Journal of a Soul 43

The Mess of Things

Winter scene of Dublin Bay from Clontarf

We learn lessons almost as soon as we are thrust forth from our mother's womb.  In the terms coined by the father of psychoanalysis the child learns early that there is a clash between the "pleasure principle" and the "reality principle," and it is somewhere in the clash of those two that the reality of life lies.* 

I can recall as a young boy when I first became aware that things broke, that plants decayed and that animals died, and finally that human beings also broke and died.  The lessons of mortality are soon learnt indeed by the growing child.  I vividly recall following a wind-up toy around the floor as a young boy and then my dismay when it ceased functioning consequent on my having wound it up too tightly.  Or when my father got sick when I was just three years of age - he lost the use of his right arm to polio and spent the rest of his life depending on his left arm only.  Or my grandmother Mary Phoebe Brophy laid out on her deathbed in the front room of the Crumlin home.  Life is messy and we learn to acknowledge its mess early. Admittedly, for some, life can be a whole lot more messy than for others.

Types of Mess

In the past few weeks I have dealt with various types of mess, mostly in the life of others, and I suppose any mess I might have experienced would be my ability or rather inability to be of help or my inability to deal with theirs at a personal level.  However, thankfully, I manage to forget about their mess as soon as work ends and I go home.  Otherwise, I would be no good to any of them. (When I was a very young teacher, I was not quite so good at doing that).  In those past few weeks I have dealt with one young lad who suffers from anger issues and shouts and roars at his dad mostly.  They have exchanged blows at times.  I have listened to another who told me that his mother (a recovering drug addict on metadone treatment) and her partner attacked him one morning and that he had rung the police. (We duly reported this to the social services, of course) I listened to another boy who is suffering from depression, and another who exhibited schizoid or schizophrenic traits and told me that the group he was founding was going to take over the world starting with Africa. Somewhere in the midst of all his outpourings he talked about exterminating those in the human race that were useless, and when he found me to be listening only and not reacting that perhaps he was playing mind games and how he didn't like anyone trying to get into his mind. (Some few Asperger boys exhibit symptoms of schizophrenia and that is a clinical fact)** I mention these instances here not to impress the reader with my psycho-therapeutic prowess or my empathy with others.  I do so to illustrate the various messes we humans find ourselves in.

Life is Unfair

I have always found that the simple statement "life is unfair" as the most basic of philosophical foundations on which to base one's life.  I remember reading it in a biography of Steven Hawking, a book co-authored by two of his postgraduate students about twenty years ago.  They had asked him whether he was angry with life for being confined to a wheelchair, indeed to be rendered speechless and motionless almost by Motor Neuron disease.  He replied in words akin to the following: "Why should I?  As a physicist I know that life is all about chance and luck -Evolution has nothing to do with fairness or justice." Obviously these are my words and are a mere paraphrase of what this world-renowned physicist said all those years ago and are rendered here through the mists of memory. However, they capture the substance of what Hawking said.

Acceptance and the Onward Thrust of Life

Sometimes the desire to understand things can frustrate us, especially our desire to understand and make sense of life.  I see this almost all the time with the Asperger boys with whom I work.  I teach them Mathematics, Life Skills, Communication Skills and Social Interaction.  One obstacle to tackling mathematical problems (in the less mathematical student) is their utter obsession with understanding everything and not being able to accept this or that method on trust to such an extent that they down tools in despair and say simply "I can't understand that!" I tell them that we are all simply finite beings.  We are not all superhuman, nor could we ever be.  There are many things which we should take on trust.  I tell them that I love technology, computers, iPads and cars and airplanes and so on.  I don't understand everything about my computer or the engine of my car but that I can drive both. The rest I can take on trust.

And so acceptance of our finitude means also accepting all the things we cannot understand and trusting others who understand some of those things.  Acceptance means going with the flow, swimming with and not against the current.  Now, I hasten to point out here that swimming with the current means just that - swimming, that is doing something, not just abandoning oneself to fate.  I stress again - acceptance is never blind fatalism.  Acceptance is an attitude that accepts things in a way somewhat similar to the following manner: "Okay, there is no use denying the obvious, I have high blood pressure, suffer from endogenous depression, am borderline obese and borderline type 2 diabetic.  Now I have the first two regulated by medication and meditation and by looking after my mental health.  I admit I must take more exercise and eat much more healthy foods so that I can control the type 2 diabetes that threatens by my diet.   I know this is possible with determination. Yes, this is something, I, Tim Quinlan must get on top of as a fifty six year old man."  Okay, all of the last several lines are true as they are an account of my medical condition.  I will do my very best to get down my weight over the next few months.  I need to drop 1 stone and I'll be fine apparently - well, as fine as any 56 year old can be.  I am a member of the local gym and do my best to take exercise and keep my weight under control.  All of that is the onward thrust of life, built on the acceptance of the reality of me and my state of health now in February 2014.

