All good things come to an end right?
Yes. Even DMA’s 3-part ‘Reasons to be Cheerful’ series!
But before we sign off and head into our European winter, we’ve been sharing notes on what has kept us cheerful during these stranger than ever months. The answer at least partly?.........Eggs.
Round the corner from my house is a bar run by my friend, Carlos. He makes the most simple, delicious, slightly runny omelettes served with a hunk of fresh bread, a beer and invariably some expletive laden chit-chat about the wider world. Despite it all, he shows up every day, fires up the kitchen and does what he does best, dispensing small bursts of joy from morning to night.
Inside DMA, every single day during lockdown and out of it, (and now back into it), our team have not only turned up. They’ve kept smiling, kept on producing great work and still cared deeply about doing the best we possibly can for our clients. This is not an ad by the way. It’s a kind of love letter: to these people that I have the very good fortune to work with.
The world has been wrangling and bickering but down at our human scale we are surrounded by small acts of kindness every day. There’s the people that cross the street to keep us socially distant (but empathetically connected), there is the plumber that came to fix my leaky tap and didn’t want to charge for his time as “we’re all in this together”, there is the lady at the supermarket checkout smiling her greeting every single time I go. She, I’m sure, sometimes doesn’t feel like it, but her smile is far more than professional gloss and is visible even through a face mask.
It is her own manifesto to optimism, a rallying cry to the simple transformative power of fewer words and more action.
Are you listening, our political class?
We all want to keep going, to make it better, - and instinctively we understand that a hearty homemade soup beats a thousand woolly words anytime.
So this good 3-part series thing is coming to an end (for now). Thanks for your comments and letting us know your own Reasons to be Cheerful over the last few weeks.
There are lots of good vibes and positive energy all around us and if we want to, we really can, in the words of the song, “feel it in my fingers, feel it in my toes”….