Nimue Brown's Blog, page 407

Time, blogs and habits

I get the odd comment now and then about how I manage to blog pretty much every day. The short answer, is habit. It is easier to maintain just about anything if you can acquire it as a habit. Here I am, dead beat and late in the day, and sorely tempted not to write a blog, but this is something I do every day, and so I show up.

I’ve explored prayer, and meditation. Both are easier to maintain if I set aside a specific bit of the day for them. I’ve been a dabbler in music most of my life and I know that practice is easier to manage if there is a habitual pattern around it. Good sleep patterns are also habits, and I try to cultivate those with habits of behaviour at the end of the day designed to encourage sleeping. Exercise is most easily maintained through frequency and habit. So is housework. In fact the majority of things that take up our time can be structured into routines to ensure that we keep doing them.

The first issue this raises, is one of time. There are only so many hours in a day, and how you deploy each is now in question. If your habits are unconscious, then you won’t automatically know what time is devoted where. Television, facebook and computer games will easily suck up a lot of time without that being noticed. All too often, our habits of time use are not considered, and not serving us. However, once you consider how you deploy your time and what your habits are, you have to start weighing and valuing how time is used. How much time is spent commuting? How much goes on reading? What does cleaning cost you in terms of time? We only get to use it once.

The second issue, is of order verses chaos, and I don’t get on with too much order, which means I can’t live to a tight timetable.

Every choice to make something a habit and give time to it every day, is a choice that excludes other possibilities. It doesn’t matter whether we do that consciously, or not. If we do it consciously, we get to decide and that’s got to be an advantage. Every half hour I devote to writing a blog is not spent on writing fiction. Every hour on fiction is not spent on music, every hour of music is not spent on cleaning. There are balances to strike between needs of the body, the soul and the bank balance. The need for rest, the need for play and for more stimulating experience. Duties to honour, and inspiration to seek, and no minute replaceable.

There are no right answers, and the habits of time that would suit each of us best depend very much on our needs. I chose blogging, for at least a small fragment of my day. I don’t tidy up as often as I might.

Human Sacrifices

Dear George Osborn,

I heard you talking yesterday, in your Autumn Statement as Chancellor of the Exchequer. You mentioned the ‘sacrifices’ of the British people. I’d like to take a small, semantic issue with this, but it has considerable implications, so bear with me.

When people ‘make sacrifices’ as a voluntary act of love or devotion, that’s one thing. However, what’s been happening in the UK over the last few years has not been people voluntarily putting themselves through hell for the good of the economy. You did this to us. People have not made sacrifices. People have been sacrificed. I was surprised you were brave enough to even use this word, it was remarkably honest of you, because your government’s policies are killing people, and at this rate are going to kill more people before we’re done.

This report from the 3rd December, in the British Medical Journal, suggests Britain is on the edge of a health crisis caused by malnutrition. http://www.bmj.com/content/347/bmj.f7157. There’s every reason to think that malnutrition is in turn caused by poverty (given the rise in foodbanks) but your government has yet to publish its look into the subject. We’ve also got a lot of fuel poverty in the UK, Mr Osborn. Add together a cold winter, and poor diet, and there will be people who die as a direct consequence. Many of them will be elderly.

The Daily Mail has reported that poor people are killing themselves as a direct consequence of government actions and ‘austerity’. There have been a few explicit suicide notes on that topic, from people pushed over the edge. How do you sleep at night, Mr Osborn, knowing that your choices have led people to kill themselves? And then there are the sick, vulnerable and disabled people bullied by ATOS, too many of whom have already died in abject poverty because their benefits were cut. As more than 60% of appeals against ATOS are won, it’s clear we have an unfair, unjust system here. No terminally ill person should die in abject poverty, abandoned by the state.

People are dying, Mr Osborn. Vulnerable, elderly, ill, disabled people with no options are being made more sick with anxiety by your cuts. Do take a moment to read up on the impact of severe stress on the human body, and the impact of malnutrition, and unheated homes. Hospitals are seeing more people with hunger related illness (that’s doubled since 2009, are you proud?) and those freezing through the winter are going to get ill, too. But then, someone in your party (Owen Lister, Tory councillor) recommended guillotining disabled children. Some of us wonder if your aim really is to kill off the vulnerable. Is this malice, or incompetence at work?

