The 'if only' chorus

I woke up in the early hours of this morning to hear rain on the corrugated iron roof and thought only of the almost dry laundry on the clothesline. Once it was in I drifted back to sleep, waking near nine. Just before ten the phone rang.
‘It’s the firewood man here. Your wood is going to be a bit wet when we deliver it today. Is that OK?’
Damn! The blasted firewood. I hadn’t made the connection that as they are gathering it from the forest it would have gotten wet in the rain overnight. After almost a month of sunny days I’d assumed today would be another one.
‘Let me think about it and I’ll ring you back,’ I said, then hung up feeling disgruntled.

The mental chorus started.
‘If only I had ordered it on Monday like I intended to, I would have a garage full of dry wood now. If only I hadn’t gone to Hamilton yesterday I would have beaten the rain. If only I’d been just one day earlier. Why didn’t I ring on Monday?’
Another voice, sounding wryly amused, chimed in.
‘Counter factual thinking,’ was all it said.
This is the wonderful piece of jargon experimental psychologists have come up with to describe what those of us outside the laboratory would call ‘if only’ or ‘might have been’ thinking. It simply means that what you are thinking is counter to fact – that it does not accord with reality. I think it must be fun to be an experimental psychologist, spending hours coming up with counterintuitive terms to describe phenomena that already have everyday labels, to confuse the rest of us.

I find it helpful to say these words – ‘counter factual thinking’ – to myself. It reminds me that the facts are the facts, however little I like them. Lying in bed feeling grumpy and hard done by I said to myself ‘Now is now.’ I have the circumstances that exist right now to deal with. I can’t change a thing by saying ‘if only’ or beating myself up. In situations like this I sometimes look at my watch or cell phone and say to myself ‘what time is it?’ When I answer ’10.19am’ or whatever, I then ask ‘can I change anything that happened before this moment?’ The answer to that question is clear, so then I get on with dealing with what is with much less mental noise. Today I have breakfast, as I never think well on an empty stomach, then ring back and establish that some of the wood is dry. That’s all I need to light a fire to start drying the rest of the wood, so I tell them to go ahead and deliver it. It turns out to be a complete lie (as does their assurance that ‘the wood is dry on the inside’) but by the time I discover this I’m well into coping with what is happening now, the ‘if only’ chorus silenced. Now is now and in the now that is I light a fire and start the mammoth task of drying two cubic metres of wet firewood.