Life – Page 33 – Achilles & Aristotle

Achilles, Life, Odysseus, Psychology, Science, Work

Stop Hoovering

I knew this (or at least I kind of did) but a line in a book has recently kept it on my mind… ‘Mood’ is more a matter of biochemistry than anything else.

In the right mood everything is possible: ingenuity, problem-solving, creativity and joy. In the wrong mood, it’s all too much; all too hard and nothing can be done.

Win the lottery, lose your job, whatever happens most people’s underlying ‘mood’ ticks along remarkably unaffected; so long as you let it. Apparently only bereavement really affects mood for extended periods. It seems we can’t short circuit grief.

So ‘mood’ in fact, is not really about how happy, fulfilled, successful, busy or creative we are. It’s about noradrenaline, serotonin, cortisol and melatonin. These operate in an internal chemistry set, controlled by the limbic system – which is pretty much the same as in a bear, a monkey, a cat or a dog.

The limbic system is very resilient, very effective and very old – crocodiles have one. But it needs looking after. Apparently if you stress it to much, it chemically crashes and puts you into a state of hibernation. Literally.

My book says the physiological symptoms of stress-related depressive illness are best understood, as exactly what happens in a bear’s body when it prepares for hibernation…

Why? Because the limbic system interprets the signals from the environment as too ‘hostile’, and that same old system kicks in: which enables a crocodile to lie dormant in mud for months; or a bear to hole up in a cave. We shut down; to wait for better days.

And here’s where the Hoover comes in. Because if you’re working yourself to the point your limbic system is about to blow a fuse – you have to stop; however exhilarating is the sense of achievement of getting more things done, or however great the pressure to do even more.

The test for hard-working diligent people is this; literally and metaphorically can you sometimes ‘leave the Hoover in the middle of the room’..? That is, can you visibly leave half-finished a task, you and people around you expect you to finish?

Ouch, guilt and fear of humiliation – that hurts…

Because if you can’t – and you don’t listen to your body and look after your mood, there’s only one place you’ll end up…. shattered, flat and feeling like hibernating.

This much I have learned in the past few weeks – if you want to avoid becoming a very grizzly bear, sometimes you have to leave the Hoover in the middle of the room.

Achilles, Life, Odysseus, Psychology

Black Cat

Apparently human beings are easily fooled by coincidence – we are tuned for life in a Stone Age village, where not that much happened.

The maths of probability are skewed by the everyday experience of everything happening to us. As the precocious footballer Mario Balotelli is wont to say ‘why always me?’

Lady Luck is our constant companion, as we try to fit random events into a sensible narrative of what the blazes is happening to us. Studies suggest the gods (although not God) first sprang from here.

So how much of life is luck, how much is the luck you made – for better and for worse? Who knows. It all seems to makes sense looking back; but at the time…

Was it me, others, chance, caprice – or the hand of gods or God? Whatever and wherever you ascribe the credit or blame, like the handsome black cat who once stalked me for a fortnight, I have landed firmly on all four paws this week.

Happy days.

Aristotle, Ethics, Life

A Taste of Luxury

Four days of luxe in the Balearics leaves me with mixed emotions. It cost a lot. We’ve never done anything this expensive, in the more-than-a-decade since we’ve had kids: it’s their first ever flight on a plane.

It was absolutely lovely in the main. We didn’t pinch the pennies, and largely had and did what we all wanted.

We also succeeded with multiple modes of transport: car, bus, plane, hire car, ferry; navigating ‘sin plomb’ with aplomb, in the obligatory last minute hire-car-drop-off-petrol-top-up-panic – arriving with fully 5 minutes to spare.

A breeze through the airport, and as I sit here with bad inflight coffee in hand, it’s all been very good.

But you couldn’t but notice that the many kind and smiling people who served us on our hols, weren’t anywhere near as flush as we are; and back at home we feel poor enough.

The nice young man, at last night’s eye-wateringly expensive restaurant, has a small son and daughter in Spain. A need for work took him hundreds of miles away from them – to serve us unnecessarily fancy food at our boutique hotel.

