It’s Saturday. Earlier today I had a sudden urge to tidy and reorganise a friend’s apartment. In retrospect that first struck me as more than a little odd, but then it made me think: Why is it that often we find it easier and even enjoyable to organise and improve someone else’s life rather than our own?

I’m pretty sure it’s a widespread phenomenon (I hope so – otherwise it looks like I’ve got the dictator gene). At the risk of sounding like I’m preaching or coming from a specific religious viewpoint, I suppose that bible verse they rammed down our throats at school applies here: ‘Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?‘ Perhaps we get so used to our own faults that we turn a blind eye (no pun intended) and begin to view them as the norm from which everyone else deviates, making it challenging to identify our own gaping ‘room for improvement’ (another well-known and ultimately obvious, vague and unhelpful phrase from school). Dangerous. Perhaps sometimes we do partially recognise our own faults, which is why fully focusing on someone else’s needs not only helps that someone else but also acts as a necessary and refreshing mini-break for ourselves, allowing us the opportunity to return to our own lives with a little more of that abstract gold dust known as perspective.

And now back to sandpapering down that rather large piece of wood in my own eye; perhaps tidying my own apartment might be a practical, productive and relatively pain-free start. And in true Sesame Street style, that’s all from the letter P today folks (purely unintentional, I promise).