Nimue Brown's Blog, page 342

More than two sides to every story

‘There are two sides to every story’ is one of those statements which, at first glance looks like wisdom, but in practice causes all kinds of problems. Here’s why…

It assumes both sides are equally true. This is the case sometimes, but it’s not always the case. If someone is lying, ignoring the differences between stories in this way allows the liar to get away with whatever they’ve done and leaves the honest person exposed and unsupported.

There are often, perhaps usually more than two sides to any given situation. Often it’s only when we start looking at the other facets of a story that the whole becomes more apparent. The trunk and the tail are both part of the truth that is an elephant, but without seeing the big grey bit in the middle, you aren’t going to understand what you’ve got in the room.

Reducing a story to two sides can be used to give a false sense of validation to one version of truth. This is especially popular in politics where the two options are ‘my way or certain doom’ and too often we don’t even consider that alternatives might exist.

Some things are facts. Climate change is a reality, and the vast majority of scientists confirm that it’s happening and an issue. Allowing unfounded opinions to hold the same weight as facts distorts debates and makes credible that which isn’t. We sometimes make it look like there’s two sides, when really there’s nothing to discuss.

Balance is not always about finding opposites. This is often a media issue where a subject is discussed by finding people who disagree, to argue it out. Our law systems are equally confrontational. Pitting two sides of the story against each other is not a sure fire way of finding the truth. The ability of the journalist, lawyer or commentator to make their side of the story look plausible may have more to do with storytelling skills. That something can be condensed into a simple and plausible narrative does not make it true.

The idea of two sides can be used as an excuse. Somebody acts in a way that looks terrible from the outside, but points out there are two sides to every story and you should hear their version. How far does claiming failed good intention excuse poor action? It’s certainly not a tidy situation.

We’re all cobbling together our own subjective understandings of what’s going on, what it means and what to do about it. We’re all limited by our own perspectives, experiences, capacity for empathy, and ability to understand. None of us will ever see the whole of anything (don’t believe everything The Waterboys tell you!). If anyone tells me there are two sides to a story, my first response is to wonder what it is about the other sides, beyond those two, that they would prefer I did not notice.

Missing the equinox

There was, as you probably noticed if you’re at all Pagan, a solar event recently – the equinox. Which one you experienced it as will depend on which hemisphere you are in. I didn’t celebrate it. There were some years, when I was actively involved in ritual groups, when I showed up for equinox rituals. When they form a part of a celebrated wheel of the year, when you’re bringing people together with shared intent, there’s no reason not to celebrate them, but for myself alone, it doesn’t work.

The main reason equinoxes don’t work for me is that they aren’t traditional festivals. There’s no history of celebrating them – not only does Ronald Hutton say so, but having spent most of my life engaging with British folk traditions, I know the only equinox celebrations are modern. For me, this means there’s not much to draw on or work with and that just doesn’t appeal to me very much.

Of the new traditions developing around the equinoxes, I do like Peace One Day. It’s not a religious event, but falls on the 21st of September each year as an opportunity to celebrate what peace there is, and dedicate to crafting peace in the world. For a Druid, this is an attractive notion to work with, and some years I’ve picked up on Peace One Day.

This last week has had rather too much conflict in it for my tastes. Seeking peace is of course no guarantee of avoiding conflict. I could resolve it by doing what is wanted of me rather than what I think is right – but I do not believe that peace bought at that price is worth having. I could seek peace by stepping away entirely from the conflict – that probably wouldn’t solve anything, merely improve my comfort. I reserve the right to do that if it gets too much, because my personal peace is a consideration, even if it’s not the whole story. Sometimes, the withdrawal of energy from a situation is the best way to bring about peace – it’s hard to have an argument when there’s no one else in the room, and other people’s rage can sometimes simmer down into something more workable if you give them the space to do that.

This weekend brings a local, seasonal activity that I’m much more drawn to than the equinox. The Stroud Five Valleys walk is about 21 miles around the town, up hills, down hills, through some stunning countryside. Some 7000 people will walk it, in whole or in part, raising money for meningitis charities. Last year we did the whole thing, and struggled to finish it. Over the last year the three of us in my household have worked hard to improve fitness, stamina and long distance walking capacity. We’ve improved our kit, and refined and reduced what we carry. Not having been well this week (in no small part due to the lack of peace) and having had a late night yesterday for a book launch event (unfortunate timing) it remains to be seen how far we will get tomorrow. In the meantime, rest and carbohydrate are the order of the day.