Shit Happens but Shit also Grows the Roses

The Autumn leaves in Fairview Park, Dublin, 3

We all need to accept the mess that life is or can be, and develop coping skills to guide us safely through that mess.  Life will throw many messes at us, and our task is to deal as best we can with the shit it throws at us.  That's why the Self-Help sections of bookshops and online book sellers are so well frequented.  That is also why complementary medicines and therapies are becoming so commonplace in these modern times.  Please notice I have said complementary, not alternative.  Listening to Professor Richard Kearney recently on the radio, I noticed that he spoke about dealing with his depression by the use of both medication (antidepressants) and psychotherapy and meditation, and that the treatment of mental illness needed a both/and approach, not an either/or.  As a sufferer from endogenous depression for the last twenty years I have believed this right from the start of my getting to grips with my illness, and more or less overcoming its severe debilitation. 

After coming to grips with my depression at forty years of age I have travelled more, written more - I wrote some four books, one of which I got published, done more courses, studied more, been involved in more voluntary organisations than I had ever done prior to forty.  In other words while shit happened to me, that same shit also helped grow roses which I never knew could have bloomed in my life.

The Mess of Things Revisited

As I look around me as I write I am aware of the small but significant mess of things about me.  I have a few thousand books I guess and I have spent about an hour trying to put some order on a few hundred of them.  When their authors wrote them, it is my contention that they were trying to put order on some messy ideas they had about life.  I was trying to separate my books into sections so that I'd more easily be able to access them. I also have a lot of washed clothing awaiting the pressing of my iron, some breakfast things that need to be washed and put away, documents that need to be sorted, bills that need to be paid, forms that need to be filled in and returned to this or that government department and finally, my own lack of inclination to engage with some if not all of this stuff is also part of the mess.  As I look around me I see this little mess that my life is now.  However, as I write these words I take great delight in the order that I am putting on the mess that is my existential being here and now in and through the task of making words and thoughts behave upon a page.  It is in the struggle for order, pattern and control versus the mess of disorder, lack of pattern and chaos that essentially the human (if not divine) dwells.

Endnotes

*Freud argued that the young baby realises early the importance of the pleasure principle. If the little child cries and is fed quite often when it does so it begins to realise that its needs can be met, its hunger and thirst satisfied and that such leads to real pleasure and gratification. Simply put, this is the “pleasure principle.” Now, it would be great if we lived in an "ideal world" where all our needs, wants and desires were satisfied. But such is not the real world. Instant gratification is not the way of life. Everything comes at a price. The child also learns very early on that sometimes when he/she cries their needs are not met immediately. In other words that child is beginning to learn that harsh reality is just that - harsh! It is almost superfluous to state that Freud called this meeting with harsh reality the "reality principle." The child now embarks upon a more balanced take on life – fine, it is well and good that one’s desires, needs and wants are met, but such does not happen all of the time. The young child quickly learns to balance the "pleasure principle" with the "reality principle."

** see this link for information about a possible link between Autism and Schizophrenia:  Here

Journal of a Soul 42

Reaching Out

Third Year photograph from School which I took for the Year Book.  Some will be friends for life!

I remember years ago one of our philosophy lecturers, Fr. Brendan Purcell, talking about the drive to connect in the human person, that desire to establish human relationships as a “we-wards” drive.  That odd neologism, so much Purcellian, that transforms the pronoun into a directional adverb, encapsulates a lot about human relationships. Reaching out is something we humans are wont to do. And the directional adverb sums up its two-way direction. Let me illustrate.  Recently, Friday afternoon, 3^rd January to be precise, as my brother Pat and I visited the ancient town of Santa Caterina Superiore, a small medieval town atop the mountainside in Eastern Calabria a perfect stranger came over to welcome us to his town.  In broken English he proceeded to introduce himself as Luca and told us he was a stone-mason, sculptor and artist. Our conversation was in his broken English and our rudimentary Italian.  However, we had enough words to communicate at a relatively deep and meaningful level.

He brought us to his little studio where he had many carved heads, which you will see in the photos that accompany these lines that to my mind were of ancient Celtic design as they were carved out of granite rock, at least so it appeared to me, a total neophyte in sculpture.  He also had some of his paintings on the walls.  On a small desk to the front of his studio he displayed a Visitor’s Book that was signed by many.  This man was reaching out to us to talk about his art, albeit in broken English and our rudimentary Italian.

What is that Desire or Drive to Reach Out and in turn to Receive?

Students Council presenting cheque to Arthritis Society

Let’s explore this phenomenon on several levels.  Firstly, let me deal with the biological level of reaching out.  Reductionists like Richard Dawkins would argue that such a drive or desire is merely instinctual and essentially part of that “river of genes” that flows from one generation to another.  It is simply that Darwinian survival of the fittest organism. In a sense, then, this is what I call the lowest common denominator approach.  In other words, we are no more than highly sophisticated animals. In philosophical terms, I have always been taught, and am firmly convinced indeed, that this is a reductionist or scientistic approach (Scientism is defined as an exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science applied to all areas of investigation, not simply those of the natural sciences.) 

