Swimming Easy in the Deep

A camel, a lion and a wheel

Nietzsche reckoned the spirit went through 3 stages.  In the first stage it is a camel kneeling obediently while it is loaded.  The camel then wanders off into the desert where it encounters the "Thou Shalt" dragon.  To slay the dragon the camel is transformed into a lion - the better the load, the more fierce the dragon.  Once the dragon is slain the lion is transformed into a wheel spinning out of its own center with all the lack of inhibition and spontaneity of a child.  

Celebrate the slaying of your own dragon by doing something totally goofy.  If you are mortified by what other people may think, the dragon is still breathing fire ....

THE BEST LAID PLANS OF MICE AND MEN …

And here I am having promised myself I will post at least something every day – I even have a reserve of what I call emergency posts – and not a single post for the week!

I won’t burden you with the all the gory details but between gale force winds that delayed our flight out of Cape Town to a car-hire firm that thought I was kidding when I said I can’t drive a manual gear-shift vehicle with my reconstructed shoulder yet to the unexpected admission of my wife to hospital tomorrow morning for an angiogram (we trust that it is just a precaution, but not nice anyway) to an imminent environmental authorisation hearing that just won’t go away, etc, etc, etc, I have had about an hour’s sleep a night and the prospects of more in the foreseeable future don’t look too bright.

All of which is, of course, entirely irrelevant. There are probably hundreds of people out there facing far worse challenges who would have posted twice a day given the chance. I never forget the story about the guy who complained about his new shoes pinching him who realised that he was better off than the guy with the tatty old shoes who was better off than the guy with no shoes who was better off than the guy with no legs ….

What the past couple of “post-less” days have done, is to give me an opportunity (the first since I took the plunge and went public with the Blog) to reflect on what it is I want to achieve with the Blog, and whether that is where I am going?

Swimming Easy in the Deep is about insisting on joy in spite of everything; even unexpected angiograms. It is about seeing the lighter side of life more often and more clearly, even (make that especially) when things get rough (and they will).

This is not to say that the Blog is intended to be just an amusing bit of distraction. As Tom Robbins said, being light-hearted is not the same as being light-weight. We take ourselves way too seriously and seem to think that unless we look earnest we can’t be taken seriously. I don’t agree. It may be scary to think that they are going to inject some sort of dye into Tilla so that they can take photos of her veins and arteries but that isn’t going to make her look any more elegant in one of those hospital gowns they make you put on backwards so you can’t see how ridiculous you look. Or make her paranoia about the state of her underwear, her heels and her leg-hair should anyone look while she’s asleep in hospital, any less funny.  

When I write reports or analyses in the course of my day job I always allow for a process of revision by mental osmosis. My deal with my subconscious and the universe is that I will do the hard work by churning out the best first draft I can manage. Their part of the bargain is to come up with a constructive critique.

When I revisit the piece after a day or two I invariably know how to rearrange it, know what to omit and what to emphasise and, best of all, find the right words so much more easily.

Perhaps that’s what is happening to us on a different level. We worked really hard to get the first draft out by organising this week down to the last detail.  Clearly that wasn't how it was supposed to be.  All we can do now is trust the universe to come up with a constructive critique.

Instead of worrying about how to post something to the Blog every day I have decided to take a leaf from my own book and to accept without question that evolution really doesn’t make mistakes. If, despite my best intentions, circumstances conspire to keep me away from the Blog for a day or two, then so be it. 

Someone asked me where I wanted the Blog to go. My first instinct was to come up with an erudite and witty response but nothing can beat the Sufi tale of the teacher who had become famous and drew crowds wherever he went:

One day as he stood before a crowd he asked them: “Do any of you know what I have come to say?”

When nobody answered he told them to go away and think about it and left without saying another word.

The next time he arrived to speak he again asked: “Do any of you know what I have come to say?”.

This time they all answered a resounding “Yes!”