I may not be equal to the whole walk this year. That’s ok. That’s how it goes sometimes. We don’t always get what we want, and I can’t help but feel a little recognition of this would be a great help towards increasing the amount of peace in the world. If we’re not convinced we have to have everything we want at the moment we want it, there’s more room for negotiation, for compromise and co-operation.

The hellish culture of sleep deprivation

Sleep deprivation is torture and is recognised under international torture laws as such. I know from personal experience that if you are constantly deprived of sleep, there comes a point when you will start to do or say anything at all that you think might end the nightmare. Because (trigger warning on the rest of this paragraph, but the blog content afterward should be less alarming and not triggery) the relatively brief misery of forced, painful, humiliating unwanted sex is actually less bad to deal with than extreme sleep deprivation. Both cause longer term emotional and psychological distress, but trust me, when you’re agonisingly sleep deprived, these are not things you can weigh up.

Again, speaking from experience, sleep deprivation messes with your thinking and makes it very hard to make good choices. It slows the mind and impairs judgement. It can cause hallucination – amusing at a weekend festival perhaps, nightmarish when you’re trying to deal with real life and can no longer quite tell what’s real. Waking dreams invading your consciousness in the wrong context are a real problem. There isn’t an illness or issue out there that won’t be made worse by sleep deprivation. I gather (from New Scientist a couple of years ago) that studies show a distinct correlation between sleep deprivation and weight gain. It really isn’t good for us.

Other studies show that as a whole we have a sleep deprived culture with a lot of people reporting far less sleep than they want. Work that follows you home, awkward and changing work patterns that shift when you can sleep, and thus disrupt your sleep. Not enough exercise to tire the body. Too much mental stress to be able to settle. Light pollution. Noise pollution. Over-stimulated environments. Too much caffeine to try and function the rest of the time. We’re tired, most of us, and that we are tired is not taken as a reason to do differently. You still have to turn up to the job when it suits your employer. You still have to go to school bright and early – or get up and get kids to school. Most of us are not in control of our timetables, and if we desperately needed more sleep, there’s not much we can do about it.

Sleep deprivation is a recognised form of torture. This is not taken into account when ordering people’s change of shift, and I’ve seen the consequences for friends. It’s not taken into account for the parents of young babies when they need to go back to work. It’s not at all recognised by the on demand 24/7 lifestyle we get pushed towards.

I’m a sleep evangelist, because there aren’t many things in this life that can’t be helped with more sleep. Any illness is more quickly overcome if we can sleep enough. Good, deep sleep helps with many kinds of mental distress (not the staying in bed drowsing in apathy semi sleep of the depressed, though). Sleep helps with learning. We don’t learn well if we aren’t sleeping enough because our brains need that time to consolidate new input. This applies to new experiences as well as deliberate study. If we sleep well, our moods are better, we aren’t as short tempered, we are less likely to get the threadbare exhaustion that paves the way to depression and anxiety. A well rested, clear thinking person makes better judgements. Sleep more. If you don’t need an alarm to wake up, you know you’re doing it right.

Pagan Dreaming is not just about dreaming, it’s also about the context for dreaming – namely sleep. I chose the title because it’s punchy and attractive, but in terms of what is in the book, I think you can tell it was written by a sleep evangelist, and there’s a lot in there about wilder, more natural, more beneficial approaches to sleeping. After all, if your sleep patterns are lousy, your stressed and anxious mind is never going to get round to the really interesting dreaming. I learned this stuff the hard way…

Old words for old problems

I have problems with the term ‘patriarchy’ because it’s part of a dialogue that pits men against women. It’s very difficult to talk usefully about feminism, when feminism has been structured by some people as an assault on men. Yes, there’s a whole issue here around privilege, and the need to recognise that not having all the advantages any more is about fairness, not attack, but it’s hard work making that argument in face of constant hostility, and the hostile people are the ones who most need to hear something different. I’ve seen too much on social media of a certain flavour of male entitlement, and the resentment of women asking for an equal space in society, and I think we may be trying to have the wrong conversation here.

While historically women have, overall, been more vulnerable to the problems in our culture than men, most men don’t really benefit from it, and some women do – it’s never been a simple gender divide, an us versus them. The sense of being more important than the women in their lives may serve to help keep a certain kind of guy comfortable with his position in the status quo. Sure, he’s kicked from above, but he feels he’s better than someone – his wife, his mother, his daughter, and traditionally this makes his position more tolerable. That’s hideous, when you stop to think about it. A sense of privilege seems to depend on having someone to look down on, and that in turn helps us not to mind being looked down upon by others. Women do this too, and slut shaming is part of it. So much for dignity and self esteem.