There are frequently no jobs available for people who want to work, and yet your government blames the jobless and penalises them with draconian systems. Are you aware, Mr Osborn, that it is entirely possible to cause mental illness in people by putting them continually in impossible situations? I doubt we will ever know how many people have become sick with anxiety and depression as a direct consequence of your policies.

Human sacrifices, Mr Osborn. Human lives brought to an end in the name of the Gods of GDP. We frown on ancient peoples who sacrificed people, and animals to their Gods. I ask, how are you any different? The bodies of badgers, and the rising number of the dead stand as witnesses against the government you contribute to. Stop sacrificing people for the sake of the economy. An economy exists to serve and facilitate the people it belongs to, not the other way round!

 

Sincerely etc.

Stories in a picture

[image error]A picture can tell a huge story, but sometimes it helps to tell the story as well….

So, this is me, a copy of graphic novel Hopeless Maine vol 2, Inheritance in one hand, and the new religious/ philosophical meandering, “Spirituality without Structure” in the other.

 

I’ve been told that the tree behind me is a Dawn Redwood.

The brown dress I’m wearing was a skirt, a few weeks prior to the photo, picked up second hand at a Green Party jumble sale, and re-worked, to be a knee length pinafore dress. Something I can wear over leggings and a jumper to be passably warm, a bit fem, and wholly practical. That flash of blue jumper, is a handmade item, knitted by an incredibly talented cousin. She was a genius at all forms of needlecraft, and died in old age more than fifteen years ago. Her decision to leave half of her house to me has been a major contribution to my being able to follow this career path. It takes a lot of years to get established as an author, and without Louise Chandler it would have taken me a lot longer and been a lot harder. It’s a really snuggly jumper, too.

You can’t easily see the pentacles on my scarf, but I’ve had it for years, as useful Pagan bait. “I see you’ve got pentacles” is such an easy conversation opener, and I’m old enough to remember when we had to be a bit more careful about that sort of thing, when you could lose your job for being Pagan, and it wasn’t always safe to be out.

The colourful jacket came from Intrigue of Stroud (my favourite clothes shop). I’ve been getting into wearing colours in combination more in the last six months. I had years of being told I didn’t know how to put colours together, and it really dented my confidence. I also used to hear a lot that I had no idea what clothes shapes to pick or what looked good on me. I had no faith in my ability to dress myself, and that’s a big thing to lose. Now, I’m getting more into wearing things I like. The process of forming my own preferences, and learning to be comfortable in just liking a thing because I do and not having to justify it, has been an important journey for me. I am happier now in my clothes choices than I’ve been since my teens. I feel no pressure to dress to be sexually attractive to anyone, and I wear colours I like.

I’m thinner around the face in this picture than I’ve ever been before in my life. It’s not the product of weight loss, but of improving my iodine intake. It looks increasingly like insufficiency of iodine in my diet has, for my entire life, been compromising my thyroid gland, hence the chubby face that has been a source of misery since childhood. I’ve had a lifetime of feeling guilty over being fat, when what I had was a flaw in my diet. I look back and realise my life would have been really different if there hadn’t been an assumption that my chubbiness was my fault. I didn’t have a fat body just a fat face. I now know it wasn’t because I was greedy and overeating, and that’s a big thing in terms of sense of self, and how I feel about my childhood self. A kind woman at Druid camp last summer took me aside, and said I looked like I might have these issues, and she knew because her daughter did. I didn’t get her name, but my gratitude for the difference made is vast.

An image from a moment on the journey. Published author. Passably comfortable in my own skin for the first time ever. Living in a place that I love and where I feel a keen sense of belonging. And in the background, a tree that was thought extinct, and turned out not to be.

The Tyranny of Healing

We’re all supposed to want to be perfectly functional. To be well, stable, capable, not inconvenient for others. Being well is not all peace and light.

On the New Age side there can be a lot of pressure towards wellness, with a sense that being ill represents a personal failure, a not having tried hard enough. The more extreme end of other religions will ascribe illness to being out of favour with God. Good Christians don’t get cancer, in some people’s book, therefore to get it is to have failed religiously, on top of everything else.