On the next-to-last leg we went the wrong way round the Ibiza Port one way system; and drove past a three storey yacht. Complete with polo shirted crew and chi chi cocktail party “How much would one of those cost?” my daughter asked.

Her mother and I had no idea. But one thing is for sure, absent major criminality, venal corruption or sustained workplace psychopathy – and I don’t do those – the massive yacht will likely elude us.

At the airport, the first thing ‘free wifi’ served up, was one of my colleagues tweeting from a refugee camp in Beirut, about the everyday courage of people protecting and promoting their arts and culture in Lebanon. Puts it all in context.

Jeremy Deller’s ‘We sit starving amidst our gold‘ captures the right attitude to that super yacht for me; a giant William Morris, the great Victorian social reformer, lifts and hurls one into the sea.

We had a lovely lovely time. But luxury is expensive, intoxicating and addictive. Like all such delights, it is best tasted sparingly.

Life, Psychology

Scrim Down

scrim: (noun) pronunciation /skrɪm/ Theatre: a piece of gauze cloth that appears opaque until lit from behind, used as a screen or backcloth: “a plain scrim for backcloth and good lighting are all that are needed.”

We all live in our own personal cinema. Much, if not all the time, the way we experience and interpret the world is based on the familiar script of how we view ourselves; played out against the cast of characters with whom we are surrounded. Sometimes the hero, sometimes a victim; it is often supremely hard to see beyond the daily soap opera which occupies our heads.

The late American psychologist Donald C. Klein has some interesting things to say on this, in his 2004 paper ‘Appreciative Psychology: An Antidote to Humiliation’:

“The scrim is a transparent curtain on which theater people paint scenery. When illuminated by footlights and spotlights from the auditorium to the stage, the scenery appears opaque.

That scenery and the actors playing their parts on the stage in front of the curtain constitute “reality” for audience members. The curtain no longer is perceived as transparent.

If, however, the scrim is lit from behind, the scenery fades or even disappears. The curtain now appears transparent and the audience can see through the curtain to a whole new vista of objects and people, that is, a new reality.

It is as if each of us has a ‘mental scrim’ on which, from earliest childhood, we have been painting the scenery of our lives, literally millions of thoughts about ourselves and the world around us.

When we are an ordinary state of being, we take these ideas very seriously and treat them as the only reality that is available to us. Under ordinary circumstances, this is the only reality of which we are aware.

Under special circumstances, however – as, in my case, when I witnessed a beautiful sunset and experienced the awe and wonderment – our mental scrims become transparent. The clutter of thoughts about ourselves and the world fade or even disappear. We see through and beyond our mental scrims.”

It’s a lovely concept. If (to paraphrase Klein) you can regularly get beyond:

how one imagines one appears to other people;
one’s imagination of other people’s judgment of that appearance; and
emotional reactions related to one’s sense of self…

…you are metaphorically, and sometimes literally laughing; as I was yesterday with a great friend, as we laughed and laughed at each other’s French phraseology.

If you feel the ‘mental scrim’ of the ‘millions of thoughts about ourselves’ and the soap opera of ‘one’s imagination other people’s judgements’ coming down, all you have to do to escape, is concentrate hard for a moment on looking through it.

Reality is often full of little-appreciated beauty, joy, happiness and love which is simply masked by the vivid, all-consuming but largely psychological ‘light show’ playing out in nearly all of our heads, nearly all of the time.

Donald Klein’s ‘mental scrim’ is worth thinking about; and regularly seeing through.

Achilles, Life

Enobarbus

I always remember – from my youth – Enobarbus’s immortal line from Antony and Cleopatra…

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety.

Antony and Cleopatra: Act II Scene II

I was Enobarbus in our classroom rendition of Shakespeare’s classic. And as it was in the play, so it is in life.

‘Infinite variety’ keeps you on your toes. Sometimes frustrating, but perhaps essential in a life partner.

But as Lepidus says at the start of the scene:

Good Enobarbus, ’tis a worthy deed,
And shall become you well, to entreat your captain
To soft and gentle speech.

‘Infinite variety’ and ‘soft and gentle speech’ aren’t bad ingredients, to keep the most important relationship on the right road.