Twenty Four little Hours

What a difference a change in perspective makes. … I’m back to my usual self. … Haemorrhaging energy and creativity. I know some folks find me ‘too much’ or ‘odd’ … but I’m okay with that. I don’t need anyone but me to like me. … and if a few others do too … all’s the better. What a bonus. (you know who you are … and yes this really is about you )

Increasingly I’m seeing the difference between being unhappy and being stuck in an unhappy moment in time. Everyone gets down in the dumps. If we didn’t experience the lows how could we savour the highs as someone no doubt famous and very clever once wrote. But what I’m noticing is the large numbers of individuals who have become entrenched in a miserable time in their lives, and then go on to re-created situations and events in order to relive that emotion. So much so that they have made themselves a victim in their own lives, feeling persecuted and put upon … without ever realising that it is them who are keeping themselves enslaved in this manner.

Worse still, my blinkers are off and I’m beginning to realise how many of these people there are in the world….. and more significantly around me. Amongst them is a close member of my family who has been draining my veracity for two years now. … my love for him has found me putting my own life on hold. … I’ve been stuck, suspended in his misery. I have been keeping him company, validating his depression and apathy and I failed to realise how much energy this has been taking out of me. Following being recently forced into change and my subsequent decision to embrace it with positively … I feel like sleeping beauty having awoken refreshed for a dark dreamless sleep. Change is inevitable. … and it feels good!

Serendipity? I’m not sure but last night I received a call from him and I refused to talk about our childhood and the usual misfortunes that are always discussed. I said that I realised that he was feeling very low, but the excuses and reasons for his outlook were wearing thin. I continued, we are no longer children, subjected to the whims of others, and whilst we may or may not have reason enough to justify feeling a myriad of malign emotions, we are old enough to make the choice to continue treading the same old path or just make better decisions. Unfortunate things just happen and we cannot erase them. Simple as! He ended our conversations saying ‘thanks, I feel better’…. I smiled.

and then…. I got an email this afternoon….

In a message dated 17/02/2008 13:37:34 GMT Standard Time, xxxx writes:
I have a load of shit to deal with Ellie. I vanish sometimes. I’m sorry.
When I like someone too much I run away
Would you understand that?
Could you?

My reply would ordinarily be ‘yes yes, but of course’….. for I am the sickly accepting sort, no angst with life and those living it around me. But I’ve been confused, out dated in my ethos that life should be lead without causing harm unto others and that I have a duty as a human to reach out where I can to my fellow beings, so that they can know a kindness that can restore love.

I wouldn’t want to change my belief that people matter, however, I do myself and others in turn a great disservice if I do not trust in them to have the ability to make their own lives good. By shouldering no more than my own responsibilities and giving what support I can out of love and not a false sense of obligation, I can be limitless in my bounty knowing that it was always be replenished.

My reply?

Life happens…. We all deal with ’shit’….. life is meant to be full of peaks n troughs … each of us have a choice — to surrender to the river of life and be exhilarated by the journey or cling to the riverbank too terrified to let go. No one can change your perception except you. Do I understand? … oh yes. Will I wait around? … unlikely. I’m a free spirit who refuses to shackle themselves to others. Either we swim along together or we don’t. I’m going forward … are you?

The question remains now. … will they understand?

All Change!

Things are changing for me, some are my own doing and others are out with my control and I’m feeling somewhat at sea. Then I found this …. and the future seems remarkably easy now.

“Why can’t we get all the people together in the world that we really like and then just stay together? I guess that wouldn’t work. Someone would leave. Someone always leaves. Then we would have to say good-bye. I hate good-byes. I know what I need. I need more hellos.”

Charles M. Schulz

New Year - Good Times?

“….As market days are wearing late,
And folk begin to tak the gate,
While we sit bousing at the nappy,
An’ getting fou and unco happy,
We think na on the lang Scots miles…”

Following the Christmas celebrations, I was thinking about the run up to new year and the traditional Scottish link between Hogmanay and booze and it got me wondering how many folks indulge in a wee spot o’ mind altering substances (not just at this time of year but throughout the year). I thought about the different people using different methods - food, sport, booze, drugs, meditating, bodybuilding, sex, running and any other mood altering activity. If so many people are using one or other of these methods to get away or opt out of their normal hum drum life… is anybody actually having the great life we’re all not living?

Perhaps a ‘good life’ is nothing more than a big fat lie, like Santa. Each of us helping to build a delusion that a good life is possible… and each of us buy into it out of desperation that better times are just around the corner. What if this illusion of more, is as good as it gets? To admit that there is nothing really that great about life after all would be so depressing that we’d might be left with the conclusion that reading any meaning and purpose into human life is absurd, and who would want to raise a glass to that?

Happy New Year Readers
Good Luck with your Adventures in 2008!

Fire Down Below

Not my usual topic for blogging but its fair to say I’ve had something on my mind this past week. It would seem that for the first time ever it has affected my ability to think with clarity and do my job. I’m ashamed to say that in the embarrassing stakes it outranks the ‘inside-out top’ scenario by a long way. It happened like this…

I was beavering away trying to get my desk cleared as quickly as possible, the sooner the better as I’d be on holiday the moment I could see the wood under the paper mountain. Phone rings…. ‘hello’… ‘oh, hello, I’ve been trying to contact you. You don’t know me by we know a mutual acquaintance. Sandy’ ‘ah, yes. I know Sandy. How is he?’… blah blah blah - pleasantries pleasantries pleasantries…. ‘So, anyway. I was rather hoping to meet with you to discuss a joint project’… ‘Oh, I’m so sorry I don’t have a free minute before the end of the year’ … silence…. ‘What about on my way home today?’…

I caved….

