I’m used to hearing people say: ‘the common denominator is me’. It’s often a relief to hear someone accept that they may be the source of a problem, that they realise they may be doing something a lot of the time which makes life hard for them — and for other people. But we don’t only exist like that.
We feel we exist individually and the reality is very different.
If I wake up and think ‘I don’t feel myself today’ I know what I mean. I feel ‘off’, somehow. If I don’t think this kind of thing I’m usually feeling … okay. Good, even. Here’s a thought: we feel ourselves. A scientist might tell you that we feel our way through life before we think about it.
This thing that goes on, this good–self-feeling thing, leaves you feeling you; but it doesn’t tell you how interconnected you are with everything around you. Paul Federn wrote about this way back and anybody who’s ever been into improvisation or poetry, factories for vibes that mean we can all meet up, truly plural vibes, will know exactly what I mean.
When somebody tells me ‘the common denominator is me’I wonder: do they mean that they are going about instigating some kind of a problem which makes life harder than it has to be? Are they doing things that on reflection they wish they had not done because something else would have been the right thing? Something which wouldn’t hurt them or other people like that?
Or are this person saying ‘the common denominator is me’ hurting differently: refusing to tolerate some of the things that might follow them around from one group of people to the next in a weird kind of a way? I mean things like friendship or family, notions that people inhabit, generally without thinking about it, which dictate how a life needs to be lead. These vibes, these ways of doing life, are alive with people: they come from and through people. If you disagree, life gets tricky.
If you don’t think blood is thicker than water, as they say, or that family always comes first, as I heard someone else say, where does that leave you in situations when your experience of family is bad? Or you don’t think loyalty to your friends should over-ride other people’s peace of mind? Or for that matter when you think anything that seems to clash with the status quo? When you find somebody overlooking you because of the colour of your skin or other ways your body is, or has become, what next?
The common denominator is not only you. You are never alone.
The common denominator is you plus the force and effect of whatever you disagree with, felt in you, messing you up, as administered by other people. Our lives are full of these things. Family and friendship, and you could also think about misogyny, racism, sexuality, cowardice, resilience, or productivity. All of these things interconnect. Nicolas Abraham and probably Maria Torok thought about the dynamics of intersubjective functioning. I’m not into ‘intersubjectivity’ but let’s go with that. Fred Moten thinks about everything, so let’s go with him. These words, these things are bodies of signifiers. They do as much as anything that lives. They are group totals of who we are — the more than me as an individual which can only be felt through its effects.
Why is this important? Because often, if you conclude that you are the common denominator in situations that get fiery, or frightening, or depressing, you can find yourself believing that you must change. People around you might agree with that. Even your family and friends.
There’s a line in life that we can all come to. It marks a division between what you feel is right and true, and what others do. Do you cross it? Maybe if you cross it there’s a vibe that says you’re wrong or crazy, deluded.
Or perhaps you’re in touch with injustice and there’s no arguing with that.
Hold hands with somebody else when you cross that line. Justice may be impossible to achieve, but it’s always there to be found if you look for it together. Thinking like an individual makes you think about yours, which is always going to be a kind of profiteering, which is never just in any sense. Justice never gets started. Thinking together, which can only be felt, which might have good vibes, might find a beginning like this.
Insight and information can help you avoid repeating past ways of feeling, thinking and acting. You need to protect your capacity to think with that information, rather than to remember it. Your capacity to think freely is what will keep you safe and doing life the way you want.
Here are three things that you can do three times each day which will help prevent your body from becoming overloaded by negative intensity… worries, resentments and so on … the kinds of thing that will leave you stuck. causes a loss, sometimes a radical loss, of momentum. These three things promote positive intensity: the joy of being able to feel relaxed and thoughtful, the pleasure of being in harmony with your life, and the ability to start and stop things when you need to.
Box Breathing
Experiment with different amounts of time for the in-breath, pause and out-breath to see what suits you most for a situation. Box breathing is something you can always turn to discreetly
Don’t get taken for a ride
Stop being taken for a ride. Go and see films specifically to explore whether staying watching them or leaving is the best option. After you leave you need to be able to tell someone why you left. How long can you stay before you’re confident the film is not going to deliver what you need? You can experiment like this with any kind of experience, really. Always hold a place for your right to leave, work out how to do this in ways that feel right for you and others (ie storming out might not be the best option – quietly departing might be instead. Do you really want to make a point? What will the effect of that be on?
Instant sound bath
Buy a tuning fork or two and sound these close to your ear for an instant experience of being present in the world, connected to something outside of you that leaves you feel grounded in yourself.
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).
If you tend to zone out and lose track of time set your phone to buzz, beep or otherwise gently remind you to stay present every ten minutes or so. This is likely to feel irritating, but stick with it for a week and see what life feels like. The uncertain sense of coming and going in life, in and out of the present, is tiring and sometimes shocking. It breaks life up, makes concentration hard and may even get you misdiagnosed as having ADHD. You have been dissociating. It’s time to remain more present in your life. Alienation and hesitation go together with this kind of a problem. But I might also say that dissociation is likely to trouble anybody who’s had the odd shock.
People talk about feeling part of a group. If you feel inclined towards to ALIENATION you will still feel this ‘groupishness’ (a hard to describe combination of unity, solidity, possibility and protection), but probably in relation to a select group of one. Yourself. You may believe that you can do the ‘team player’ thing but I imagine that, on reflection, you might acknowledge that you never properly feel part of a group.
To begin to resolve this, without losing the special, clear sense of yourself that you already have practice stopping interpreting.
Pick any situation and when the part of your mind that starts to suggest to you why someone is doing something, or what they are doing means or symbolises, STOP.
Yes, STOP IT.
Lose yourself in the process of what another person is doing. Recognise how this affects you. If you really have to say anything at all maybe draw that person’s attention to what they are doing. If, for instance, you believe they may not be aware that they are doing something: ‘oh, you’ve got your wellingtons on’ (and it is sunny) … or ‘that was quite loud’ (when someone speaks with more volume than a situation seems to demand, ie in a cinema during a boring bit), or ‘you’ve got your arms folded’ (when a large adult is standing in front of a timid child and looking very defensive). That sort of thing.
You will be surprised how this way of being with someone, bracketing or setting aside your thoughts and allowing theirs to come to light while you somehow keep a beat going (like the rhythm players in a band) do, protecting ‘the beat’ of your time together (a way of thinking about life’s rhythm, perhaps), will allow you to feel connected.
You will be more connected to someone else instead of to your own internal sense of life with all of its suppositions, predictions and ways of forming conclusions.
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.
Feeling Stuck?
When you feel stuck you believe that nothing will change. Bad things repeat and the future looks bleak. Other people tell you life will improve but you don’t believe them. You can’t, however much you wish you could.
These pages are about how to get unstuck by doing things differently. Being stuck governs what you believe. Painful, contrary, invalidating feelings rule your mind and lead you to do all kinds of thing to try and get unstuck. (more...)