Secondly, let me refer to the theory of social Darwinism which was extremely popular in the late nineteenth century (1870s in USA and the UK). Social Darwinists generally argued that the strong should see their wealth and power increase while the weak should see their wealth and power decrease. Different social Darwinists have different views about which groups of people are the strong and the weak, and they also hold different opinions about the precise mechanism that should be used to promote strength and punish weakness. This type of thinking can obviously lead to fascism and racism at its extreme interpretation as we have seen so vividly in Nazism and Stalinism and so forth.

Thirdly, let me mention the role of friendship in life.  Essentially friendship is an important factor in what I have termed above as the desire or drive to reach out and its opposite to receive.  Many years ago I remember learning about the ancient Greek understanding of this phenomenon.  Aristotle gives great praise his concept of friendship or philia, which includes not only voluntary relationships but also those relationships that hold between the members of a family. Friendship, says Aristotle, is a virtue which is ‘most necessary with a view to living … for without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods’.

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

If friendship is so important to the good life, then it is important to ask the question, what is friendship? According to Aristotle, for a person to be friends with another ‘it is necessary that [they] bear good will to each other and wish good things for each other, without this escaping their notice’. Friendships that are based partly or wholly on virtue are desirable not only because they are associated with a high degree of mutual benefit, but also because they are associated with companionship, dependability, and trust. More important still, to be in such a friendship and to seek out the good of one’s friend is to exercise reason and virtue, which is the distinctive function of human beings, and which amounts to happiness or what Aristotle terms “eudaimonia.”

And yet, there is still a deeper sense to the drive or desire to reach out that is purely altruistic, that has absolutely no self-interest in it for the giver, as in those who work for causes greater than themselves: people who join such organizations like Vincent de Paul, The Red Cross, Goal, Trócaire, Oxfam, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and so forth for purely altruistic reasons.  I will readily admit that there is a return factor for the giver, namely that of satisfaction, and a positive feel-good factor.  However, my point here is that there is something more than the mere biological, more the mere egotistical or self-interest at work in my above named desire or drive to reach out and to receive in return. 

If the Greeks spoke about “philia” which we have defined above, the early Christians spoke about “agape.”  Agape is selfless, sacrificial, unconditional love, the highest of the four types of love in the Bible. [Eros, Storge and Philia are the other three terms used].  There are indeed many incidents of people laying down their lives not alone for their friends, but for others whom they don’t even know at all, like a teacher or doctor or care worker or child-minder protecting those whom they care for from a lunatic gunman, or simply a fireman or Garda or any member of the public putting his or her life at risk to save another.  Now that drive or desire to reach out to another in such a purely selfless and dramatic or dynamic way cannot be explained by any of the theories I have outlined above.  Or simply how does one explain random acts of kindness? Surely they are more than just the opposite of random acts of violence? Now, therefore, I wish to call this phenomenon I’m discussing here the Greatest Highest Factor to which we can aspire as human beings?

Are we Less or More?

Perhaps one of the less desirable characteristics of the human race is its hubris or pride that would over-estimate its own abilities and indeed even its own virtues.  This, of course has led to all types of oppression and exploitation of other human beings (deemed to be less than human as in slavery), of animals (destruction of species, endangering other species to feed the greed for ivory or whatever) and indeed of the earth through destruction of nature and the pollution of the environment. 

However, we are more than those reductionists that Dawkins et al would have us be.  We are more in our desires to reach out, our drive to do good, in our moral awareness, in so far as, in the words of the great contemporary Canadian Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor, we act within moral frameworks and horizons of value that are greater than us.  Such moral frameworks and horizons of value are very clearly felt at our heart’s core in times of moral judgments in the wake of horrific crimes like those tried at Nuremberg in the wake of atrocities committed during the Second World War.  That sense of moral wrongness, of gross deviation from what we instinctively or intuitively believe is right is surely a pointer to what is more in the human person than a mere collocation of atoms, molecules or organs; to what is more in the human person than a mere correct choice of acting; to what is more in human society than the mere wellbeing of the greatest number of its citizens.

What is the more?

