simply small blessings. Finding a two-ingredient roti recipe online when the bread bin is bare changes your life. For a week or two we have roti, wraps if you roll it thicker and even vetkoek if you go big.

So I ching-ching my friend and thank him.

He is right. Life is tough, but we need to count the little blessings the universe throws at us.

And he is one – maybe my biggest.