I don’t know if it’s a start of the year thing, but this week I’ve been experiencing some strange psychological phenomena. For example, on Wednesday evening I went to my local chippy to get dinner and found it shut. That wasn’t the strange part – they often go back to Turkey for the month of January – so I walked away and focused instead on making a sausage sandwich. That’s not particularly noteworthy either, but wait. It gets better.
I thought I had forgotten all about it until today, when I drove past another chip shop (an open one) at 11.55am and felt a powerful compulsion to have saveloy and chips for lunch. (Stick with this, it gets better.) I never usually think about lunch until 1pm, so I knew something was up. This was a Pavlovian response of epic proportions and I knew I had to act on it. It felt like unfinished business. I was denied my chips on Wednesday night and I thought I was fine with it, but somewhere in my psyche, unbeknownst to me, I had not let it go. I knew, subconsciously, that I would get my chips eventually.
This same word cropped up on Thursday morning, when I was waiting to turn on to the main road at the bottom of my road and was kept waiting by an inordinately long stream of traffic. Trouble on the M25 probably. My mental gyroscope, which spins to the rhythm of minimal hold-ups at the bottom of my road, began to whirr like a dying bluebottle. I nearly pulled out in front of a dust cart, just to preserve the rhythm of life. I had to have a word with myself. Calm down. Be patient. This too shall pass.
Eventually, I was able to go on my way and I spent the rest of the journey musing on the way everything comes to pass eventually, so just sit back, shift into neutral and wait patiently. You find yourself in a five-mile tailback on the M6 and it feels like time could end and you could die there, but you know that time never ends and you will reach your destination eventually. With a little mental adjustment, a traffic jam becomes a rare opportunity to be still and do nothing.
Brian Adams gets to number one and you feel like you might have to spend the rest of your life listening to (Everything I Do) I Do It for You, but you know deep down that he will get knocked off the top spot by U2 eventually. With a little mental adjustment, prolonged torture becomes an overtight pair of pants that you will one day have the ecstacy of removing.
And as I shifted into neutral and mused on these truths, I thought what a strange word ‘eventually’ is, when you stop and think about it, which you have plenty of time to do when you find yourself in the sort of interminable situations described above. I mean, what’s it got to do with events?
The thing is, its meaning has changed. In the 1600s, when we first picked it up from the French, it meant ‘to do with events’. Simple as that. And by ‘events’ we didn’t mean The Galleon Show at Earls Court or The Ideal Castle Exhibition at Olympia, we just meant things that happen, in particular a consequence. It took until the 19th century for this to evolve into ‘if you wait long enough’, as we use it today, but it got there in the end.
The beauty of the word ‘eventually’ is that it’s a reminder that everything comes to pass if you wait long enough. Nothing lasts forever; not traffic, not pain, not Pep Guardiola, not even this.
And that’s a comforting thought. But not as comforting as a saveloy and chips on an early Friday lunch time. Yum!