The mistreatment of women is underpinned by a number of really nasty ideas. There’s hierarchy – that some people are worth more than others. The people at the top matter, the people at the bottom do not. Men matter more than women. There’s ownership issues – the idea that people can be property, in slavery, in serfdom, in poverty so abject that they must do your bidding. In obedient marriage. The idea that using people to achieve your goals is fine. This is the same system that for hundreds of years has cheerfully sent men to die for the sake of a land grab, a bigger title for the man in charge, and for the man who would be king.

It’s a system that cheerfully kills men in dangerous industries. Mining, fishing. The death and maiming rates of the industrial revolution were huge, and the canals cost about a life per yard, on average, I have been told. And when they have no use for you, they’ll leave you and your children to die by starvation.

I’ve long felt that if we want to tackle the huge international issue of the mistreatment of women, we have to tackle the culture that holds it together. Many of us officially no longer live in feudal monarchy systems, but the same logic applies. The same sense of worth attached to the few, and the disposable quality of the many. We don’t see life as equal. The life of a wealthy ‘important’ person is not considered in the same way as the life of a refugee, a sweat shop labourer, a subsistence farmer. Anyone whose position depends on looking down, must bow their head to someone else, until we get to the top of the feudal pyramid, and the few who bow to no one. The lure of moving up the food chain keeps us in the system. The feeling of being better than someone else helps us tolerate where we are. It’s a way of being in the world that turns us into users, standing on other people to get an advantage, pushing them down that we might stay above them. Anyone, regardless of gender, who engages in this does so at a cost to their humanity.

You can have gender equality and still have feudalism, you just need to find a different reason to pick on people, one that isn’t about what’s in your pants (say, money). But you have a much harder time of it maintaining sexism, or for that matter racism or any other us and them based prejudice, if you don’t have a feudalistic mindset.

The importance of language

The exact way in which we use language has a lot of influence on how we experience the world, and how we relate to each other. This is one of the reasons I find the careless use of words annoying. A bit of accuracy goes a long way! I feel very keenly that issues like gender in language are also incredibly important. As a child reader, I was conscious that books were generally addressed to men, the reader was always a ‘he’ and watching that change in my late teens and early twenties was a huge relief.

As an example of this, I’d like to flag up my reading experience of two different versions of the Tao Te Ching. Both are based on the same texts – although several versions of the original poem exist, so translation requires choices about which bits to include or ignore. The first translation I read (yellow cover) spoke of the wise man, the sage, the king and the prince. I found it fairly difficult to extract anything that I could work with, because I felt alienated by the language. It wasn’t really written to me, and therefore not for me, nothing about it invited my participation.

Ursula Le Guinn’s version (blue) involves the choice to use non-gendered and non-hierarchical language for the translation. The wise person, and where relevant, the leader. It’s much more accessible, and it makes for a completely different reading experience.

I know there are people for whom inclusive language seems like politically correct nonsense. It’s a lot easier to feel that language is no big deal, when the language deployed favours you, reflects you and affirms you in ways you probably don’t even notice. The difference between ‘mankind’ and ‘people’, is huge. It would seem a bit weird to refer to all of humanity as ‘womankind’ because so obviously half of the population, give or take, do not identify as women. But disappearing the half of the population who do not identify as men has been normal for a long time, and plenty of people use the words ‘man’ or mankind’ when what they really mean are ‘humans’ and ‘people’.

There’s a great deal of divisive language out there for talking about different kinds of people – the language of us and them, of me and other. I like what happens when we replace that with people, with the language of commonality, shared humanity and shared experience.

Saying no to unconditional love

Unconditional love can often be held up as the ultimate that love can be, and can do. Some people become obsessed with trying to find the partner who will love them unconditionally. For me it’s been about the feeling that I *should* love others unconditionally and feeling guilty because all too often, I don’t. A new kind of clarity has occurred to me in the last week or so: In matters of love, the conditions are really important. Knowing what they are and why you need them honoured is vital. Understanding other people’s conditions and whether you find them acceptable is also essential.

There are things my marriage is conditional upon. That I feel safe, that my body, my feelings, my wants and desires are honoured. They don’t have to be met all the time, but they do have to be respected. My marriage is conditional on my partner being a decent human being, and if he woke up one morning and decided he wanted to take up deliberate cruelty as a hobby, I would not stay with him. That I cannot imagine him doing this, definitely helps!

