The plateau

Interesting. I'd assumed that if I'm not sliding down, I'd be climbing up, but it appears that I have found a plateau. It's not a dull level, but more of a pleasant area of nice easy flatland that is verdant and rich. It feels relatively high up, but not at the peak. I like it here. All ready to do a yoga set - decided to stay in and do yoga rather than head to the gym. Later I shall investigate a local Buddhist centre, to see if it's a good place to meditate, then walk into town to meet a friend. I'm going to make today an easy and pleasant one. :-)

Refusal

I've decided. I refuse to go down. I prefer to go up. I am turning around as I type. Decision made.

The mountain

So the lowness has taken me. It used to happen every January and February when my mood would slide down a slippery mountain, until spring arrived. The winters that were partially spent somewhere hot and sunny would be fine too, a kind of elongated early-onset spring that would prevent the slide. I've been working hard the last few weeks, with work, a five-day residential, a weekend of moving house, and so my SAD lamp seemed unimportant, taking valuable time that I felt I should be putting towards unpacking, college work, or something else that seemed equally urgent. Then I started sliding and it reminded me how absolutely essential my lamp is to me, at least in winter, as well as exercise, meditation, laughter, love and distraction. London was great for distraction. Always something to take my mind off the lowness. I pray for the sunshine. I don't think most people quite get exactly how much better the sunshine makes me feel. It shines life into the darkest corners of my mind and brings me clarity and energy.

Anyway, I've spent the day writing - thought I might as well make use of my mood to write the section where my main character is depressed and starts to hallucinate. All moods can be used, as a writer. At least there's that bonus - there is a use for my lowness. Once I'd done as much as I could stomach, I decided to face the world, so I went out and I bought soil and lime green plant pots to go with the bright yellow lounge. Colour is good. On the way home I bought a Big Issue and gave the guy some extra cash in case he feels like I do. I've now re-potted my lovely plants and positioned them in places that I think/hope will help them to grow. I've sorted out the electrics and my lava lamp is on the way to flowing. I've also installed a new multi-way switch thing in the bedroom to make it easier to turn off the lamp, fairy lights and electric blanket. I feel more useful and so I feel more positive about myself.

I intend to spend this evening relaxing and allowing myself to do nothing. I was going to say 'nothing important', but that's the mistake I keep making - this is important. I am doing something very, very important. I hope that tomorrow when I wake up my mood will be lighter and more care-free and I'll start climbing the mountain again.

Birthdays...

So this entry is to wish the very clever re-namer of this blog (2010 was then) a wonderful birthday and a year full of happiness, snow, sunshine, tea, cake, cheese, yummy tofu, happy cars, happy bikes, many camping stoves, leak-proof tents, well-written travelogues, much love and many enjoyable chats with his beloved sister (me). xxxx

The whirlwind is settling

Sand, sea and feelings behind me, Bournemouth seems a long time ago. After a year apart, I finally have the majority of my belongings with me and home feels even more like home. Going back to Salford felt like a circle had completed, like something had finished. Two of my brothers used to live in the community housed in those little poetic streets, I lived there for one summer when I was 17 and I worked hard to earn money for the first time in my life - photo flashes come into my head of newspaper from the 70s lining the carpets, trying to wallpaper the ceiling and, afterwards, trying to wash wallpaper paste out of my hair. Now my nephew lives there and when I collected my stuff I felt like I had finally been able to close the circle on everything that happened there and it was with sadness that I said goodbye - to the poetic streets, Rudyard St, Kipling St, and to the church at the end of the road where the evil dogs chased me and caused me to break my foot. I remembered going back to my brother's that time, for food, sitting in his small living room with my sister, my parents, my aunt and my cousin. It was family time and family moves on. They're still around me and still in my heart, but not like it was then.

I look around me and I smile. Maybe this weekend when the whirlwind stops, I'll be able to stop and enjoy it a little more. This is my home now and my heart glows with warmth and happiness.

Cultural difference

Tomorrow I am heading off for a five-day residential (give or take a few hours) in Bournemouth, where around 70 trainee counsellors and psychotherapists will sit around and discuss their feelings, perceptions and thoughts on cultural difference. From experience, this has the potential the generate a highly volatile atmosphere and to tap into deeply rooted resentments, fears, anxieties, anger and prejudices. I am mildly concerned that I am about to walk into an emotional minefield and am positive I will end up offending someone, somewhere down the line. I hope it isn't someone I care about. It's impossible not to offend someone in a timeframe this long. Unless I become mute.

I wonder if I will be one of those that is offended. I wonder if I'll angry. Last time I got very angry when this issue came up, primarily because another girl said she wished life didn't have to be like this - that differences shouldn't matter and she wished everyone got on. I thought she was being naive and that our responsibility as counsellors is to see and recognise these differences. However, part of me agrees with her. Or rather, I wish that differences mattered only in a positive sense - we appreciated individual strengths and perspectives. I wish that we, as humans, were not so quick to judge those who are different to ourselves, or perhaps, just unfamiliar, because familiar difference is not seen as difference so much, or perhaps is not so obvious. We focus on the similarities between ourselves and those that are familiar to us.

Someone said this to me today, and I won't quote who in case he wouldn't want to be named: "...differences are a figment of contemporary cognitions which have no basis in fact and are entirely transient as peoples merge, shift and change. What ever you believe now about cultural differences will be shown to be meaningless in the future as all cultures change."