At which point he said “Well then you don’t need me to repeat myself”, and left.

The crowd were ready for him the next time and when he asked them “Do any of you know what I have come to say?”, they answered: “Some of us do and some of us don’t”.

To which he responded: “In that case those who know can tell those who don’t” and left.

To be honest, I am just swimming easy in the deep with the Blog. I have no idea of what circles around in the waters below, no idea of what will happen next and am enjoying every minute of the suspense. As the gentleman on the deck of the Titanic said to the waiter: “I asked for ice, but this is ridiculous”.

 

Until next time. Insist on joy in spite of everything!

THE DIVINE PATTERNS OF THE UNIVERSE?

According to a rather amateurish New Agey booklet on the counter at the local pharmacy if we would only tune in to the “divine patterns of the universe” there would be no evil, no crime, no poverty, no need for states or police forces and best of all peace would reign forever.

The Biblical prophecy of the lion lying down with the lamb will come to pass, so the brochure claims, not just because the Bible tells us so, but because that’s the way the world really is. 

Oh yes, and if we all agreed to part with a sizable chunk of our already meager wealth, the publishers would let us into this long-lost “secret” so that we could all live happily ever after.

Truth be told, there are so many forgotten secrets floating around these days it’s a wonder we remember anything at all. 

There are two common denominators for these “secrets”:

• They only get revealed in return for cash; and

• They don’t work.

 

There may be two more:

• If it doesn’t work, there’s nothing wrong with the secret, you must have done something wrong; and

• It costs double to buy a second chance (which comes with the absolute guarantee that it won’t work either) and three times as much the next time around.

Unduly cynical?  Methinks not.  How many people do you know who have “asked, believed and received” a million dollars in the post the next morning or a red Ferrari by Friday or that special house on the hill? 

If they sold a gazillion copies of “The Secret”, why aren’t there a gazillion new millionaires or suddenly blissfully happy individuals … and how is it possible that John McCain can still win the election?

By now one would have thought that everybody knew that life isn’t a mail order catalogue, but it seems not; there are still people naïve and stupid enough to part with their hard-earned money in the expectation that they can order a different life as easily as they can switch channels on the TV.  

But I digress. The  “let’s-all-play-nice-because-that’s- how-it’s- supposed-to-be” brigade have always fascinated me – almost as much as the “we-dare-not-harm-anything” crowd.

Perhaps I’m just dumb, but I have always thought that if everything stopped eating everything else we’d drown in cow shit within a week or be queuing up for the last remaining leaf on the only non-sentient plant on earth. And if we (you and I) stopped eating other things, you can bet your bottom dollar the guy next door will start serving double-portions.

You just have to tune in to National Geographic or own a cat to know that “mother earth” works because some things kill (and others are killed by) other things.

If the lion suddenly lay down with the lamb, it wouldn’t be long before both of them (and the rest of us) would be looking for celestial soup kitchens as the ever growing masses of everything that was no longer being eaten bred us all into oblivion.

The bad news is that there are no divinely gentle patterns in the universe; no short-cut to Blandville where nothing ever goes wrong. The good news is that the myriad of violent encounters that happen every moment of every day create more windows of opportunity than we could ever use for those lucky enough to still be uneaten.

Perfection is the result of a cumulation of imperfections. Millions of years of evolution coupled with generations of selective breeding with less than perfect stock produce a champion stallion. Thousands upon thousands of microscopic scratches on what was once a flat glass surface will produce a perfectly smooth lens. We are perfectly in place right here and right now.

There are patterns to the universe but they cannot be bought, do not come in limited editions and will not reveal themselves to anyone who does not believe in magic or intends doing harm. 

If we tune in to the patterns of the universe we find peace in the perfect imperfections of life on earth; we see ourselves reflected warts and all in the mirror of space; and we vibrate in resonance with the strings of time. 