I’m perfectly happy to accept similar conditions from other people. If someone has issues – practical or personal, one of the conditions of friendship may be that I am able to accommodate those issues. I may not be able to see them very often. I may need to cope with their illness, or be accepting of their circumstances.

I’ve had other conditions raised in relationships of all kinds of shapes. That they must never be told they cause unhappiness because it is unbearable. That they must always be right. That I must do as I am told. That my feelings are irrelevant, or that I am to submit to their understanding of what it is that I need. They are not obliged to flex or change to accommodate me, I must do all the changing required to make it work. And on, and on. These are observations of relationships that I have walked away from, because these are not conditions I can work with.

I’m very wary of double standards, and of people who have every justification for their actions and no scope to hear when it doesn’t work. I’m also increasingly wary of people who run forward proffering unconditional love, because I have noticed that the people who are keen to say that they love you more than anyone else ever could, often aren’t right about that anyway.

We need conditions on relationships. We need it to be acceptable to walk away from a person who does not uphold the basic standards of behaviour we need. If someone changes, or reveals their true face, or stops bothering, no one should feel obliged to stay and keep pouring love over them. Sometimes the act of walking away is the wake up call the other person needs to get their life in better order.

Boundless, limitless, endless unconditional language is very New Agey. “Everything is love” (even incest and murder?). Claiming everything you do is love can also be an easy way of shutting out any suggestion that what you do isn’t working for someone else. And really, there’s not much to be gained from dealing with the person who yells “everything I do is love” in your face whilst standing on your toes and stealing from your wallet. Conditions are a good thing, and we need them.

Fabulous learning opportunities

I’ve just had a very challenging weekend that delivered a lot of scope for learning experience to a lot of people. What anyone else learned from it, I don’t even have the energy to try and speculate. I hit this morning so tired and lacking in brain power that the options are not blog, or blog about what’s going on. I usually don’t do this, because I like time to process experiences more thoroughly and put them into a wider context. Today, that’s beyond me.

Sleep deprivation makes me really ill. I knew it was something I had a problem with, and for years now I’ve been managing my time and choices to minimise it. Staying over for events and doing late evening events can really knock me about, but if I sleep extra beforehand I can weather it. Wake me up repeatedly through the night and stress me out so I can’t sleep and the consequences for my body, and my mental wellbeing are huge.

If a person is in trouble – if someone is dying, or suicidal, or a house has burned down, sure, call me in the middle of the night. I’ll take the backlash when something is that urgent. The person who had a safe place to be and chose not to be there, and phoned me repeatedly through the night expecting my help and then wondered why I wasn’t very helpful… maybe needs to learn that not all of us are at our best in those conditions. So I’m still paying for that.

I’m not ashamed of the choices I made. I’m not an infinite resource, and I have finally learned that someone wanting something from me does not actually put me in a place of having to deliver. What I give is my choice and the terms on which I give are my choice, and ‘no’ is always an answer I am entitled to. I am not obliged to be anyone else’s fairy godmother. I am not obliged to trash my own health and wellbeing because someone else would find it useful. Anyone who thinks I am not entitled to say no to them, is, I have decided, someone I really don’t want in my life.

I’ve been obliged to think a lot about how we justify our actions. I’ve come to the conclusion that I am not comfortable with people who do problematic or antisocial things (or worse) in the heat of the moment and then think that it having been done thoughtlessly and off the cuff somehow makes that ok. I will accept it as an explanation, but not as an excuse. It is a line of logic too often used to justify violence and assault, and if we collectively think it’s ok at less dramatic levels, it’s harder to challenge it when the excuse is in the mouth of a rapist. If you cannot control your words or actions that is not an excuse, it’s a failing.

I have learned that I do not have to be nice to people. I can be ok with myself in face of other people thinking I’m not as nice as I ‘should’ be. In the past I’ve been incredibly susceptible to that kind of emotional pressure, I am glad to learn that I am no longer as easy to guilt trip into doing things that are not at all in my interests. I’m getting flack for standing my ground. Well, I say standing. I spent most of yesterday sitting or lying down because my body is in a mess, but I have sat my ground. I’ve not voluntarily taken further damage for someone else’s convenience. I am appreciating the friends who have not asked me to suffer for their sake over the last few days, and I am identifying as not-friends the people who feel entitled to use me, or to berate me for not co-operating with being used.