I like this comment a lot, but I think it might upset a lot of people, because on an individual level, I imagine people would be upset to hear the phrase 'figment of contemporary cognitions', perhaps interpreting the comment as suggested that their experiences are 'made up'. However, it is not that their experiences are made up. No, it is more that the differences our society focuses on are not factually different to those we don't focus on. With changing society and mixing of genetics, races, classes and cultures, at some point in the future, those differences that are key or uppermost in people's minds now, may become meaningless.

Certainly food for thought and I shall be chewing the cud on this one for a few days.

Startled connections - continued

I read back over that and I see why my mother was concerned I might be going mad. It doesn't make much sense. I wrote without thought - a very nice lesson in why thought should precede sharing of brain-content. Though this is something my dear brothers have been trying to teach me since I was small...

My previous post may suggest that my focus is on the 'critical mass' of something, but it wasn't. I can't even remember what the guy was talking about - something to do with banking - and it's no longer massively important. What struck me was the selection of 'Reading' in his example, out of all the towns in England, why would he choose one that had no relevance to him, but huge relevance to me? It got me to thinking about how we seek or see significance in our daily lives. It can be unbearable to think that there is no purpose, or meaning, or greater design. It can create a physical sensation of heightened awareness and a sense of aimless floating in the vast space we inhabit - the universe. A pang of existential angst, perhaps. We don't see and hear everything around us - we focus only on the specific things in our line of vision and the specific words in sentences that have relevance to our lives or to ourselves, and we ignore the rest.

The thing is, our memories are not big enough, generally, to retain all the details, so we have to be selective. Life is about taking opportunities and choosing different paths. My 'golden strands' were metaphorical - in my minds eye I was seeing opportunities as golden threads that are held out to us and if we choose to accept them, we follow the strand. My friend in Hong Kong offered me one such golden strand that influenced the course of that year. Life is - to my mind - composed of these little golden strands that people offer to us, that may change the path we are currently on. Like when my mother met my father in England - he offered her one such strand and she took it and her life moved to the UK from Croatia.

Science is important, but even science teaches us that it's not just the visible things that matter and influence our lives. It's the tiny or invisible things that have as great an influence as, if not more than, the visible - the subconscious, the pre-verbal memories, strings and quarks. They're all there, they exist, and there is nothing mysterious about any of them - it's just that most of us don't quite understand the stuff we don't see on a daily basis. And why? Because there is only so much we can focus on, so we select that which feels relevant, make connections between the relevances and keep hold of them as one unit of experience - our lives - discarding all that which feels unimportant or irrelevant. It's called simplifying.

I'd better get on with work...

Startled connections

So, I just did a telephone interview for someone and he said something about there not being a 'critical mass in Reading' and it startled me. Why did he choose Reading out of all the towns in England? Did he somehow know I was here? I told him that his example had startled me and asked if he knew I was based here. He said 'no'. He laughed and seemed, I thought, a little startled also - he told me that he was speaking to me from Sunderland and that he lives in Bristol. No connection to Reading, other than me. Apparently.

So is it that we somehow pick up things subconsciously from others, that consciously we have no access to, or is just that as evolutionary hunter-gatherers, our minds are fine tuned to patterns, and so we make links and connections wherever we see them or we notice only what feels most relevant or figural. Like when someone shouts our name, we hear it, among a babble of other background sounds...as then for me, among the babble of his speech, the word 'Reading' became figural.

I know what the scientists would say. There is no coincidence. It's just a connection that you pick up on and may in actual fact not really be a connection at all. Out of all the millions of unrelated words that are uttered, we focus on the ones that have meaning to us. I don't know how I feel about that. I live my life based on these networks of connections - they are what take me closer to my goal and provide me with opportunities that were previously not presented to me. There's nothing magical about this - I just take the golden strands that are offered to me and see where they lead. Do we create our own connections, or is there some bigger, deeper way in which we're all connected?

I know how some of you would respond and I am not sure that your responses would influence me massively, because ultimately none of us 'know' the answer. We believe certain things, but we don't know for sure.

Does it matter anyway?

34 clicks

Just come back from seeing Tron in 3D. Relatively entertaining. Brilliant recreation of 2D computer games into 3D. Fantastic effects, very comfy VIP seats, but terribly cheesy acting. Cheesy line - "What does the sun look like?" "Well, no-one's ever asked me that before. Warm, radiant and beautiful." Cue to shot of beautiful girl looking demure and unaware of her beauty and his recognition that he thinks she's pretty hot. Amusing.

I was a little restless when I got back so I typed in some random letters to google (which happened to be kj) and clicked through the internet 34 times (my age, in case any of you had forgotten) to see what came up. It turned out that a page on copyleft came through.

http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/copyleft.html

I know all about copyleft through brotherly brainwashing a few years ago. Thought it was an interesting way to generate random ideas or as a way to find inspiration or a starting point for something. I might try it again sometime, though as a tip (if you're thinking of trying it at home), set the number of clicks before you start, otherwise you might not know where or when to stop and end up clicking through many sunrises until one day you realise you're old.

Night night all. xx

Happy birthday!!

To me and my sister.

May we have a wonderful year of fun, frolicks, health, love, light and peace. And may we maintain our love, compassion and determination, as we need to, to achieve our goals.

Lots of love to my sister and to me, from me. :-) xxx