When anyone promises to lead you to a perfect world in which the lion will lie with the lamb, think “wolf” and “Little Red Riding Hood” instead – you are about to be had!

Swim Easy in the Deep. Insist on joy in spite of everything.

POSITIVE PESSIMISM

Yvon Chouinard is as close as one can get to being an invisible icon. Rock climber, surfer, falconer, writer, angler, entrepreneur, environmentalist, visionary, would all be appropriate descriptions for the founder of the company that makes patagonia^® outdoor clothing who is adulated by many but completely unknown to many more.

Chouinard is credited with inventing the “slow company”.  In various interviews he shrugs off the notion and explains that all he really did was to keep his company’s focus on what it did instead of how much profit it made – an unintended consequence has been that his profits have easily outstripped the opposition (for whom profit was all that mattered)!

His company is at the cutting edge of environmental accountability, he has probably done more than any other individual to nudge corporate America in the direction of a gentler approach to the environment and he celebrates the outdoors.

Which is why we should take notice when, in an interview carried in the July issue of Maverick Magazine Chouinard bemoans the fact that as far as he is concerned:

“It’s completely hopeless. Civilisation is out of control, growing way beyond its resources and it will destroy itself. Anyone who really thinks we’re in charge, that we can honestly change the course we’re on, well, they’re mistaken”.

Does this depress him? Not a chance.

Chouinard, you see, is a positive pessimist. As Andy Davis who wrote the article puts it:

“He literally oozes happiness and vitality – even when decrying how deeply screwed we are”.

Over the next few days I’m going to explore this notion of “positive pessimism” because it points to perhaps the most inconvenient truth of all:

Nothing that human beings can do will ever threaten the existence of our planet.

No, that is not a typo, I mean it when I say:

Nothing that human beings can do will ever threaten the existence of our planet.

Evolution doesn’t make mistakes. Where we are right now is where we are supposed to be right now.

Whether human beings survive as a species on this planet is entirely irrelevant to everybody but human beings.

The planet, cockroaches, crocodiles and various other planetary contemporaries were here long before we came along and there is no reason to believe that they won’t be here long after we are laughed off the existential stage.

How many species we take down with us matters more to us than it does to the planet. Whatever we do, on how great or small a scale we continue to screw up and whether we are here or not, the universe will maintain the evolutionary equilibrium we are vain enough to think we can influence.

What we are trying to save is not the planet, but our own collective butt!

And we’re not doing well at all …. Despite all the noise we are still spending and consuming ourselves into oblivion at an ever faster clip.

What to do? Nothing we can do. As Chouinard points out, we are well and properly screwed. So, as they say in the classics, we may as well lie back and enjoy it.

But that’s also not entirely true. What Chouinard is saying, as I understand him, is that whether human beings will survive as a species or not is not in our hands – never has been and never will be.

All we can do is to trust the universe and there's no reason, no reason at all, why that can't be fun.

Positive pessimism means:

• understanding that if our future depends on people we don’t have one; and
  
• knowing that just as the universe conspired to get us here in a moment of inspired craziness, it is still crazy enough to keep us here.

All the universe needs is for us to say we want to stay and to behave as if we want to be here, as if we enjoy being here ... which is what Chouinard (and Swimming Easy in the Deep) is all about in the first place.

 

THE MAN, THE BOY AND WHEN A BANANA IS JUST A BANANA

Many, many people dream about a perfect world where there is an explanation for everything and nothing happens without an obvious reason. People don’t like uncertainty.

We are content if we understand how and why something is the way it is or how and why it happened, even if it isn’t nice. If we don’t, or heaven forbid can’t, explain or understand something, we have a problem.

There are two standard human responses to the unknowable and inexplicable:

• to pretend it doesn’t exist (which is quite common in the scientific community where anything that can’t be observed or measured doesn’t exist by definition); or

• to invent an explanation or reason (whether it corresponds to reality is not really an issue, as long as there is an explanation and a reason).