Many years ago (1994) I was asked by a learned theologian who was the second reader of my S.T.L. thesis what was the more in the human person at my defense of my piece of academic work before a panel of three Doctors of theology. From this distance in time I cannot recall what precisely I said then.  I most probably said something about the grace of God which lives in every human soul.  Back then in the 1990s we spoke of grace as being “the theology of Christian relationships.”  Today, I would not put the answer in such theological terms as a non-practicing Catholic who likes to describe himself as a Christian-Buddhist, whose two great heroes are the founders of both these religions.  What I’d say now is that the human being is more insofar as he is not just an animal with a high IQ.  He is an animal also with an EQ (Emotional Intelligence) and an SQ (Spiritual Intelligence).  There are times when I am meditating that some power other than me moves through me, a power that I firmly believe to be greater than me.  This is the SQ dimension I believe, to which we humans can allow ourselves to be open.  I believe that SQ shows itself in all religions in their purest forms (not in their impure forms as in Jihad or Crusades, Inquisitions or Conquistadores).  However, I also believe that SQ shows itself in many other manifestations outside of religion: in arts and crafts, in sports and in music – in all creative pursuits.  This for me is humankind in its Highest Common Factor.  Too many of us subscribe to the Lowest Common Denominator of what we humans are and can be.

Journal of a Soul 41

Thoughts on the Eve of 2014

A very wet Lungomare, Soverato, Jan 2nd 2014

I remember once reading in the works of the great Victorian theologian, scholar and writer, John Henry Newman, that essentially how (not why) we believe was as much a mystery as how we remember.  And indeed, memory is one of those great mysteries in life.

As I write this post here in Isca Marina (Sullo Ionio) on the last day of the year of 2013, bereft of Internet connections as the rain pours down – almost as inexorably as it does in Ireland – I am indeed awash with memories, most of them random, though somewhere my inner Self (whatever or whoever that is) is giving them some structure and form. Being without any instant Internet connection for the week to come means that this post will not see “light of day” on-line until sometime later than this last day of 2013 - more than likely very early in The New Year.

Is memory (which here I am equating with what many of us have come to define as the Self) really all about nothing more than the random connections and interconnections made by all those millions upon millions of neurons through those even more numerous dendrites that randomly spark off one another through this or that neurotransmitter?  Or is the Self more than a biochemical or even a psychochemical mass?  Whatever, the Self may be it always has a sense of being so much more.  Indeed, every human being wants his or her Self to mean more, to be more, than just a “bundle of perceptions” as the great Scottish empiricist and atheist philosopher David Hume had it.  After all, what client or patient comes to a psychotherapist, counsellor, clinical psychologist or psychiatrist with the complaint that they don’t really feel that they are being true to their “real bundle of perceptions,” or that they have not yet found their “real bundle of perceptions”?  We believe deeply that we are more.  Intuitively we grasp that the whole (Self) is always greater than the sum of its parts, greater than a mere “bundle of perceptions.”

And so for this present post I am defining myself as my memories.  At the end of any year we so love to trace what has happened not alone in the world or the country at large, but what the dying year has made of us.  Even, what all our years to date have made of us as we stand on the threshold of yet another year.

An old picture from 1945 or there abouts.  My mother is at the back on left

Memories crowd my neural memory pathways somewhat randomly, but with some little dictation from some centre of control – some area of “self-awareness.”  There I am, a three year old boy sitting on the dirt lane at the back of our house in Roscrea playing with a toy lorry and filling its trailer with lollypop bags of sand.  The old half-blind cat sits on the line pole, a great comforting presence.  The backyard is full of geranium plants.  The sting of the nettles on my legs as I run through the neighbouring fields. The fading sound of the train leaving Roscrea station with my daddy aboard, click, clack, click, clack, ...  Sad feelings.  Missing him again.  The move to Dublin. No electric light. Just candles till the power is restored.

My grandmother laid out in death in a bedroom in the old Crumlin house. I was ten. So still. Beyond us. Then and now. Only old faded photos remain. Uncle Pat’s funeral in 1970 when I am twelve.  The sound of leather shoes crushing the gravel as we followed the coffin up to its final resting place. The sound of clay falling on the wooden lid. Prayers intoned.  Men in gray coats condoling with my father. My mother comforting him in Granny Saunders’ garden when he cried. I buy ice cream for the same old woman – the oldest woman I have ever known as a young boy.  How I think she might expire at any second.  That horrible big yellow blister on her leg when she spilled boiling water on it. The time she told us that once as she dozed at the fire a mouse had run up here leg.  How we laughed.

The old Christian Brother who takes us for catechism and who tells us stories both to frighten and uplift us, though more of the former.  The smell of chalk dust mixed with stale urine, the steam that rises from wet coats as they lie draped over radiators on a rainy day.  The ice that covers the school yard making it a skating rink.  How we skate free on it before the bell tolls for class and lessons.  The young boy whose name I forget who is knocked clean from his bike to dusty death at only ten years of age.  The black hands of the old wind-up clock with Roman numerals that counts out our education in loud tick tocks.  The old brother winds it up every other day.

And there are so many other memories vying for attention with that self-aware centre of control that they could overpower, swamp and almost smother it at once, if all the controls were off.  Maybe this is the place to stop this wet last day of the dying year that is 2013.  Maybe too many memories have been summoned up.  Some centre of my inner Self has summoned them up, given them life, and shape and pattern.