There are a lot of chronic and on-going illnesses out there that can, at best, be managed well. No amount of healthy lifestyle choices or positive thinking will cure you of Multiple Sclerosis or arthritis. Then there are the psychological ailments, because it simply isn’t the case that you can positive-attitude yourself out of suffering from severe depression. There are life experience too painful and serious to heal from as well. I know people who have lost children, and who carry that grief. No one should be asked, or expected to ‘get over it’ but the pressure to be convenient to those around you, is vast. Grief is something we are supposed to knuckle down and heal from, and if we can’t or won’t, we will be treated as though we need a medical intervention. There are occasions when not healing should be a perfectly valid option.

That which seriously harms us, in body or in mind, leaves marks that endure long after the obvious damage has gone away. The damage to a rape victim’s body will heal, but the damage to self, to relationship with the world, may be there for the rest of their lives. There is no way back from certain kinds of experience, no way of unlearning it, or ceasing to be aware that it can and does happen, that it could happen again, and that it will happen to other people. Extreme pain and sickness, violence and dire accident change our relationship with the world. Afterwards, we are not the same. We can’t be. We become more cautious, more aware, and we see differently. The damage becomes a part of self, a part of life, and to be asked to heal after that is to be asked not to recognise your own harsh journey.

The pressure to heal, put upon us by well-meaning people can add insult to injury. Are we to forget, then? Are we not to learn the lessons a failing body has taught us? Are we to pretend it never happened? Those who have not been put through hell at some point, quite understandably do not want to have to think about what might be out there, waiting for them. Those who have, may not wish to be reminded by seeing it happen to someone else. But what kind of answer is that? It’s not healing that is sought here, it’s not about what the survivor may need, but abut rendering them less problematic to those around them.

Sometimes, the best you can hope for is to make peace with things. A place of acceptance that makes it possible to get by, and from which you can make something of life. Peace is not the same as healing. One can be at peace with the open wounds in the psyche, with the lost parts of self, with an innocence that can never return. One can be at peace with grief while still carrying the razor-sharp sense of loss. Healing is not always available, for body or for mind. It is not always the best response. Sometimes we have to adapt and become some new thing, and let the damage shape us. The pressure to be well, to be normal, to be convenient is of no help at all in that process. Healing people might seem universally heroic and good, but there are times when it isn’t the right answer, and where honouring the transformation and allowing the change would be a good deal more helpful.

Warning: contains naval gazing

I lost most of yesterday afternoon and evening to a welling up of pain. It’s left me feeling sore and disorientated today. I’m in a place of unpretty introspection. It isn’t what other people do that haunts me, it is the fear of having got it wrong, of not having given enough when it was needed, not being able to offer a sufficiently tolerant and open heart, not being able to take the knocks. I’m a creature of finite resource, no kind of saint, and alert to the ways in which I could have done a better job. Yesterday I was caught in a web of ghosts and mistakes, trying to figure out where I could have done better, in the hopes of not repeating any of it.

I’m fascinated by people who shrug of mistakes and failures, of any magnitude, and move on. I’ve encountered a few folk down the years who were remarkably untroubled by their errors of judgement and acts of unintended cruelty. I’ve met people who genuinely didn’t seem to care when they caused pain. I have noticed an interesting discrepancy though, because the people who feel they should be able to shrug off their mistakes and move on seldom take the same attitude when they feel hurt. If they are suffering, it matters and needs taking seriously. It has also been my experience that people who make less fuss about their own discomfort are often more compassionate when other people are hurting.

I’ve learned the painful way that guilt and regret are the things I am least able to bear. Being hurt by someone else is as nothing compared to what I carry over mistakes I cannot fix, things I cannot undo, or unsay. I have made a lot of mistakes along the way. Poor judgement calls, misplaced expectation, dodgy interpretation… Nothing a person would wind up in court for, just regular human failure born of not seeing clearly, not knowing myself well enough, not getting it right. I pick over these like a scavenger picking bones. If there is a means to put right, I’ll try and do it. At least I can learn, with a view to making new and different mistakes next time.