Resigned but determined to keeping it short and to the point I did some homework before he arrived. Prepared with my ‘wish’ list ready to negotiate I welcomed him into the office. That’s when it happened. I found my thoughts wandering…. oh so wandering. He wasn’t particularly handsome but with every uttered word I was finding him more and more appealing… EEK… here I was trying to sound intelligent, erudite and lucid but failing miserably to keep my guttural thoughts checked!!

He asked if I was okay… I muttered something about trying to remember the ingredient that one of my boys needed for home economics the next day. Not sure he believed me.. truth be told he’d have to have been blind and deaf to not realise why I was unsettled… oh the shame - the shame of it all!!!

Needless to say I stuttered like a buffoon, simpered like an overzealous Labrador and agreed to FAR more than I would have ordinarily done. All because i couldn’t rise about my hormones. Now I face the task of extracting myself and my project from the terms I’ve signed up to… Any good lawyers out there? Preferably, unattached, fiscally sound and willing to embrace primal urges as they happen…

Who Stole Christmas Cheer?

Got my first Christmas card this weekend and it spun me into a tizzy… I’m not organised at all. So I trotted off to face the big bright lights of the city and after two hours of soul destroying indecency I returned home empty handed. Where did all the Christmas spirit go?

After enduring ignorant people stepping in front of me, people causing mayhem in an attempt to secure the last car park space and much ‘tutting’ at the sales assistant, the final straw came when I overheard a young lady talking to her friend saying ‘that’ll do for so-in-so’… as she picked up items from the stores gift selection. It made me think of how many presents will be opened on Christmas morning to bring disappointment or at best disinterest, simply because they were bought for the sake of giving rather than with the receiver in mind… I felt so sad. I always thought that the joy of Christmas was in the giving of gifts, but it would seem ‘not today’.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not really religious but I do try to keep the real sentiment of Christmas in mind… I mean I know that the X in Xmas comes from the Greek word ‘Chi’ which means Christ, so technically its okay to shorten ‘Christmas’ to ‘Xmas’… but I feel I’m not Greek so I should stick to keeping the Christ in Christmas, even if this means my hand gets cramp writing it into so many cards. I think it’s important.

I mean, if the magic of Christmas was to be swallowed up by mean-spirited shallowness it’s hard to imagine anything else keeping acts of kindness and human decency alive. Its only having lived thro’ eleven and a half months of disrespect, road enraged selfishness that you realise every one of us ‘needs’ Christmas to keep up the delusion that our lives are actually beautiful. Mebbe it’s not the parcels around the tree that is the real gift at Christmas, but perhaps it’s this realisation that humans can sometimes be selfless that is precious.

Worst kind of Masquerade

Nothing can stay the same
Change shall always come
To sweep away the old ways
So the new may be begun

Wind of subtle time’s breath
Born on tides do move
What once was monumental
Down unto a hollowed groove

I look to where your hand
Has made my own feel worn
To see tissue paper thoughts
Squeezed until confetti torn

Dreams of pea green boats
Will remain locked in my head
A secret world of harmony
A companion in your stead

In hurt I cannot wish you ill
This day was bound to come
Dismiss regrets for snapshots
Let my reasons seek the sun

I will not deny a hankering
For more memories to share
But I realise time has caught us
And I must accept to leave it there…..

The Week that Was

It has been funny over this last week…

I had an important meeting with some councillors and prior to me leaving the house I’d been decorating, so I thought I’d spruce myself up and jumped into the shower… all well and good right up till half way into Aberdeen city I noticed I’d put my top on inside out!! Eek!!… Shock — embarrassment (yes I noticed my error whilst chattering on the phone to a friend, why are we never completely alone when these things happen?) — Panic (amidst the chuckling).. Where could I change? Did I have time to stop and change? How would I persuade council members to favour my project and trust me with large sums of money when I couldn’t even dress myself properly!

I was almost at the council chambers when I noticed a club house that sits in the middle of a town park… so swinging the car into its car park… I legged it to the main entrance…now it gets weird.. okay mebbe weirder!..

The front doors were locked; I could see the mortise - but….. it was locked with the doors still open!… So I snuck inside… the place was in darkness, the alarms were going off…. and I couldn’t see a soul… I danced briefly around the reception area waiting for someone to pounce out at me and demand to know why I was there…my consciousness of lack of time swelled my panic so I deciding not to hang around but to dive into the ladies toilets and sort my top… which I did…

I left the building in the same state I found it and jumped back into my car… with only five minutes spare. It wasn’t until I was back driving that I thought ‘did I set off the alarms’?… ‘mebbe the door was supposed to be locked after all’… eek…. I might’ve entered a building without permission!! Perhaps as I type I’m really a stowaway ignorant criminal……

Now…. whilst this is a tale amongst many in the narrative that is my life, what is the point in these happening if you have no one to share them with… Everyone I’ve ever encountered has been judged by me as either a ‘drain’ or a ‘radiator’…. This week I have to get used to missing the warmth of a particular radiator… it switched off without warning but the trouble with human radiators is that there isn’t a workman I can call to reinstate the heat…

The only comfort I’m left with is my belief that each of us are not an identity that exists independently… even if it appears like that. That indeed we are simply the basis of our imputation, without that concept we are dependent upon that imputation and the naming and labelling of it… so I see the radiator and I as being interdependent…. and that brings its own heat and love.