Human capacity

Today I have been reminded of how resilient we humans are. Terrible things can happen in our lives, things that we feel, at the time, remove all point to our lives. Yet we do usually carry on, some how getting past this awful time that we feel has blighted our lives. Real pain is not transitory, the agony and gripping horror leave their scars on us, but we do have the ability in time to put them in to perspective in the grand theme of life.

Loss and the accompanying grief are I believe our basest, darkest emotion, capable of leaving us with seemingly permanent emotional blots and holes in our lives. All losses great or small, a life, a love, a time in our lives are all capable of evoking these feelings and reminding us of those greater pains, seemingly minor things of a loss nature can refresh those deep feelings of mortal dread. Things that we would never consider as a loss, an imagined negative glance, a careless word, all reinforce our hard learned experiences and can plunge us back into those depths.

We call these dark emotions negative, implying that they are always only capable of bringing us pain, something that we can never escape from, something that we have to suffer with for the rest of our lives. Being "negative" or having "negative" thoughts is something that we must avoid at all costs, something that will only bring disaster into our lives, it will always bring us down to somewhere we don't want to be.

Why?

Evolution has given us this brain capable of feeling the darkest negative thoughts, but also capable of experiencing the brightest positive thoughts, so there must be a reason. Certainly the metaphors of darkest and lightest seem to direct us towards opposites, light and dark,  black and white, implying that there is something deeply different about them. In physics white is all the colours and black they are totally absent, they are the opposite ends of the spectrum, without them there would be no colours.

I believe emotions are the same, without the positive and negative feelings our lives would be colourless. We know that if you move from a dark room, sunlight seems so much brighter, even dazzling, and so it is with emotions. When we are in the depths of pain and grief, often seemingly positive things can be seemingly so intense that they blind us to their real joy. We become so accustomed to the gloom that things that could brighten our lives become confused and lose their positive impact, or even be perceived as just more pain. So often we can chose to live our lives in a safe comfortable greyness, the depth of which we feel we have no control over, missing the colours that the world outside our own world can bring to us.

We all have our dark places, they are personal and every ones darkest place is theirs. There is no competition, our darkest place is our darkest place. And similarly our own light is also personal. It is easy to live in the dark, I believe the ability to do it is an evolutionary essential, like pessimism it has a protective function, perhaps about saving us from some ancient dread. But it can become all too comfortable, so much so that it can prevent us from seeing the positives. We cannot expect to be able to move effortlessly from dark to light, we have to let ourselves become acclimatised, allowing ourselves to see brightening shades of grey and colours before finally being able to see our brightest place, we are not able to move seamlessly between our extremes.

I believe that we all need to be able to experience a full spectrum, a life needs dark to be able to really enjoy light, emotionally we are not colourblind whatever we might think .If we have never been truly sad how can be ever know what happiness is. They are the yin and yang of being human and like that are all part of the balance we need in our lives.

It is the hope and knowledge that we have all experienced our darkest and our lightest times that give us the hope that we can use to carry us through. I think it is this hope that gives us our resilience, that most human of capacities, millions of years in the making and one of the things that makes us stand out as a species.

Rays of hope

Today the sun crept onto the lawn. Climbed over the fence and tip toed onto the grass. The dog sighed and leaned heavily against the warm garage wall, stretched out and closed his eyes. I sat on the bench, bathed from head to toe, sighed, stretched out and closed my eyes.

The Dam breached

The Flood of Life gushes

The Hope of Renewal

Dreaming my way out of a mess

Been thinking about putting my philosophy of life, stuff and things on this blog. Wasn't sure how other people would take it, but well what does it matter so long as I enjoy it.

Which brings me to my first belief about life and stuff. Those who know me will be familiar with my healthy start to the day, I believe in a proper healthy breakfast. I always have the same, glass of water, half a pink grapefruit (the acid is just right to open my eyes), real strong coffee (to keep them open); healthy low sugar, salt and fat muesli, fresh berries, banana, skimmed milk topped with a large spoonful of selfishness. This for me is healthy living, sets me up for the day and whatever is hurled at me. As a top up I have several mugs of Earl Grey, sometimes with 2 spoons of organic selfishness (I do think that organic is best, don't you?).

You see I spent most of my life worrying about doing things just for me, didn't feel comfortable, and those around me were fond of telling me that I was the S word. So there I was saying yes to everybody I came across, then spending the rest of the time full of resentment. I practiced this at school, with my mother, partners, work, friends and children. I guess that I was just a yes man, then a resentful man followed usually an angry man; this for years was my recipe for success!!! When you don't know any better, and those who could tell you about it were either long gone or too scared to tell you; then ignorance can be a blissful state to be in. It takes a while before you notice that the faces keep changing with a monotonous regularity, and despite the obvious success of your plan you keep ending up feeling lonely. Some one told me recently they thought stubbornness was a virtue, well for me it wasn't.