Indeed how true is the opening statement I quoted from the venerable Cardinal John Henry Newman.  How we believe is as much as mystery as how we remember.  Perhaps a greater mystery is what we remember and how we choose to construct those memories, what shape and pattern, what form we may wish to give them.  That is the mystery of the Self, the centre of our identity which is an on-going construction, ever a work in progress.

Journal of a Soul 40

Mortality

The Lungomare at Soverato, Calabria, a few days ago

Everything is relative, they say.  Very true, but relative to what? Relative to one’s expectations or income or status in life?  A bicycle is a fine means of transport dependent on weather, distance from one’s destination and one’s agility.  A Fiat 500 is a fine car to get one from A to B in a modern town, and it’s also very handy for parking.  A Mercedes Benz is also a fine car and it mirrors the status or ego of its driver.  Indeed, everything is relative.  As an existentialist, I believe that everything is relative to the one only certainty in life, namely death.  Death is the ultimate criterion or yardstick of life.  Let me elaborate.

It seems to me that what ultimately gives anything value is its relation or relativity to death.  Art is art because it is created by mortal beings.  Music is music because it is likewise composed.  Poems are poems because they combine mortal intellect and mortal feeling to such perfect effect in words.  This is the way with all the creations of the imagination of humankind.  Because their original composers are either no longer alive or will cease living at some time either soon or in the future, the works of their imagining is valued highly by society and it builds up and adds to what we call culture.  Meditate on these last statements.  Ponder on how our mortality gives value to most things which we humans do.

As a mental game, or more correctly what the philosophers call a thought experiment, let us ponder the opposite.  Suppose for the moment that any artist or composer or poet lived forever.  His or her eternal existence would lessen the import of their artistic labours.  Their works would now become 10 a penny or a 1000 a penny and so on and so forth.  Our mortality increases the value of our little lives and our little work.  I use the diminutive adjective only in relation to our smallness, and consequent insignificance, when considered in relation to the age and the expanse of the universe.

And so, let me finish with a litany here – an old prayer style used in our Catholic churches many years ago - based on what I have described above:

The Leader (L) leads the Prayer. The response (R) to the litany is: For we are Mortal. Please note that I am invoking no deity here, just humankind’s sheer mortality which is almost the author of his humanity.  It is a humanist prayer in the sense that it is neither theist nor atheist.  This last sentence is, obviously, of the utmost importance for this writer, for he is neither pushing the one nor the other here.

Town Centre, Soverato, Xmas '13

L: For all the works of men and women everywhere and at all times, we give thanks. R.

L: For all the great poets from times gone by who weaved such wondrous words and made us cry and laugh. R.

L: For all the poets from the present times who continue to weave such wondrous words to make us cry and laugh. R.

L: For all the wonderful composers of the past, who lifted up our hearts with music and song, brought tears of joy and sadness to our eyes.  R.

L: For all the wonderful composers of the present times, who continue to lift up our hearts with music and song, bring tears of joy and sadness to our eyes. R.

L: For all the brave explorers who set forth to find a promised land beyond our native shore, we are thankful. R.

L: For all the brave explorers who set forth today and will set forth to find a promised land beyond our present shores, we are thankful. R.

L: For all the carers who give of their love in action for the poor, the lonely, the sick and the aged, we give thanks.  R.

L. For all the dreamers and visionaries everywhere who dare to believe that justice is possible in this less than perfect world we are thankful.  R.

L. For all the beauty in this world, both natural and the work of human hands we are thankful and in awe.  R.

L. For all who weep and tend our graves, we are especially thankful.  R.

L: For the hopes that live within our hearts, we are especially thankful.  R.

Journal of a Soul 39

The Human Condition

Autumn scene, Fairview Park

This title covers a multitude.  It is a phrase I have heard bandied about since I was in my mid-teens.  When I was young I was very certain of what things I really believed in; I trusted instinctively what society in its wisdom through the education system and the broadcast and print media wanted us to accept almost unquestioned; I welcomed almost wholly the accepted truths promulgated by either Church or State.  However, as soon as I got to college I was encouraged to question accepted opinions and beliefs on a cerebral level. However, it was when things began to crumble on a personal level much later in life that I really began to question the old certainties.  Questioning old certainties has always been part of the life of the thinking person.