While generally I am pro-learning, I’m hoping for a very quiet, un-educational week in which I can get my body working again and my head into a better state.

The stories that keep hold

There are a number of stories about stories so powerful that they echo through time. Such tales speak to our belief in the power of myth, and our willingness to believe that a tale closely associated with a place, or events rooted in the distant past, can keep a hold that influences the present. Alan Garner’s ‘The Owl Service’ is one such tale, where Welsh myths keep replaying themselves in the same valley, drawing in new people to take on the three leading roles, usually with tragic consequences.

Daphne Du Maurier’s ‘Castle D’Or’ does something similar with the Tristan and Isolde myth, capturing two young people in the same story, such that it overpowers their lives, and destroys them. These tales are distinctly different from updates and retellings, which play out the themes in different contexts. What’s important here is the way landscape and story combined are able to recreate themselves – perhaps because the original protagonists are fated to reincarnate in the same spot and keep playing it out, or because the story and place draw new players in.

Elen Sentier’s new novel – Owl Woman – makes a fascinating addition to this kind of tale. The characters in her story live in a village that is both protected and defined by some rather curious stories about where the water comes from. Here, the people are aware of their story, and are, for the greater part, active participants in a process of keeping the myth happy and well behaved. When that balance is lost, some of the darker and more dangerous parts of the story start to replay themselves, and there’s a real risk that it will take a number of deaths to restore the balance. Despite what the title may suggest, this is not a Blodeuwedd related myth, but something unique to the landscape in which it is set.

There’s a power in stories that are tied to landscapes in this way. What Elen’s novel suggests to me is that these stories exist because they represent something of how we are supposed to interact with the land. If we remember the stories about how to live in a place, we can live peacefully there. If we forget those stories, or ignore them, we can set off the cascade of bad things that happen when you don’t respect the place.

As a relevant aside, I listened to Neil Gaiman talking (on youtube) about experts trying to figure out how we could keep nuclear waste sites safe for the tens of thousands of years it would take for them to stop being dangerous. The verdict, was myths. The most enduring thing we might use to help distant descendants whose culture and language is not the same as ours, to deal with the dangers we leave, is to leave them stories. That said, given the total disinterest most modern humans have in stories about what it is a really bad idea to do, I’m not sure this would work.

Owl Woman is a really engaging tale with a large cast of characters, both heroic and less so. I greatly enjoyed it. On one level it’s a mug of cocoa and cold winter’s afternoon sort of book. On another level, it’s a passionate case for ancestral wisdom, for respecting what’s handed down and respecting the land you live on.

The problematic art of giving compliments

Compliments can be a very positive thing – lifting confidence, creating social connections and affirming people. At the same time, compliments if mishandled can cause massive offence. The people who offend by complimenting generally can’t see why this could be so, and can feel unreasonably got at as a consequence. I’m not sure this will work for all variables, but it is, at least, a place to start.

What is my relationship to the person I’m complimenting? Do I know that they want to hear my opinion? If I know they do, fine, go ahead at an appropriate level. So, if my husband looks really sexy in his new waistcoat, I will tell him he looks really sexy. I know he likes me thinking this. If a friend had a new waistcoat that made them look really sexy, I probably wouldn’t frame it that way. I might say ‘you look fantastic in that waistcoat.’ I know they care about my opinion, but I don’t want to seem like I’m coming on to them, that would be weird.

If I see a stranger who looks fantastic in a waistcoat, I have no idea how they are going to feel about a comment from me. To walk up to a total stranger and tell them they look sexy could either be threatening, or seem like I am making a joke at their expense. At this point, focusing on the waistcoat seems a better way to go. They probably chose the waistcoat, they probably like it, they probably won’t be offended by me saying ‘hey, awesome waistcoat.’ Thus far, I’ve never had this be a problem, at any rate.

If I’m in a professional context with someone who I do not also know in another context – say I’m at the doctor’s, talking to a lawyer, dealing with a volunteer… unless how awesome they look relates directly to the job in hand, I will stay away from it, because it’s a distraction and not what we’re there for. I probably don’t have time. They probably don’t have time. This is particularly why focusing on the appearance of a woman in a professional context is not a good idea – all of the above issues, plus it’s taking attention away from the work. It’s not clever, and makes the one dishing the compliment look unprofessional and like their mind isn’t on the job.