My most problematic reoccurring mistake goes like this: I accept people as they present themselves, so I fall foul of miss-selling. There are qualities I’m drawn to, and if someone fakes those, I can be suckered in. The bitterness that comes from realising it was all pretend, is horrible. I find it hard to forgive in those circumstances, but I realise it may often be the case that people do not realise they are faking it. They have learned the language of passion and intensity. They’ve learned what sounds dramatic, poetic, inspired and wild. They like the image. Perhaps they do not realise that all they have is a shiny surface. The shock of realising they do not know how to live what they are voicing cannot be comfortable for some of them. The ease with which the shrugging and walking away often follows though, suggests to me that they mostly do not care. They only ever wanted to look the part.

How I let myself get into one of these again? How was I bewitched by the surface appearance, by an illusion of authenticity? Is there some magical way of discerning between people who truly speak from the heart, and people who know how to sound that way? I haven’t found it yet. Do I become cynical and mistrustful, and keep at a distance those who do come into my life open hearted, honest and full of integrity, so as to also keep away the players of games? I oscillate. There are days (yesterday was one such) when I feel no confidence in my ability to relate to people at all, and the call of hermitude is strong. But there are those few souls who were not faking, who have brought depth and wonder into my life, and I would not have that if I’d carefully insisted on keeping everyone at arm’s length.

I’ve been told that I expect too much of people. I have unreasonably high standards, am demanding and unfair. I expect so much that I set people up to fail; they can never be enough to meet my outrageous demands. I’ve looked long and hard at those accusations over a lot of years. There is some truth in it. I can be decidedly all or nothing. I do ask a lot, but I ask no more of others than I ask of myself. Just occasionally, I find someone who isn’t affronted by how I am, someone who does not disappoint, or turn out to be more hot air than substance. In the meantime, what I get is the guilt of feeling that my being let down is a measure of my unreasonableness. The uncomfortable sense that I ask too much and judge too harshly, and that if only I could seek for less, I could enjoy the easy, non-committal, shrug off the mistakes approach of others. I would have to be someone else. Still, there are losses that I grieve, and mistakes that haunt me.

Ritual Locations

In theory, you can do a ritual anywhere. In practice some locations are deeply impractical while others might lead to arrest. Some places, in their beauty, invite spiritual responses. Others, particularly those degraded by human activity, encourage us to look away and move on.

Many Pagans are attracted to ancient sites. There is something resonant about going to the places of our ancestors, even though we don’t really know much about what they did there. For me, that as readily includes churches and cathedrals, but I know that wouldn’t speak to all Pagans. The thing about ancient sites, is that they also attract tourists. My first Avebury ritual was a bit of a system-shock on that score. Up until then, I’d been used to private, secretive rituals. Suddenly, we were a tourist attraction. It made me uncomfortable and self-conscious, and it was some years before I became in any way easy about using that space.

For me, acoustics are a big part of the ritual location. I like to be able to hear everyone in circle, and I favour rituals with a strong bardic element. Acoustics out of doors are tricky things, but more sheltered spots with less sound from other sources are a good place to start. Windswept hilltops are all very good for romance and drama, but totally useless for singing. I’ll go into potential ritual spaces and sing to them. This is the easiest way to find out how sound behaves in the space. It’s also a way of engaging with the space and getting a sense of whether ritual would work there. I also learn quickly if I feel comfortable – if singing in a location is a source of self-consciousness and ill-ease, then rituals are not going to work.

I like to know the history of a place I’m working in. That might not be ancient history, but everywhere has a past. One of my favourite locations for years was a former landfill site, grassed over in the centre of a wood. The history of interaction between people and land was complex there in so many ways – a mix of ancient woodland and inappropriate conifer planting, and the landfill. It was, nonetheless, a friendly, easy place to work. In more anonymous patches of woodland, the age of the trees and the nature of the undergrowth has given me a sense of what may have been there before.

There are ancient sites I have visited and simply found too intimidating. I don’t know what the history was, but I had no sense of being welcome. I have learned along the way that I like the presence of trees. Partly for the companionship and presence, partly for the shelter, trees make for better ritual spaces. I’ve shouted myself hoarse across the windswept open spaces of Avebury, but I’ve never had that problem in a wood. My absolute preference is for beech trees, but I also feel comfortable in spaces where oak and apple feature significantly. I can’t imagine doing a ritual in a conifer wood, unless someone else asked me to.