Just how silly this is, is well illustrated by the following stories:

A man goes to the doctor …

A man goes to the doctor distraught beyond words because he has a major and most embarrassing problem. After examining him the doctor prescribes medication for the man’s condition and a mood enhancer and instructs him to be back in a week. When the man returns the following week the doctor is delighted to find him in a much better mood, smiling and joking with the receptionist and other patients.

Doctor:

I am so glad to see that you are feeling better. The tablets must have worked.

Man:

Not a chance. It’s much worse than last week.

Doctor:

But then you were ready to jump out of the window and now, even though it’s worse, you’re on top of the world. How come?

Man:

It’s those little blue happy tablets you gave me Doc. Ever since I’ve been taking them … well … it doesn’t matter.

Berry patient

A doctor has spent the better part of an afternoon patiently plucking tiny berries from a little boy’s left ear.

Exasperated Doctor:

Just tell me why. Why on earth did you stuff all these berries in your ear?

Smiling Boy:

They kept falling out when I stuck them up my nose!

Sigmund Freud may have got some stuff wrong but he understood the sometimes random nature of life as this often-told story shows: While they were studying the meaning of dreams (and focusing on bananas as phallic symbols in dreams) the great Doctor came down to breakfast one morning to find his daughter (who was also his research assistant) extremely troubled:

Freud:

What is it?

Daughter:

You know how our research shows that when we are dreaming about bananas we are actually dreaming about penises?

Freud:

Correct.

Daughter:

Well, last night I had a dream about all the men in the city including you. Every one of them, including you, had a banana and yours, yours was much bigger than anybody else’s. Whatever could that mean?

(After a short moment of thought)

Freud:

Well daughter … sometimes, just sometimes … a banana is just a banana.

 

It may have been nice to have an explanation for everything. We don’t.

Living in an uncertain world is a given. All of us (you, me and everyone else) were signed up for the adventure at birth – and there are no emergency exits along the way.

Just like the intrepid explorers of old, we are hacking our way through our own jungles without a clue of what we might encounter next.

We can pretend we aren’t and take little happy blue pills that make us feel better without our being better; we can keep ourselves busy with nonsense; or we can buckle-up, enjoy the roller-coaster ride and make it up as we go along.

Which sounds like more fun?

Insist on joy in spite of everything!

Swim easy in the deep!

THE SECRET TO SUCCESS: POSE AND SUBSTANCE

Life comprises two elements:

• Pose; and
• Substance

To succeed at anything you need both and progress requires you to adopt the pose until – or even in the hope or expectation – that the substance develops.

The logic is really quite simple:

• Unless you look the part you are never going to play the part; and
• There’s no use in looking under “L” for Landing in the Idiots Guide to Flying when you’re about to touch down.

 If all you have is pose your deception will be exposed sooner rather than later. If all you have is substance nobody is going to believe you and you are likely to end up on the sidelines somewhere.

 We all pose. More often than most of us would like to believe. Most often with no idea where the substance will come from. All we can do is trust the universe to deliver … and it usually does.

Ironically pose is not something that is adopted just for the benefit of others, so that we will look right to them, but as importantly so we will look right to ourselves. Our subconscious is a fickle and peculiar thing. It will kick into action to flesh out a new pose at the drop of a hat but will slumber in the background in the absence of one.

This notion of “pose and substance” has an interesting footnote. 

We have been taught to believe that there are only three kinds of knowledge:

• What we know we know;
• What we know we don’t know; and
• What we don’t know we don’t know.

While this may be scientifically accurate in the sense that it can be proven, life isn’t always scientific. At some point in our lives, with some more often than others, everybody finds themselves knowing how to act in a completely new situation, something they had never dreamt of having to do. How does that work?

While scientists may not like it, there is a fourth kind of knowledge: What we don’t know we know.