We can be quick to default to the idea that our opinions are relevant and necessary. Sometimes they aren’t. If we’re looking at a situation and inferring something and basing a compliment on an idea of what we think is going on – this is hazardous, because it’s so easy to misinterpret in the first place. The better you know someone, the less of an issue it is. ‘That was brave’ is not necessarily a compliment to someone who was shit scared the whole time and wants to hide under the table. It can make things worse. It may be more useful to say ‘I’d have been terrified doing that, I’m really impressed by you for doing it’ which leaves the other person room to say ‘well, I was terrified,’ but maybe still feel a bit affirmed. ‘I would not have the courage to do what you just did’ is more honest, and probably more useful than calling someone brave when you don’t know what’s going on. If the idea of their courage is based on the idea of them being disadvantaged to begin with (not perfectly skinny people jogging, for example) it may be a lot more helpful to just leave the whole thing alone. If your compliment has a disparagement nestling inside it, don’t say it. ‘I’m amazed you past that test.’

Complimenting on weight loss – when maybe the person was ill and lost weight that way. Complimenting on physical appearance can suggest you’re busily judging people on how they look when they have little control over some aspects of how they look – that can be uncomfortable. ‘Nice jacket’ they probably did have some control over, and it’s less personal. As far as I can make out, the more control someone had over the thing you are complimenting them for, the less likely it is to offend them. Compliments that are velvet gloves for an iron fist of put down, are not actually compliments. ‘Not bad, for a girl’. There’s a definite power in affirming each other over the things we do well, and affirming people we don’t know, as well. Compliments that cause discomfort or irritation do the exact opposite and should not be excused under the guise of being well meant.

I can cure your cancer, and other myths

The more successful MBS authors out there tend to be the ones who make the biggest claims. I’ve read books from people who reckon they can cure you of any ailment by getting you to think in more positive ways. If you can’t be cured by their wisdom, it’s lack of faith, or karmic debt, or you chose this path before you were born. If you were in trouble and do not magically fix, being told it’s karma is no great comfort.

When you’re absolutely desperate, when life seems to have dealt an unplayable hand, anyone offering a way out is persuasive. The greater the fear, the more willing we are to believe that someone can save us. The less we want to think logically about how much trouble we might really be in. And so the person who makes outlandish promises can be a lot more attractive than the person who says ‘this might help you a bit’ – even if it’s truly better advice.

It’s worth pausing for a moment to think about the pre-election promises of politicians. Sometimes those aren’t so very different in style from the worst excesses of MBS magical cures. The more afraid you are, the more willing you are to believe the politician who says they have simple answers. In politics it tends to be less about positive thinking, and more about blaming a minority. The more we back the people who tell us there are simple solutions to our complex problems, the more we are likely to hurt ourselves. In a political sense, Nazi Germany was the extreme example of what you get when you go this way, but plenty of other countries have succumbed to simple hate-based non-solutions to complex real world problems. At least if you decide to pray away your life threatening disease, only you are your loved ones are likely to struggle. Do this at the political level and a lot more people are going to die.

I’m not a wildly successful author in the MBS arena because I’m not prepared to tell people I have simple answers to all their problems, or that I have it figured out. I really, really don’t, and I think what usefulness I have comes from sharing the broken bits and the shuffling, lurching journey towards being… whatever it is I’m being. No grand terms, no how I saved my life with five minutes of meditation a day. No easy ways to cleanse your karma of negative vibrations and restore your afterlife to the right colour for your magical aura. I’m really bothered by the relationship between wealth, health and privilege, and this kind of teaching.

If we want easy, tidy solutions, probably the best one is: do everything you can as well as you possibly can, and pay attention to the small stuff. It won’t cure much, but taking the details seriously improves all manner of things. Be kind, be honest, look after your body but be willing to let it go when you are truly out of options. Accept that there are no magical cures for all suffering and that sometimes you will suffer, and then do the real things you can do to alleviate your own suffering and other people’s. Be willing to work at it. Expect to fall, fail, mess up, feel lost, be let down, as well as the moments of inspiration, wild hope, unreasonable success and pure delight that are also part of a life.

People who are offering to sell you simple solutions to make it all wonderful, are people who make a lot of money. What would happen, in our spiritual and material lives, if we became a lot more wary of people who promise to fix everything? Politicians and faith healers alike. Companies with wonderproducts. Advertisements. What if we put down the belief that a simple easy anything can save us from things we don’t like, and started to deal with the realities of what we’ve got, instead? It would be a whole other world.

(You could buy my books, but they won’t save you, they won’t cure you, they won’t transform your life into pure success and unmitigated bliss. You might find them useful – some people do – but then again you might not. Truth in advertising.)