I’ve done rituals underground, in a car park, in a museum, on hilltops, in gardens… there is no one right answer here, only what suits the people and place. Different spaces suit different people. You can add accessibility to the list of factors there – how do you get to the area of the site, how do you get to the exact point for doing ritual. Some people are a good deal more mobile than others, some need resources to hand. Big, open spaces with no nearby toilets are a real difficulty for many women.

The important thing is to figure out what your practical needs are, and what works for you, and which spaces will be accepting of what you intend. There is no one right place to do rituals, there is no tidy answer, only the quest for personal connection and for places where communities can engage with each other, and with the land.

The silliest job imaginable

This week, I read an Alain De Botton book about work. What I found most interesting was the author’s evident belief that work was something he would have to observe other people doing – author, academic and philosopher not being normal or ’proper’ jobs. There was some comfort to be had in knowing it’s not just me who angsts over this.

I can make a case for the not-fiction work being useful. Not least because every now and then, someone comments to precisely that effect. I suspect a fair amount of time though, I am preaching to the converted – I think those of you who read my stuff already have a predisposition towards wondering and questioning. I may offer useful things to throw at that now and then, but you were already much of the way there. The difficulty is that so many people are not – especially those with material power. I am never going to get whole governments or business leaders to sit down and listen to my ideas, and therein lies the problem.

Most of the time, writing fiction feels like the silliest job imaginable. The fiction author invents that which never was and probably never will be, and spends many hours on this. Once thrown out into the world, the novel, (or other written forms of amusement for that matter) will entertain its victims for a few hours and then, for the greater part, will be forgotten, having done nothing more significant than used up a modicum of paper and time.

And yet… according to Neil Gaiman, China is now seeking to develop a fantasy and science fiction genre. Forms that had previously been banned (too decadent and bourgeois, I assume) are now required. The Chinese have made a link between the presence of speculative thinking, and the presence of innovative industries. They want the latter, therefore they conclude that they must have the former.

Fiction has a capacity to get in under the radar. It can prompt us to think and feel in unfamiliar ways, precisely because we do not take it too seriously. In many ways, a fiction work has more potential to change the world than a non-fic, because it can sneak in and travel further. Consider the relationship between Frankenstein and genetically modified food. Consider how a culture of space-opera-adventure feeds our collective desire to reach for the stars. Think about how Disney taught us to equate beauty with virtue and ugliness with being evil. Consider how JK Rowling has gone some way towards reversing that. There is power in those unreal things.

Religions are made of stories – often quiet implausible ones at that. All aspirations for the future are stories we tell ourselves, and we process the past into coherent narrative form, too, turning the chaos into meaning. We are story telling creatures, and we respond to narrative. So while writing fiction often feels like the most pointless, ineffective thing I could try and do, I also know that it is the thing I do with most potential for real impact.

I did not aspire to be an author because I craved fame and fortune. As a child and young adult, I wanted to write because I wanted to make a difference and I believed in fiction as a medium for delivering ideas. The trouble was that at that stage I didn’t really have any ideas, I didn’t know enough, hadn’t lived or thought or felt or empathised enough to have any clue at all about what needed saying, much less how to say it. For a while I stopped believing that I could write a book that would touch people. I lost faith in the process when I should have just recognised that I was too young and inexperienced to pull it off yet. I’m still probably too young and inexperienced. But I’m starting to think it may be possible after all, to do something meaningful that is made of fancy and impossibility. I’ll keep you posted.

Phones and sex

Not so many years ago, put ‘phones’ and ‘sex’ in the same sentence and you’d almost certainly be talking phone-sex. Recent studies suggest that our phone/sex dynamic has now headed off in quite the other direction, with phones becoming a real barrier to intimacy. Apparently we take our phones to bed and play with those rather than heading off to play with our partners.

The phone is a device invented with a view to creating more communication, and therefore one might assume, more intimacy. It all comes down to how you use it – true of so many things. If we use the phone to tap into facebook and twitter, as a substitute for having conversations, that’s our choice. A person does not have to go to parties and spend the whole time messing about with their phone. It isn’t compulsory. Equally, we can switch them off and go to bed.

