This was the view that greeted us when we looked through our old and very tatty kitchen window, the old oil tank for the central heating system. We never used the system, firstly because it was so old and dilapidated it didn’t work, and secondly because there was no point in having it repaired because we didn’t have the four thousand euros for the oil every year!

People said to us that we should go back to the Notaire (think French Solicitor ) and lodge a complaint against the farmer who had sold us the house, because he had said it was a working system; this would be the same farmer that owns all the fields around us and could easily make life difficult for us, and we decided that what was the point in arguing over a heating system we were never going to use. It got me thinking….

I have always been the kind of girl that came out fighting, nothing would beat me, because I wouldn’t let it. I am not going to say that my strength did not enable me to come through some of the most difficult times of my life, mostly when I felt abandoned and alone, and I would not have survived without my fighting instinct then; as M Scott Peck explains in ‘The Road Less Travelled’ people with strong personalities are ‘blessed’, but, and there is a but, it is like having the equivalent of ten strong horses in your back yard and trying to control them. Living here has enabled me to do that.

It has given me space, space from people, space from life, with nature all around me. It has given me time to re the Tao Te Ching, and now Deepak Chopra, and it has given me time to contemplate what I have read and understand it. I understand that to come out fighting may get you what you want, but exhausts you in the process; and I understand that you can achieve the same result most times without fighting at all; or you may even decide that you just don’t care enough.

So back to the oil tank, that was taking up a lot of room in our chemin, where we could put another log store. Now talk about life showing you the way, earlier in the week two scrap metal merchants arrived unexpectedly and asked if we had anything they could take; Rich seized the opportunity and offered them the very heavy, and impossible to move oil tank. So out came a huge chain from their big truck and it was tied around the tank, and they pulled, and they pulled, and the tank would not budge! They all decided it was best to leave it when up came the farmer, the farmer who sold us the house, in his gigantic tractor; he jumped down spoke to Rich and without any further discussion lifted the oil tank out of it’s resting place and plonked it onto their truck. Simples!

This is my view from my dilapidated window now

It proves my point, better to be friends than enemies, you don’t always have to do battle; would the farmer have helped us if we had fought him about something that did not matter? I think not.

Choose your battles wisely, and even then go away and think about them.

Look out for more blogs, more changes are on their way….

Moisy