by Tom Tomaszewski | Sep 23, 2023 | ALIENATION
ALIENATION / PLAY
Look at all of the connections occurring in your life. Maybe think of yourself like an old-fashioned telephone exchange. Here’s a link to a short film about Enfield telephone exchange that will help you understand.
To do this properly you need to find a way of representing your connections: a list, a scribble, a drawing, a model made out of plasticene. It doesn’t matter what as long as you feel like it’s your way of doing this. And don’t try and do this in your thoughts because keeping too much in your thoughts is part of the problem we are trying to deal with.
Look at all of these connections: meetings with friends, paying for something at a shop, answering the telephone, speaking to a colleague at work. Go through them one-by-one and ask yourself ‘how much am I trying to fit in with something when I do this?’ Then ask yourself: ‘is there some small thing I can add to this exchange that might make it more me.
This exercise is about you finding your way of doing something that may involve an element of compliance – but which respects a sense of you. It’s about becoming more properly connected to the world so that if life is like a game it’s as much your game as it can be.
by Tom Tomaszewski | Sep 23, 2023 | FRUSTRATION
FRUSTRATION / CARE
Here’s a way to think about regret. The feeling we surely all have at some point about something we wished we’d done differently, or about something we wished we’d done – or not done.
This feeling can only ever be solved through understanding what your body wants. Remember, when I say ‘what your body wants’ I mean unconsciously.
In the past, at the time of the thing you think about when you feel regretful, your body wanted something. Your nervous system reached out for a feeling but it failed to find it.
You can spend the rest of your life feeling dead inside, or sleepy somehow, wishing you’d done something differently when all your body wants is to find that feeling in the future. If you feel dead inside then it’s likely it’s lost hope (don’t ask me how a body does that). If it feels sleepy then sometimes you’re coming close.
When you find this feeling your life will become more predictable. It will have continuity because you will seem more present to those around you. They won’t automatically think about asking you to do something for them because they will experience you more like a rock in a stream than a sandbank or some weed floating beneath the surface. You’ll be more there. Less interruptible. More resilient.
This is how you find the special kind of resilience called agency.
Satisfy the feeling you experience through understanding what you regret.
by Tom Tomaszewski | Sep 23, 2023 | DESOLATION
DESOLATION / LUST
Pay attention to things that you’d normally not be drawn to. Does any of it interest you?
If something does, concentrate on it. Just look at it. Where did it come from? Why is it there? Do you like it? What do your thoughts guide you to do? Consider doing it.
The way that your mind works means certain things, which might otherwise hold great significance for you, may remain if not invisible then as if they are not worth a second glance.
Think of Horatio Nelson peering into his telescope and announcing “I see no ships.“ His decision to ignore the approaching ships that he could in fact see was a strategic one. Your mind operates strategically, too, adding or subtracting significance to the way your recognise objects out in the world, to thoughts, to feelings, to dreams. Repression, dissociation: there are a various ways of clinically describing why this happens and what goes on inside you while you do it.
Sometimes you may do it only at certain times: when you are stressed, for example. Your focus changes according to your mental state, which shifts in line with whatever your body is doing to try and make everything in an ongoing experience add up and leave you okay. The problem is that ‘an ongoing experience’ will include many thoughts and feelings about events from the past that suggest how what’s happening presently may end. It doesn’t take much to make what you are trying to do now become an attempt to copy whatever your mind tells you would have been the right thing to do then, on a previous occasion.
That’s all very complicated. Simply focusing on what may normally escape your attention can give you a vital new perspective on life. You may start to see the world more fully, less telescoped, and including things, which, once upon a time might have been best avoided.
You may start to understand the special place in your life that something might have which could in the past have been too painful to include. And even if it’s simply a sock given to you by someone who loved you, I hope that you start to understand how lovable you really are.
by Tom Tomaszewski | Sep 23, 2023 | HESITATION
HESITATION / PANIC
Whatever you’re doing, imagine what you want to happen, don’t get caught up in trying to perform one particular stage of a task. This is harder than it sounds. Becoming distracted, ‘taking your eye off the ball’, is NOT what I mean.
I can best explain what I mean using some examples from cricket (the sport, not the insect).
Shane Warne was a fabulous bowler and he spoke about imagining, as he bowled, what shot he wanted the batsman to play. He didn’t focus on a spot on the pitch where he wanted the ball to land, as many coaches suggest you should do. He didn’t try to get ‘out of his head’, as other coaches might say. He held the ball very loosely (‘if I feel relaxed doing it, then I’ll be able to do what I want to do down that end’ [the end where the batter stood anxiously facing him]).
If you have a natural hesitation built into your ways of connecting you will tend to do life in segments. That’s like driving a car and having it stall again and again. Thinking imaginatively joins life up so that it flows.
by Tom Tomaszewski | Sep 21, 2023 | FRUSTRATION
FRUSTRATION / CARE
Order your material things (and I mean everything) and things you can easily get hold of like dates of special events so that they make sense not just to you but to someone who you like who seems organised. Use your imagination to work out what this would be like. Sort, gather, sift, arrange, label, box, hang, or fold the whole lot. Give everything that you and other people can easily see a place in your life.
Then you can move on to the things that only you can see or feel.
Care structures things and too much of it or not enough of it in your early can leave you with unhelpful things happening in the way that you order your life. Things get lost, overlooked, damaged or forgotten, presenting you and others with a regular source of frustration. If you are a TV station your continuity person has gone missing. The producer’s drunk. The station cat is in charge.
Think about where care comes from. What it might be all about and how people, for thousands of years, have tried to recognise its force and effects.
The word ‘care’ comes from a very old word meaning to call or to shout. Allowing yourself to speak about your frustration, to call out the things which need attention, is essential.
But before you can do that something else needs to happen. People who experience frustration in their life are generally bad at collecting themselves. Their experiences, their interests, their thoughts: all of these things tend to be scattered and aren’t things you can see or touch easily. They’re like ghosts of wild cats. They remain unreceived, not properly picked up on because something about their occurrence has gone unnoticed.
Begin by ordering the things that you can see and touch and then move onto the cat ghosts.