Those among us who are more easily more willing to adopt a challenging pose are usually also those who most readily accept that we can tap into a universal source of knowledge in ways we may not be able to explain or understand but which is there if we expect it to be. Some people accept this consciously and are able to use it at will. Most, however, only discover or use this parachute of knowledge when they are in unexpected crisis … and then end up believing it was dumb luck. More’s the pity!  

CRAZY WISDOM: ROBBINS SAYS IT BEST

The aim of Swimming Easy in the Deep is to be a serious bit of fun that nudges readers into smiling at life so that they can experience the joy of receiving a celestial grin in return. 

Which is easier said than done and I must confess to finding it really hard to be light-hearted all the time and have ended up writing posts that are longer than intended, more cerebral than they should be and about as funny as a utility account.  It seems I am struggling to escape the ubiquitous subconscious suburban conviction that light-hearted must be light-weight.

So it was with some relief that I came across a new interview with Tom Robbins on the meaning of Crazy Wisdom and how it works.  Robbins starts all his novels with a single "perfect" sentence and then completes them one sentence at a time trusting the universe to lead him from the one full-stop (period if you are in the States) to the next until he gets to the last one.  Apart from being really funny and having an organic - some would say orgasmic - resonance with the vagaries of a universe that defies the vanity of our collective delusions of order, he writes extremely well and has a turn of phrase that few can equal.  A quote from Still Life With Woodpecker will suffice:  "Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature".


One day maybe I will be able to write blog posts as prescient as this excerpt from an interview with Tom Robbins called "Wisdom of the Rebels" in the July issue of Shambhala Sun:

   

Shambhala Sun: How would you define crazy wisdom?

Tom Robbins: The quick and easy answer is that crazy wisdom is the deliberate opposite of conventional wisdom. Like most quick and easy answers, however, that one isn't really satisfying.

For want of a precise definition, we might consider that crazy wisdom is a philosophical worldview that recommends swimming against the tide, cheerfully seizing the short end of the stick, embracing insecurity, honoring paradox, courting the unexpected, celebrating the unfamiliar, shunning each and every orthodoxy, volunteering for those tasks nobody else wants or dares to do, and perhaps above all else, breaking taboos in order to destroy their power. It's the wisdom of those who turn the tables on despair by lampooning it, and who neither seek authority nor submit to it.

What's the point of all this? To enlarge the soul, light up the brain, and liberate the spirit. Crazy wisdom is both transformative and transcendent.

SWIMMING EASY IN THE DEEP: QUE SERA SERA

Most people think that life was once simple but has become complicated and a lot faster since the advent of mass media and the internet. They are wrong on both counts.

To begin with, life still happens one second, one hour and one day at a time. It always has and always will. As we become older each year is a slightly smaller part of our lives so far with the result that succeeding years may seem to pass faster and faster but this acceleration is an illusion. 

It is also a myth that life was once simple. Life has always been complicated beyond belief and understanding with an infinite number of possibilities facing each and every person every day. Think about it. 

As we have seen, life works a lot like racing along a busy freeway while all you can see is the rear-view mirror. Add to this that none of us can really know (as opposed to believe that we know) where we come from, where we are going or why and you have a recipe for calamitous confusion. Or do you?

The secret to life and all human success, happiness and contentment is what Tom Robbins calls the ability to “Swim Easy in the Deep” and it is to him and all the others who insist on joy in spite of everything that this Blog is dedicated. 

It goes without saying that when you actually do swim in deep waters, especially in the sea, you have no idea what is going on below you. There are two ways to respond to not knowing: you can panic and try to get out as quickly as you can, or you can relax and enjoy the moment.

Most people prefer being in shallow water or on firm ground because they feel safer there. There is just one slight problem with this belief: it is dead wrong. They are just as likely to be happy and safe in the unknown as they are to be struck by lightning, a bus or another form of catastrophe on terra firma. In fact, whether they are at home, at work or at play nobody, but nobody knows what will happen next … or even whether there will be a next.