Daily Reality

As a firm believer in the positive outcomes of such practices as those of various Meditation techniques, Yoga, Zen, TM, Tai Chi, Falun Gong, Focusing (Eugene Gendlin) and so on, and even ordinary everyday physical exercise, I have instinctively in the last twenty or so years almost always listened to the wisdom of my body.  The body, when listened to in any attentive fashion, is a great yardstick of and guide to what is truly real.  Our bodies in a physical way (through pain and the development of the various psychosomatic diseases) "know" much more about us -  stuff we either refuse to accept about ourselves or the world - or are simply unconscious of in the first place.  That's why another name for Meditation is Awareness (Anthony de Mello has written a wonderful book with this very title which is really worth reading) and Mindfulness, still another more modern synonym.  Such practices train us in precisely becoming more aware firstly of our own bodies through concentrating on or being aware of something so essentially and simply human as our very breathing, and then becoming aware of our "real" or "essential" self, or simply by learning to delight in simply being.  Doing versus Being is an interesting polarity, or contrast, or healthy tension, or dichotomy - call it what you will. They are really the two polar opposites of the see-saw of existence as it were.  I will refer to them more fully below.

What is Your Daily Reality?

My daily reality is that of a 55 year-old Special Education Teacher in a Boys' Secondary School where I teach in the Asperger's Unit as well as doing learning support for pupils who have problems in Mathematics.  In between the teaching, or perhaps more correctly, during that teaching I listen to the vicissitudes of the lives of my charges.  One boy who comes in tells me about his suicide attempts and about his friends who have cut themselves.  Young people (that is, teenagers) today have many concerns, not all as grave or as serious as the one I have briefly described in the foregoing sentence.  Others have addiction problems or are perhaps the sons of absent fathers, or of former or current drug addicts, or of abusive parents and so on and on and on. Others are just going through the usual hard and difficult identity crisis associated with their adolescent years.  However, the nub of the problem, that is of the human condition, is very simple really - all they want is a compassionate and non-judgmental adult ear.   In a sense my workaday world is never dull or dry or sterile. It is always gripping and mostly rewarding if at times somewhat tiring. All you have to do, dear reader, is to ponder what your daily reality is.  Perhaps it would be better for you to write it down for yourself, or if you are artistic you might sketch or paint it, or if musical sing it or play it. 

Lessons to Learn

Autumn Scene, Fairview Park, late November, 2011

There are many lessons we can learn from tuning in to life, from becoming aware or mindful, and I shall attempt to list some of them here.  Pardon me if you have read some of them here before because it is really very hard for me to be fresh and insightful a lot of the time.  When I write here, I often feel like I am repeating myself ad nauseam. However, I take much solace from the answer T.S. Eliot gave to an interviewer who commented that the famous and erudite poet had repeated himself much in his poems and writings that while he may have done so he certainly never said anything ever again in precisely the same way. Anyway, here are some short lessons I have learned from life:

(i) We don't get out of life alive.  This world is not a "dress rehearsal."  We only get one shot at living and we had best make the most of it.  In other words, here we have the context for Horace's famous injunction to us "to seize the day" and forget totally about tomorrow and what it may have in store for us.  Those of you who laboured in the vineyards of the Latin language will recall the actual words of Quintus Horatius Flaccus: "carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero."

(ii) Are we happy in our own skin?  Are we really happy with what we do in life, with our job, in our friends, in our partner and family? 

(iii) Have we really got time for others?  Do we really listen to them?  Or even more importantly do we really have time for ourselves? Do we really listen to our inner "self"?

(iv) Think about, or rather meditate upon that wonderful dichotomy between Being and Doing.  In reality one is not more important than the other.  It is rather the harmonious balance of both that is of utmost importance.  Doing must be challenged by Being, and Being can be  supported and enhanced and  by Doing. There is a further polarity worth mentioning here, too, that of Being and Having.  This existential dichotomy was emphasized and explicated by the psychoanalyst, psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm.  While the Western capitalist system feeds the greed for Having, the Eastern religions emphasize the overriding importance of Being.  While we need to have the basics to survive, and some social economists and psychologists suggest that after an annual income of some 44,000 $ the happiness index goes no higher.   

(v) Carl Jung, following his great friend, mentor and collaborator but later opponent, critic and rival Sigmund Freud, held that “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”  This task takes many long years of work to accomplish.

(vi) Can we live with ourselves, or accept ourselves precisely as we are?  When we make decisions can we sleep easily knowing that we have done our best and have acted from authentic motives?  If we can we are approaching what it means to be true to our core self.

To be continued

Journal of a Soul 38

A Passion for Equality

Frederick Douglass, around 1874

There are few things that move us as much as good oratory, and indeed we would go almost anywhere to hear a good orator speak.  The orators that come immediately to my own mind are, of course, luminaries such as Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, Winston Churchill, William Jefferson Clinton, Nelson Mandela and, of course, Barak Obama.  I would go anywhere to here them speak.  Indeed, I had the privilege to hear Nelson Mandela, Bill Clinton and Barak Obama here in Dublin when they visited our great city over the last ten or so years.  Needless to say, I was truly moved.  To add a few females to this list Hillary Rodham Clinton springs immediately to mind as does Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).  I have heard these two prominent international figures speak on our media outlets and can truly say they are accomplished public speakers. Our own two former presidents, Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese are also superb orators. You, no doubt can add your own favourites to this list.