Then one day I decided to do one thing just for me, can't remember what it was, probable immaterial now, but I took a risk, then another, and another, and another. Eventually everyone including me, thought I was a selfish B., but you know; it felt good. Everything I did, I did selfishly for me; bought myself a new camera, all for me; went for a walk, all for me; coordinated the Changes Meeting, all for me; went to the cinema with the wife, all for me.

Everything has to have a payoff, you have to look for it, but for me it is always there. Ultimately it's about making me feel good. It doesn't have to be conscious, in fact mostly I don't know I'm doing it, however there will be something in it for me.

It's OK to feel good about doing something nice, it's even OK to feel pride; and when you have to do things that you don't want to do, it isn't perverse to feel good about having done it. For me it's about finding the positive wherever I can, turning the negative into a valuable resource.

Oh, the "dreaming my way out of a mess", that's something else for another time.

Feeling unwell

We all know the effect physical health can have on our mental wellbeing, I know it but often forget how important this aspect is to me personally. I find myself swinging between rage, the floor, borderline mania and everyday normal existence. Why? Because I am a diabetic. I am type 2 diabetic, what used to be called most annoyingly age onset diabetes; yes, I know we now have teenagers suffering from type 2 due to modern lifestyles; and people who should know better look me in the face use the term "age onset". Suppose it seems obvious that I have age issues, but it isn't that: I just have an aversion to being judged.

Anyway, my GP decided that my medication wasn't good enough for me, nice of him. So he changed it to something different, like most meds it took a while to settle down and had a period of ups and downs with the accompanying emotional side effects. Oh, forgot to mention, my sleep pattern is severely disturbed as well. Well after 4 weeks the new meds hadn't helped at all, so we changed them again, 4 weeks later I am starting to fell ok again.

Now I've got a fluish virus, so I am back to square one

I know there is a reason why physical and mental health are so closely linked, and if this isn't double dutch, I can never work it out. I have found that my feelings can be more immediate indicator of my blood sugar levels, than a blood test. Often when feeling low or anger, the test shows my levels to be high or low. This is all after 4 years of being stable and relatively well. However it doesn't seem to work the other way round, i don't get a physical warning when I am going to feel down. It would be great to get a pain in my big toe as a warning of depression, or an itch in my nose warning of impending fireworks.

Suppose all this thinking is a result of not feeling well, and the nature of being unwell as I feel it. Very personal and unique, fearful of returning to former times, a difficult time both personally and at work.

Never seems to rain but it pours.

All a matter of taste

I was talking to someone recently about music, I've bought am MP3 player and have taken to listening whenever and to whatever I can. This is quite a change for me. I am listening right now.

Up to about 2 years ago I had no interest in music, in fact I will go so far as to say that I avoided anything to do with music. It was alien, beyond my understanding, incomprehensible, distracting noise and I had no need for it in my life. I would listen to talk radio in the car, Radio 4, but whenever that distraction turned up I would switch off, Desert Island Disks being particularly annoying. I would claim to be tone deaf, or that music was trivia not worthy of my attention. I had an awareness that maybe this was a little odd, some 5 years ago when on a counselling course we were all asked to bring in a favorite piece, and after much soul searching I had brought nothing. Friends found this odd, that during 47 years, no song or instrumental had formed an emotional attachment in my brain. "What about your first dance" I didn't; "Mums favorite" she didn't, "Your children's favorite" I didn't listen.

Home was a non music zone for my childhood (apart from the Archers signature tune), at school I dimly recollect banging a drum and tapping on a triangle (is playing the triangle called tapping?). In my teens I had the ubiquitous guitar (something to do with the opposite sex) which became dusty and binned. I had stared at my "Bert Weedon" Play with Yourself in a Day book for months but nothing resembling Music had emerged. A few years ago my wife bought me a harmonica starter set which met the same fate as Bert and Co..

What did I want music for, I had R4, it was all I wanted.

So what has changed? Certainly I can no longer imagine a life without music, it no longer distracts; it enriches and colours my life. I greedily consume, devour, digest and am nourished by music. It would be great to point to some event or turn in my life, there isn't one; but gradually over 2 years music has become very important to me.

So what music do I like?

Well there hangs the tale. I have missed 50 years; almost like a man wakening from a coma; the world is a strange place . Add to those 50 several hundred more that preceeded my birth which I label mostly as classical (sorry for the generalisation and a lot of the 20th century).

So what music do I like?

This is what is in my MP3 player

Adam Faith, Amimals, Arctic Monkeys, Beethoven, Billy Idol, Blondie, Carlos Santana, Cream, Dogs Die in Hot Cars, Eagles, Fear Factory (blame a friendly beaver!!!), Kaiser Cheifs, Lonnie Donegan, Michael Crawford, Pavarotti, Paul McCartney, Pink Floyd, Robbie Williams, Sinaed O'Connor, The Streets, Talking Heads and The Verve.

I have to try it all. Hope I don't find a genre, what might I miss if I do?