Human beings have known this forever but our generation has chosen to pretend it isn’t true and we are already paying a massive price for this pretence. 

Now that mass media, TV and particularly the internet has made it possible for all of us to access every word ever written on every subject imaginable and we have split the atom, beaten the bad guys, put people on the moon and transplanted hearts and lungs amongst other things we would like to think that we know it all – and if not “all”, at least enough to be in charge of our own destiny.

Ironically, the self-same mass media, TV and internet that convinces us that we are in charge is also at the root of that nagging suspicion that keeps growing larger that we are not in control at all, that we are very much at the mercy of the universe and that we are hopelessly inadequate. Wherever we look we see evidence that all is not as it should be.

In the past people accepted without question that you needed to know something to know something and that most often you knew enough. 

In the age of wall-to-wall digital media we are confronted with so much knowledge that we cannot possibly know it all so we rely on experts to tell us what matters and what doesn’t. Somewhere along the way we allowed ourselves to be conned into believing that we need to know everything to know anything which makes us incurably inadequate and utterly dependent on others to cope.

There are many people who thrive on this nonsense. A whole industry has developed around SHAM (the Self-Help and Actualisation Movement – not original but really clever) to keep people believing they are inadequate, to set them up for even greater “failure” and to earn obscene amounts of money. Steve Salerno has written a scathing indictment of this situation in his book: “SHAM: How the gurus of the self-help movement make us helpless”. It is well worth reading.

Other industries promote lifestyles that are unattainable and manage to sell useless garbage to an unsuspecting public that is by now so confused that it will buy anything. People are so caught up in the belief that they can’t know right from wrong, necessary from unnecessary that it is not inconceivable that they would gladly invest in virtual toilet paper, but more on that topic in a later post.

So, how did people survive in earlier times and how can some people swim easy in the deep?

Simple really: Shut out the noise. Confused? Let me explain using a simple example.

Just about everybody can make a seriously good cup of coffee and that to do so you need to know:

o Where the coffee goes;

o Where the water goes;

o Where the cup goes;

o Where to switch the thing on; and

o Which button to press.

You really – and I mean really – don’t have to know anything about:

o Electricity generation and distribution;

o Appliance and component manufacturing;

o Which bugs attack coffee plantations and how to manage them;

o How to design, make, fire, market and sell cutlery or crockery; or even

o Where the water in the tap comes from.

 Most things are like that: driving a car, using a computer, getting laid and raising children. You need to do what you need to do; no more and no less.

 If you had to figure out everything about everything you do or want to do you would never get out of bed – assuming you got into it in the first place. 

 And, surprise!, most of the time none of us is at all frightened by not knowing what lies behind or beneath what we are doing.

 We all swim easy in the deep most of the time anyway. But just like a child who discovers that it shouldn’t be able to float, when we realise what we are doing, we sink like a stone. Changing that is not as difficult as you may think.

 In 1956 Doris Day had a huge hit with the song “Que Sera Sera” from the movie “The Man Who Knew Too Much”.   I wonder whether Ray Evans knew just how profound they were when he penned the following seemingly corny and sentimental words? Everybody over 50 is forgiven for humming along as they read the lyrics.

 
"QUE SERA, SERA"

from THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (1956)

words by Ray Evans and music by Jay Livingston

 

When I was just a little girl

I asked my mother

What will I be?

Will I be pretty?

Will I be rich?

Here's what she said to me:

 

Que sera, sera.

Whatever will be, will be.

The future's not ours to see.

Que sera, sera.

What will be, will be.

 

When I grew up and fell in love

I asked my sweetheart

What lies ahead?

Will we have rainbows

Day after day?

Here's what my sweetheart said:

 

Que sera, sera.

Whatever will be, will be.

The future's not ours to see.

Que sera, sera.

What will be, will be.

 

Now I have children of my own.

They ask their mother,

What will I be?

