HESITATION / PANIC
Some things are hard to decide especially if your life’s been in something of a crisis. Are they fair, right, or abusive? Conjure up a panel of three judges, figures whose wisdom and experience you’d be happy to live by, and imagine them looking down on you as you try to make sense of a situation. What do the looks on their faces say? If you’re happy to live by their rule, and that bit is up to you, take note and act accordingly.
HESITATION / PANIC
Control what you can control, which isn’t much, really. Even if you feel you have something under control you’ll soon see how that might go wrong. Staying in control needs a certain way of thinking: you can’t, but up to a point you need to be able to try … and even if you find yourself able to ‘let it go’, as they say, you need to be able to think and do the ‘letting go’ thing without getting stuck in the process.
Feeling in control is being in control. And feeling in control comes from being able to do decide ‘I will do this’ without delay. Not actually doing it, but being able to do it.
What makes life really difficult are those hesitations, confusions and potential changes of mind that stop you from picking up on something quickly enough to act on it. These moments shape your life: ones happening now; those chances of something different emerging.
What can you do? Forget about the past for a moment and look at what affects you in the here and now, which jams the machine, if you like. Which leaves you uncomfortably hovering. Anyone can do this. All you need is a reliable other person who can tell you what they see and feel stops you in your tracks.
If you’re to feel in control you need to be able to act without hesitation. Staying in control is feeling in control.
INEXPERIENCE / FEAR
People take all kinds of supplements: everything from Vitamin D to lavender oil capsules. If you have a fear of something and you know, rationally that there’s something disproportionate about your fear try doing this. First of all, don’t dismiss this fear. Invite it into your thoughts carefully, like you might let someone into your house who’s come to repair something. You wouldn’t leave you purse on the table where they were working unattended, would you? What else might you not do? Let your mind get into ‘safety mode’.
Once you have introduced the thought let another one in that doesn’t feel connected, and which you can do something about. Cook something, for example. Watch something. Anything that really engages you. Don’t let your mind go back to the original one apart from for the odd glance now and then.
After a while see how you feel about that thing you fear. Maybe you’ll fear it less. What other emotions come up after you’ve done this. Notice them. Then get on with another thing. Whatever you do … do SOMETHING. Just make sure it is very low risk indeed.
DESOLATION / LUST
I’m not sure what I mean. I was thinking, if only Pete Shelley and Beyoncé had done something like Shane MacGowan and Kirsty McColl. I love all that stuff. I suppose I’m getting into the selfishness of love. In the first place it’s totally selfish. When I feel and say, ‘I love you’, who’s feeling the love? Me. And then, sometimes, perhaps, the other person feels some love. Saying ‘I love you’ might confirm something, spark something, fire something up.
If you aren’t aware of all this stuff, especially the bit about love being selfish, read on. This piece is about conditional loving (the kind of thing I was doing thinking I’d have loved Pete Shelley and Beyoncé to have done … I don’t imagine they would have loved it, really.).
It’s like this: if I say ‘I love you’ so that I hear the same thing coming back to me, so that I feel loved, maybe I should have kept my mouth shut. If I say and feel ‘I love you’, I hope I pick my moment so that it may be the right moment for you. Cuff it. What love sounds like, actually, isn’t up to me. It’s a multi-person thing.
The other thing: if I do or say something expecting some gratitude I should possibly never have done it. Not always, but usually, doing something and expecting someone to be pleased won’t end well.
Hoping is another matter.
Someone said to me the best thing ever about love: faith, hope, trust, they said. These are the ways love can happen between two people. Loving involves being open to another person and if you feel desolation in your life, or frustration, I suspect you have spent many hours on your own with your love. That’s devastating. What can you do?
Anticipate the selfishness in love and mediate it. That’s all you can do, really. Look for it in your loving and in what you hear from somebody else, and don’t necessarily recoil when you find it. It will be there: it’s a matter of what is also there. The love +.
Love + might dispossess. It may do something that works against the ‘wanting you to be mine’ thing, like what happens in that stupid children’s game, Buckaroo , where something trips and all the baggage flies off. The possessiveness of love can pull or push other people, the ones you say you love, into carrying you and all of the stuff you find too much.
Filter love as you send it and as you receive it. Imagine love like a postcard rather than a letter. ‘Wishing you were here’ rather something in a sealed envelope. It’s always the sealing off that’s the problem. Sealed off people can’t love or be loved. Sealed off love can’t be felt. Sealed off thoughts can’t be loving.
Anybody can see what’s on a postcard, and of course there are times when you can’t show what you feel (or face the consequences) and only a letter or even something more secret will do. But imagine, just imagine, somebody fair-minded, someone who you’ve never seen show contempt, and trust what you feel they might think of your message.
ALIENATION / PLAY
Leo Bersani wrote that ‘contempt cements the couple’. What seems paradoxical is revealed to be a most powerful form of bonding. Contempt makes somebody or something a strange object of desire. To feel contempt is almost to feast on someone. What a loss it can feel when someone contemptible slips out of sight.
If contempt plays a large part in your life it may have come as an answer to your panicked sense of alienation. A sense of not being part of things, of being disconnected. Feeling kept at a distance, unable to play life’s game you look for a loser who can take the brunt of your despair. More than likely you’ll bond through contempt, too.
Contempt allows politics to find an enemy: left hates right; right hates left. If you’ve ever been politically active you’ll have memories of meetings where someone or something on ‘your own side’ was savaged for not being right or left enough. Politics all too easily becomes a feast of individuals attacking those closest to them.
Bonding through contempt is like keeping a menacing beast. Take your eye off it and it will savage you. Groups who pass time lacerating others will rip into one of their own for the tiniest of reasons – and especially if somebody does something that might threaten them to feel ashamed.
Contempt is a terrible, violent anaesthetic to shame.
Fortunately contempt is easy to get out of your life. To quote Bob Newhart: ‘STOP IT’.
Then you may feel your shame, which will probably feel almost unbearable, until you realise (and this kind of epiphany can change everything) where that shame comes from. Talk to someone who doesn’t welcome contempt. It doesn’t need to be a therapist (the world of psychotherapy is as shot through with contempt as anywhere else).
