Kernel of real hope

Life, like history, repeats itself. Like everybody else, I make mistakes.

- IT CAME TO MIND | MANISH NANDY

The annoying thing is that I seem to make the same mistakes more than once. I am not foolish or perverse, but I keep repeating the same error. I keep misplacing my keys or my glasses and search them for hours. I look at the city traffic and tell myself, "It is silly to drive fast in this chaos," and then, an hour later, find myself driving pell-mell. I resolve to stay cool and not be bothered by trifles and get hot under the collar when my daughter does not call the morning of my birthday. I get irritated when a ham-handed waiter drops a dripping slice of lasagna in my lap precisely the night I am having dinner with someone special who said Yes after twenty No's.

Why do the bad things have to recur with such regularity instead of the good things? I won the raffle for a swanky dinner-for-four at Waldorf Astoria one year. Only once. No raffle since then has got me even a whistle. I had an idyllic week in a beachside cottage six years ago and went back two years later, only to encounter torrential rain and a plumbing disaster.