Orators are never better than when they are speaking on the great issues of supreme human interest, namely human and civil rights, and about issues of the equality of all human beings no matter what their religion, race or colour. Words, coupled with passion and conviction can and do ring true.  However, we are not interested in hearing mere words, no matter how passionate, unless we know they are also coupled with deeds.  Otherwise, they ring exceedingly hollow. When we listen to great passionate speakers and know that they not alone believe what they say, but that they also do what they say we are truly moved, and moved in such a way as to do something positive or to work for a better world in our immediate surroundings.  We are here right at the heart of what it means to "do the truth", "to live the truth" or what is fundamentally meant by PRAXIS. And so hypocrisy is often immediately clear to an astute and sensitive listener.  We are right to turn away from such bogus oratory and mere rhetoric.  

I write about oratory, real oratory in that sense of linking in with the passion for justice which the speaker evokes in our hearts.  Obviously, good speakers can also evoke hatred in the hearts of his listeners as did the likes of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, but they were mere manipulators of base emotions, not evokers of a passion for justice and truth.  Real orators touch us deeply at a centre of truth, at a centre of compassion, not at a centre of base emotions like hatred and greed, power and conquest.  Sophistry, of course, is even worse, as it is the use of clever but false arguments, especially with the intention of deceiving.

Abraham Lincoln (1809 -1865) said much and did much, but his was never an idle or thoughtless oratory - no, it was oratory in the true sense that I have adumbrated above - his words came from his heart and from how he lived his life on a daily basis, with a conviction always to do his best and to follow the light of his conscience. I like the following words from this great man:

I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live by the light that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right, and stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong.

Or take the words of our own Irish Catholic Liberator, Daniel O'Connell (1775-1847): "Nothing is politically right which is morally wrong."

Abe Lincoln

What put these thoughts on real oratory into my head was reading an article in a recent edition of The Irish Times on the great American orator Frederick Douglass (1818? - 1895), who has links with both Lincoln and O'Connell. The journalist Barry Roche recently wrote an interesting and illuminating article on Douglas in the Irish Times: Douglass was honoured in Waterford some days ago when a plaque was unveiled to mark a speech he gave in the city during a lecture tour of Ireland in 1845.   While here, the great orator met and befriended our great Catholic Liberator, and it appears that O'Connell influenced Douglass greatly especially with respect to the non-violent achievement of freedom for human beings of all colours and creeds.  Barry Roche quotes him in the above linked article, and it is worth re-quoting in full here:

“I am covered with the soft, grey fog of the Emerald Isle. I breathe, and lo! the chattel becomes a man. I gaze around in vain for one who will question my equal humanity, claim me as his slave, or offer me an insult,” he later wrote in My Bondage and My Freedom

President Obama has said that Douglass' Irish experience "defined him not as a colour but as a man."

Our Workaday World

Daniel O'Connell

All of the above is not worth a curse, unless it influences how I live and work on a daily basis, how I treat others, how welcoming I am of all the differences I meet in them. I am tasked as a Resource Teacher with treating all students, no matter what their ability, with equal dignity and respect.  Today, thankfully and wonderfully, indeed, Ireland is no longer mono-cultural or monochrome. Thankfully and wonderfully, it is multicultural and technicolour. Our country has been enriched by the influx of people of many nations since the growth and decline of the Celtic Tiger years.  This is a powerful cultural legacy which will serve only to enrich and strengthen our traditions.  There is much unity in diversity.  Their is no little discovery of what makes us different as Irish and what makes us all the same no matter what the colour of our skin or the shades of our beliefs are.  We need great orators in the sense that I have described them to inspire us to cherish and protect all life, human, animal and vegetable.  When the great orators of the future speak, and speak they must, their topics will be broader than human rights and human dignity.  Their subject will be, I believe, the very survival of our planet.  But that, alas, is a topic for another post.  Let us, in the meantime, ponder the words of the great orators of today and yesteryear and be inspired to work for justice in the world and the equality of all.

Journal of a Soul 37

Ageing

I am on the left above, about 4 years of age.

A colleague at work says he does not mind growing old, quite simply because once you're ageing at least you are still alive.  I recall the great jazz musician, artist and art critic, George Melly (1926-2007) once stating that he took a certain satisfaction from visiting graveyards and looking at the headstones and breathing a sigh of relief that he had managed to outlive so many.  I remember another friend of mine, an old Christian Brother, who had been Provincial Leader of the Northern Province of Irish Christian Brothers for some time remarking that the older brothers used always opine that as one aged it was "either the legs or the head which go first."  Presumably, they were referring to either the loss of bodily motion in the first case and the onset of senility or dementia in the second.  I also remember his remarking that a certain Brother simply "had not grown old gracefully."  

