Mary, age three, is given an ice cream. She smiles broadly and greedily slurps it into her - spreading it liberally all over her happy face as she does so.

John, eighteen, is getting ready to take the lovely girl he met last night at the local disco to see that latest horror movie. He hopes that she'll like it and will be suitably scared so that he has an excuse to hold her hand.

Trudy, twenty-three, is getting married tomorrow. She feels nervous, scared, excited and fearful that the day will never come or that something really horrid will go wrong at the last moment.

Richard, thirty-one, has a dinner date with his boss. He feels sure that he is about to be offered the managership of that new branch which everyone has been talking about for the past few months. But, of course, it might not be that at all.

Hilda, forty something, will be free tomorrow. After all that indecision, all that worrying, she will be really free at last. She wonders what it will be like, of course, but is confident that she has made the right decision. Or has she?

Dirk, rising sixty, stands on the ridge and looks over the valley which has been his home for longer than he can remember. He has been looking forward to retirement for such a long while. He sighs. He knows it will be wonderful. But he didn't want it to happen this way.

It's interesting, isn't it, that when one gets past the innocence of childhood, excitement always seems to be tinged with some not terribly welcome emotion. It's as though something lurks in the wings intent on spoiling this wonderful moment for us.

But there isn't anything lurking in the wings. Nor does fate have sinister motives. It's all in our mind. We've learnt to be cautious. We've learnt to tread wearily. We've learnt that things don't always work out exactly as we plan.

Then what can we do? We certainly can't go back to having the simple trust of a three year-old sucking ice cream. We're much too sophisticated and worldly wise for that.

We can learn to accept a disappointment, not as the end of the world, but as a challenge to stride out in some other direction, to see an opportunity where we first saw disaster, to make the best of things and try something else.

I remember being told this as a youngster: If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.

And how I hated being told that. It all seemed so terribly difficult. But it isn't really. It's a matter of keeping a sense of proportion. After all, most of life's little disappointments are just that - little disappointments.

And we don't intend letting ourselves be beaten by them, do we?

- Warren Roff-Marsh