by Tom Tomaszewski | Jun 1, 2024 | Be Somebody Else
When your life feels stuck you need to improvise. It’s the best way of adapting to an uncompromising world in which we all have to get enough of what we need. Being stuck is to lose your sense of equilibrium. Life feels as if it’s going nowhere; as though it’s repetitive and depleting. Getting things unstuck can feel impossible, as if you’ll have to start again from scratch. However, improvisation doesn’t mean starting again. It requires momentum: it’s keeping going by doing something else; something unexpectedly connected to what’s already there. You thrive by following and embracing new ways of doing things that take you beyond ‘okay’, which have the potential for you to be somebody else, another you, your best one yet.
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by Tom Tomaszewski | Oct 22, 2024 | Be Somebody Else
For some reason ‘gratitude’ has featured a great deal in the conversations people have brought to me. How can you feel it and express it? Twelve-step people will know why that question is so important.
You can’t artificially express gratitude. It seems to naturally occur, like laughter, unless something gets in the way of it. When there’s no gratitude there’s no joy; and when there’s no joy there’s a lack of curiosity … which usually signifies resentment. Look at what’s stopping you from feeling curious rather than try to find gratitude. You won’t find it if it isn’t there!
by Tom Tomaszewski | Oct 4, 2024 | FRUSTRATION, HELPLESSNESS
Try cultivating a sense of anticipation, rather than expectation. If you expect something it’s probably going to be easier to describe. You might have a strong sense of what you think is going to happen, where, when and so on. Anticipation is a sense of remaining open, ready to act and staying involved. Anticipate better and you’ll be a lot happier.
by Tom Tomaszewski | Sep 25, 2024 | Be Somebody Else
If you grow up around someone autistic you may find yourself being described as, or invited to think about yourself as autistic. Maybe you are. Perhaps, in the way you do life there are the signs, like footprints in the sand, of how you grew used to living with autism. We internalise the world, always attempting to make it our own.
by Tom Tomaszewski | Sep 25, 2024 | FRUSTRATION
I’m immersed in relentlessly raining blocks: shapes falling without a care for me.
This is my Tetris-dream – life as it is, indifferent to me. The pieces arrive like the complications of every moment I live, every block adding to a pile that might burn, a bonfire of my vanity: thinking I had it under control. Resentment.
As I read this I see where my dream’s pointing: Panksepp’s RAGE drive, that instinctive response to obstruction. This is the tension that builds as the game speeds up. In life it’s one mistake that takes me to the point of frustration but the accumulation, the steady gnawing away at my sense of control as the screen fills.
Time slips away. Life is merciless. Resentment, born from miscalculations, grows until until it looms above me, a tower of unresolved tension.
But the game holds a hand out to me (we’re back with the dream). Clear a line and I feel relief. For a moment I’m out of the chaos. This is anger. Something on the RAGE scale, somewhere between, gently, ‘no’ and I kick the doors down because this house is burning.
Clarity, for a moment. Resolution. It feels better.
But Tetris, like life, offers no real peace unless you’re Harry Hong or someone like him, who probably starts playing Tetris again: everything begins with repetition. The blocks keep raining down. The only way to win is by recognising what comes, adjusting to each and every complication.
This is the silent truth of Tetris. Control is fleeting, just like anger. Survival means accepting the inevitability of disorder, not trying to stop it but finding harmony within its flow.
I dream of sailors on an uncertain ocean, ever-reading the sky and the sea in ways that might escape me – or you. Life is about our powers of prediction, about following the impossible. Patient, sometimes lucky.
by Tom Tomaszewski | Aug 26, 2024 | Be Somebody Else
The way that you do things is everything. If Ryan Gosling had played Ted and Keanu Reeves had played Ken I’d have loved Barbie and wouldn’t still be wishing I could watch Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure again for the first time. Such is life.