Will I be handsome?

Will I be rich?

I tell them tenderly:

 

Que sera, sera.

Whatever will be, will be.

The future's not ours to see.

Que sera, sera.

What will be, will be.

Que sera, sera.

 

THE GOOF’S GUIDE TO LIFE AND EVERYTHING ELSE

We live in an age of instant gratification, an age where we can buy solutions to just about everything over a counter somewhere. Stupid or vain enough to believe we know everything our generation expects that to be true for life and everything else too. It isn’t.

Life happens in ways we can never fully understand or ever anticipate. To quote Kierkegaard again: “Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living”.

As has been shown many times over we live in an interconnected world where everything, even our thoughts form part of the same energy. We find peace when we find resonance with this power of the universe and we get there when we realise that even though we can never know everything, we already know enough.

The most difficult thing about making peace with life (which is not the same as solving all of life’s problems) is figuring out how easy it is. Since time immemorial successive generations have survived and flourished despite seemingly knowing much less than we do.

How did they do it? The answer is quite simple: They knew and accepted some things to be true even if they had no way of proving them and knew nonsense when they saw it. Unlike our generation which needs external assistance to for even the smallest decision or challenge, they reached these conclusions for themselves.

The irony is that in replacing received wisdom with an insistence on scientific rigour we have declared much of what we know to be true to be wrong or problematic not because we don’t know it to be so but because we can’t prove it to our own satisfaction – and are already paying a terrible price for this vanity. We have decreased, not increased, our knowledge.

But it isn’t all bad news. On the contrary, once you accept that you have sufficient sense to figure out how to put one proverbial foot in front of the other, one thing leads to another and before you know it, you have a set of rules you can live by quite happily irrespective of who, where or what you are.

 

Over the years I have developed the following understanding for myself:

Rule 1:

• The universe is governed by rules that encourage what is good and discourage what is bad. This understanding lies at the heart of all religions and all spiritual schools of thought even if they get most of the rest wrong.

Rule 2:

• These rules are way too complex for us to understand completely but we don’t need to as long as we remember that:

 

• Everyone and everything is connected to everyone and everything else. Nothing happens without it affecting everything somehow. Sometimes the flutter of butterfly wings on one side of the universe may well cause tidal waves on the other. It could just as easily calm them. We may intend particular consequences but for every set of intended consequences there is an equal and opposite set of unintended consequences – you intend someone harm but end up hurting yourself more; the less you ask, the more you get. And it doesn’t help to try and manage these unintended consequences because all that does is to extend the consequential matrix of ripples ever further and ever wider.

 

• Life happens; it isn't scripted or choreographed and it certainly can’t be blamed on you, God or anyone else. Once we accept this it becomes a lot less scary.

 

• You can't change what is past and can't know what lies ahead.

 

• All you have is right now. If you can stop for the moment and think it through you will realise that you can engage with right now without looking backwards or forward.  Once you become more acutely aware of your immediate surroundings (what it looks, sounds, smells and       feels like) and concentrate on what you are actually doing instead of why, you go into a zone where nothing else matters which is as it should be.

 

• We control our thoughts, not the other way around, but we can and often don't realise or do this.  If we are able to separate thought from reality half the battle is won.

 

• Even if it is not  pre-ordained all loss, all suffering and all joy have meaning in the       sense that they change the way the world and the universe work. 

 

• We will never know why things happen to specific people.  This, I think, is not because there is a hidden reason behind horrible things that will one day be revealed to us but because there is no reason as such other than that it happened.       

 

• Whether we are Christians, Muslims, or whatever, we are born from a single source of energy that defies our understanding and we will all become part of that energy when we die.  It makes no sense for God to have favourites or for us all to be captive to the geography of our birth.  Either we all come from the same       power or we don't.  How we will meet up again I really don't know but I am certain that we will all end up in the same "place" or "space" and that how that happens and works will make sense there even if it doesn't do so here.