Some jobs put employees under pressure to be available, and some of us have to be on call – that’s been true for far longer than there have been phones, when a bang on the door in the middle of the night was a given for some professions (doctors, smugglers etc). Most of us will not get a really important text in the middle of the night. Most of us do not need to be on standby in case someone is mortally wounded, or the big breakthrough comes through on the case, or the deal is about to break down. Most of our lives are far more ordinary than that, and most of our phone content is nothing more important than someone having posted a photo of a cute animal.

We can also play the game of imagining that some vital, important message could come in at any moment. Someone might need us. Something big may be happening. For most people, this is a total delusion. All the time we’re sat there twiddling with the internet and swapping banal messages, we are actually reducing our scope for having something important come into our lives. But then, maybe that’s the point. The imaginary important message is perfectly safe, because it won’t turn up and require us to do anything. Stepping up to real situations so that we might have to act, is a good deal more demanding.

And yet we cling to our phones.

The phone is a lot easier than real human interaction. It’s not quite as immediate, giving you more scope for thinking about how you want to appear. It’s easier to be rude and unpleasant with no comebacks. And most of what you get online is irrelevant, which also means its emotionally safe and has no impact on your life. Doing real things with real people is as loaded with danger as it is with possibility, and perhaps it is fear of the risks that has us preferring to turn on the device, than get turned on. Real intimacy, with actual people; be that emotional, intellectual or physical, takes effort to do well. You have to be present and paying attention. You need to care. No phone will ever ask that of you, and therefore there is no scope for failure.

Using tools in a measured and considered way to get stuff done has been key to human progress ever since we picked up our first stick, back in the dawn of time, and started poking things with it. However, when using the tools becomes an end in its own right, not a means, we have lost our way. There are better things to play with in bed than mobile phones.

Druidry in bad weather

It’s damp out there, and frequently cold. The place I’ve been visiting regularly in the summer is on top of a hill, and windswept. I was up there a few weeks ago, and it was simply too cold and inhospitable to stop for more than a few minutes. I have yet to find a more sheltered place that feels right and would be big enough to take a group.

I’ve been doing winter rituals for years now, working outside in all weathers. The thing about ‘all weathers’ though is that there’s a world of difference between a sheltered spot in a wood, and a totally exposed hilltop. There’s also a lot of difference between working miles from anywhere, and being close to a tea shop and toilet. If it’s cold and wet out there, your wild and edgy Druidry becomes a good deal more viable if you have a nice, warm pub or café to fall back to afterwards.

During most of my life, I’ve lived in sensible places. This meant that going out and getting wet and cold in the name of nature religion was wholly available to me. I could very easily come back to get warm and dry afterwards. During the boat period, getting wet things dry was a big practical issue. Coming back to a cold boat with no fire lit was miserable, and untended fires can and do go out. Doing the whole freezing your arse off to celebrate nature, works a lot better when you have a lot of warm, dry civilization to rely on afterwards. It also makes more sense when that cold, wet immediacy of the season isn’t a regular feature of your life. When connecting to the wheel of the year is a big part of how you get around, you don’t feel the same draw to go out there and make a fuss about it at this time of year.

This has left me repeatedly wondering what our ancient ancestors got up to. The warm weather rituals, Beltain through to Lugnasadh, are attractive and lend themselves to being outside. This time of year, too much outside can kill you. Life would have required our ancient ancestors to do a fair bit of the going out as part of normal existence. They had skins and woollen clothes, not waterproof coats. Once those are saturated, they take some drying, and the ancients did not have airing cupboards. Wet clothing must have been an on-going difficulty at this time of year. Staying as warm and dry as possible, would have mattered.

Of course if you’re celebrating in groves of trees, you will be a lot more sheltered, and that does make a difference. Even so, I don’t think the ancient Druids would have been out in the dark in snowstorms doing their thing. Well, only the mad ones with a death wish.

