Bernard O'Shea: My granny's three simple rules for life still work today

One of them was 'Worry about tomorrow, tomorrow' — and of course she was 100% right

'Go to bed and cover your head and don’t get up until Monday' isn’t the worst strategy for my always-on 24/7 brain. File picture: iStock

I was driving home last week and popped into my mother’s house in Laois.

It’s a typical Irish rural house. It was built by my great-uncle 120 years ago. It was then a council house. The council gave you the bricks and mortar, and you built it.

Every house on the road has had bits and pieces added onto it. You see the same pattern all over the country: Cottage, followed by an acre of land, followed by another cottage, and another acre of land.

My grandfather was a gardener, and my mother always said that the small acre was continuously full of runner beans, potatoes, tomatoes, and anything he could plant. He died in the 1960s, and my granny was left with three small children to rear.

She lived with us: My mum and dad, me, and my three older sisters, all in that small house. It’s still a busy place, as we’re constantly in and out, but, looking back, it seems hard to think we all lived there at the same time.

I remember massive rows over the telly, even though we only had the two stations. But, for some reason, on that wet Midlands day last week, I remembered my granny.

My sister said jokingly: “Remember, granny would say to you if there was anything wrong, ‘Go to bed, cover your head, and don’t get up until Monday’.” It was her 100% proof solution to everything. Little did she know it probably is one of the most practical things to do sometimes.

Sure, lots of online neo-Stoics will say face your problems head-on, and any decent psychologist will definitely say that burying your head in the sand is a terrible way to deal with life issues, but there is truth to it.

If you’re like me and cannot leave anything alone, it’s sometimes best to back off and give things time. But I want immediate life-solving answers. I want every issue in my life sorted ASAP. I cannot live in the ‘I dunno’ zone. So, ‘Go to bed and cover your head and don’t get up until Monday’ isn’t the worst strategy for my always-on, 24/7 brain.

The advice wasn’t my granny’s version of mindfulness, either. She was in no way trying to be mindful. It’s easy to look back with our modern attitude and think, almost condescendingly, that they were a generation of philosophers. Still, in truth, the vast majority of my grandmother’s generation didn’t have that luxury.

Her other two sayings were, ‘Did you have your dinner?’ And ‘Worry about tomorrow, tomorrow’.

I remember loudly saying, with vigour: “Jesus, Granny, I told you a thousand times, I had my dinner.” She was obsessed with asking you. Her central thought was if you had a meal and a roof over your head, you were OK. Her idea of food was sustenance. 

Her generation was conscious that a dinner wasn’t a daily given. I get that now, but as a 10-year-old boy, I would be constantly annoyed when she’d ask me, “Will I make you toast?” “What time are you having your tea?” “Do you like peas? Will I put on some peas?”

She introduced me to coffee. We used to buy those massive jars of Maxwell House, and she’d make me cups in the morning before school. I was four or five when I first started drinking coffee, and I still love it.

My wife and children think it’s mad that I was so young when I was introduced to what became my ongoing caffeinated romance. I haven’t told them yet that if there was anything wrong with us, and I mean anything, a small bottle of Hennessy brandy would come out sometimes, mixed with milk of magnesia. It’s a cocktail I wouldn’t have reckoned, but the brandy? I still like a tipple.

But the one saying that stuck with me, that I wish I could put into practice, was, ‘Worry about tomorrow, tomorrow’. I can see her now saying to one of the sisters: “There’s no point worrying about it now”, followed by, “You won’t have time to worry about it when it happens.” So true.

With the Stoic revival over the last decade, you’ll probably have seen the Seneca quote pop up on your feed: “He suffers more than necessary, who suffers before it is necessary.”

Now, I don’t want to start a classical studies fight night, but I think my granny’s saying cuts through a lot more quickly. Of course, she was 100% right: There is no point in wasting your time on Earth thinking about something that will never happen, but we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t. Still, it was a comfort to hear her say it.

Standing in my mother’s house last week brought it all back. The house has changed: The acre isn’t feeding a family anymore, and nobody is fighting over two television stations. We have more choices, more comfort, and more information than my granny ever had.

But I’m not sure all that information has made us any better today. She never thought she was passing on a philosophy. She was just getting on with things.