 

• Our single biggest talent / survival mechanism is the ability to insist on joy in spite of       everything.  This doesn't mean going into denial but simply insisting on focusing on what is joyful in even the most desperate of circumstances.  There are many, many examples of laughter in the face of adversity and it is one of the miracles of life that if you can find the strength to smile at it, life tends to smile back. 

 

• The universe metes out its own justice.  Somehow, somewhere, the universe gets even by repaying kind in kind.  Good turns are returned, bad ones remembered.  If we immerse ourselves in negative energy that is all the universe has to respond to.  As soon as we are able to let go of "hard" feelings which is easier said than done, the universe softens its approach to us.

 

Call this a Goof’s Guide to life and everything else if you will, but it works – always, everywhere, for everyone.

WOULD YOU RACE ALONG A FREEWAY WHEN ALL YOU COULD SEE WAS THE REAR-VIEW MIRROR? WELCOME TO THE REAL WORLD!

My favourite quote from Soren Kierkegaard (a really clever Danish philosopher) is: “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards”.

Imagine hurtling along a freeway while all you can see is the rear-view mirror.  No way of knowing where you are going; no way of knowing what or who you will encounter; no way of knowing what others will do! That is exactly how life is and how you and everyone else has lived every day of your life and how you will live every remaining one. Life really is as scary and unpredictable (and exhilarating) as that. Which is usually not a problem ... until you stop to think about it.

You are no exception. Nobody likes uncertainty. Which is why we so easily allow ourselves to be conned into thinking that life can be made orderly and predictable. Entire industries have been built on people’s fear of uncertainty. Churches, self-help gurus and a cacophony of professions all purvey the promise of certainty to a gullible market so frightened that it will believe – and buy – anything. They keep making money because they can’t keep their promises.

 

Kurt Vonnegut Jnr said it really well in his memoir “A Man Without a Country”:

 I wanted all

things to seem to

make some sense,

so we could all be

happy, yes, instead

of tense. And I

made up lies, so

they all fit nice,

and I made this

sad world a 

paradise.

I have never had a problem with the existence of God. In this universe of ours nothing is always nothing no matter how much of it you have and for something to be means it must have come from somewhere. Once one accepts that you really don’t (and probably can’t) understand some things it is not difficult to accept that there is a power beyond our understanding responsible for us being here. Which does not equate to a kindly old man with a beard who looks like us, sounds like us and behaves like us.

Like Voltaire I tend to think that “God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh”. One only has to look at a giraffe, a warthog or most people in the queue at your local supermarket to know that God has a sense of humour and creation is infused with giggles.

I also don't buy the notion of a "personal" God who preordains everything.  God doesn't make mistakes, doesn’t have favourites and doesn't do nastiness.  We have free choice and exercise it every day to leave our individual scratches on the surface of history.  I refuse to believe that there is a being - Godly or otherwise - who would knowingly allow the suffering in Darfur or the rape of infants and grannies. The very idea that it could be different is, to my mind, blasphemous.

Fact is, when bad things happen it is because they do; just as good things happen. We can try to avoid the former and encourage the latter but ultimately we have no control over what happens. It all depends on where we are when what happens.

It would be much easier to mindlessly accept that whatever happens is as it must be in a grand scheme of things worked out by God than to come to terms with the fact that there is no scheme and that anything is possible – do you really think God sits around deciding which early worm gets caught by the bird; who goes to the loo when; whether your boss is going to like your presentation or not?

I find solace in a childlike acceptance that evolution doesn't make mistakes and that where I am right now, is exactly where I am supposed to be and that this is always so for everybody.  Our baggage, our joys and our despair form part of a universal energy of which we and everything else and everything that has ever and will ever happen is a part.

We find peace when we find harmony with this power of the universe and we get there when we realise that the universe is governed by rules that encourage what is good and discourage what is bad.

Next time we'll look at what that means.