Both the need, and the feasibility of working outside in the depths of winter, are a direct consequence of modern lifestyles. We can easily get warm and dry, and deal with our clothes, and we all have other clothes to change into at need. We don’t get outside as much, even when the weather is good. And thus it does make a degree of sense to take your modern Druids outside and get them cold and damp to honour the winter, now and then. I suspect our ancestors would have been as bemused by the need, as they would have been startled by the things that make it feasible.

Abuse of language and person

I had a discussion with a friend a bit back, in which I commented on the issues of saying ‘I suck’ and she said…”What I think he really means is…” It gave me a double take. What on earth were we doing, trying to interpret so simple a statement? I’ve had situations where I apparently should have understood ‘never’ to mean something less absolute, and where my saying ‘no’ was not understood as ‘no’ by the person hearing me. This is dangerous territory.

I can point at a few things that got us here. There’s the pop-psychology stream, giving us a tenuous shared grasp of interpretation. What does he really mean? What is she implying? It’s become more relevant because parts of modern life are full of double speak. When someone selling a property says ‘spacious feeling’ we know the place is probably small. Any time a politician opens their mouth, we expect them to say something other than what they mean, carefully hedged so that afterwards they can pretend they were honest with us all along. We’ve learned to mistrust apparently plain speech.

The idea that someone means something other than what they’ve said feeds the passive aggressive approach, and is fed by it. “Fine” does not always means fine. Sometimes it means furious. “Do what you like” can mean “do what I want you to do or suffer the consequences.” It can also be the defeated whimper of a person who has given up trying to get themselves heard, and that can be problematic, too.

The trouble with interpretation, is that you can read anything in, and insist on its presence regardless of what the person speaking tells you they meant. You can go further and decide the other person had unconscious impulses that make your interpretation right. If you want to do something they are not consenting to, deciding you can interpret their unspoken desires is a route to doing as you please. “I know what you really want” is a dangerous and destructive line to take.

We second guess each other. We look for deeper meanings and implications that weren’t there. All too often we ignore the possibility that the surface language was fair and true. If we can’t tune into each other’s distortions and double speak at this point, we are doomed to mutual incomprehension. Then we can follow through by blaming each other for lying and misleading.

Language is a flawed, but also fantastic tool. It is the underpinning of human co-operation and we depend upon it to share and develop ideas. And yet we deploy it carelessly, and bend other peoples’ to distort their meanings. We do not say what we mean and then get angry when other people fail to understand us. Or we get angry with the people who do carefully speak and understand in literal ways.

We need to say what we mean. We also need to assume other people are saying what they mean because it’s probably the only hope we have of weaning each other off passive-aggressive language use. We need to give a good, hard look at those facets of our culture that are corrupting language with on-going misuse. Or we end up unable to talk meaningfully with each other, interpreting ‘I never want to do that,’ as ‘maybe later’ and “you are hurting me,” as “I like this, please do it again.”

I gather it is a Domestic Abuse awareness week here in the UK. I’d like to point out that wilful re-interpretation and misinterpretation can go a long way to enabling abuse. When nothing you say is taken at face value, it is impossible to speak. Your words will be reinterpreted to suit the inclinations of your abuser. When nothing they say is to be taken at face value, and you might be harmed if you don’t understand what they really want, words become weapons. They become the justification for weapons. Interpretation can become a reason for violence, for forced sex, for shouting and breaking things. The implications are huge.

Taking a person at their word is an important mark of respect. If that is taken from you, the damage to your sense of self is massive. Being able to trust what you hear is essential if you are to feel secure. If you’ve got to constantly second-guess what is being said to you, then you never feel safe or comfortable, you are always anxious and on edge. That’s no way to live. If a wrong interpretation will lead to a denigrating bout of verbal abuse, or a bodily assault, you learn to be really afraid of getting it wrong. You also feel like this is your fault and responsibility – you are the one too stupid to understand, so it’s because of your mistakes that you are assaulted. There’s huge psychological implications to feeling that way. It destroys your sense of self.

This is what we do to each other when we let over-interpretation go unchallenged. We make a culture in which some women are not able to say no to sex because their words are twisted to mean other things. We make a culture in which some men think its ok to hit the person who didn’t get what they really meant. If we stop abusing the language we will edge in the direction of not abusing each other.