I recall also my Aunt Noreen, who had spent nearly forty years nursing and is still hail and hearty (and playing golf) remarking to me that old age is "a cross we will all have to bear, and a heavy one at that." And indeed, growing old is not nearly so easy a task as one might think. Readers of this wee blog will know that my own mother passed away during the summer just gone at the grand old age of 96.  However, while she lived to such a good age, she had spent the last 11 years of her long life in a nursing home just gradually fading away into a world of very little recognition of anyone around her.  However, her doctors and nurses described her last years as being happily demented, thankfully, as many demented people can become quite angry and agitated.

A colleague of mine, referring to another female colleague, who spends a lot of money on appearing "young", says that this particular person will certainly not grow older or old in a graceful or easy manner.  It is widely believed that this person uses Botox.  However, be that as it may, what is at issue here is humankind's propensity to deny growing old...to our detriment indeed as denial is surely destructive of the inner being.  To deny any truth is to sow the seeds of disillusionment, depression, and even despair.

Acceptance 

Me an my brother.  I'm on the right, about 13 years.

Acceptance is hard task.  Oftentimes we seek to understand what life has thrown at us and what it is doing to us and we drive ourselves to near distraction in trying to come to grips intellectually with it.  However, oftentimes it is the ability to accept what life does to us that may help us through a period of disturbance and turmoil, or through a period of either physical or mental pain.  Now, I am not arguing for blind acceptance here.  To my mind, blind acceptance is useless, as it is a mere fatalism which will simply take no action and let everything happen without any striving to help oneself.  No, what I mean here is that acceptance which acknowledges whatever calamity has befallen us, accepts it as having happened, but which then positively and courageously embraces a future that does not give up on one's inner potential no matter how deeply one has suffered.  The type of acceptance I have in mind is a sort of realism coupled with a large dose of optimism and indeed hope.  I am certainly not arguing for the acceptance shown by Mary Tyrone in Eugene O'Neill's wonderful tragedy of a family bedevilled by addiction in its many forms - the opium addiction of Mary and the alcoholic addiction of her son Edmund, if my memory serves me correctly here.  Mary's acceptance is nothing short of fatalism and a passive giving into what life throws at us.  Her lines run: 

"James! We’ve loved each other! We always will! Let’s remember only that, and not try to understand what we cannot understand, or help things that cannot be helped - the things life has done to us we cannot excuse or explain.”  

There is much fatalism and absolutely no sort of realism coupled with the optimism and hope I have alluded to above.  For me, acceptance is like a diving board from which I have to have the courage to launch off into the unknown deep (future).  (See both these posts by two different bloggers on this play and on Mary's character and her addiction: Seven Pillars and Still Point).

Therapy Work

Me, in more recent times, enjoying my favourite beverage!

I do a little counselling at work as I have done several courses in that area.  I am sufficiently well-trained  to know when to recommend students to see professional counsellors or more specialist psychotherapists.  I also have developed good listening skills over years of practice both at training courses and in my line of work as a Resource Teacher.  One pupil came to me once in a state of complete nervous agitation and with a very troubled sleeping pattern.  I got him to list all the feelings he had over the particular incident with the particular person.  I got him to see how each of these feelings were linked with specific thoughts about both, and how such feelings were quite natural.  Then he wrote the following: "I hate myself!"  I explored this feeling with him and what it meant.  Then we went to the situation and the other person who was involved in the situation and I asked him was that feeling really based on a very acceptable thought.  He agreed that it was based on a very irrational thought: "I should be hated!"  "Why should you hate yourself based on what happened or continues to happen?  I see why you are angry, frustrated, annoyed etc etc and these are all reasonable feelings in the circumstances, but hating yourself, what basis has it at all in the situation you find yourself in?"  This type of clarification of his thoughts and feelings worked as the boy came back to me the following day and stated: "My situation has not changed one bit, but I feel a little better!"  In other words, I will work with him by listening to him when he comes to me for help.  I will attempt to help him accept certain facts that he can do nothing about. However, I will help him to see that he can choose how to respond to any situation he finds himself in.  I will empower him insofar as possible to see that sometimes (possibly not in every situation as that would, I think, be unrealistic and would set the client up for a fall) he can choose to decide how he feels about X, Y or Z.  One thing, I never do, nor would any counsellor worth his/her salt, is to offer any type of "ideal" or definite solution to the problems brought.  I merely listen and say that what we will try to do together is to understand as best as we can what is going on in the situation and to see if there are any ways we may possibly improve the situation.  I normally point out, because it is not always obvious to the client, that there are certain things about the presenting problem which one will not be able to change.  I normally ask a question like, "Is there anything you can change at the moment?"

Proactive Acceptance

Let me name here what I attempt to do with my students in the above situations as "proactive acceptance."  I started this post talking about ageing, and indeed all of the above is really about that even if it seemed that I went off the point somewhat in talking about acceptance in general. There are indeed many good things about growing old: growth in knowledge of all types, growth in wisdom; a certain peace of mind that you have worked hard to earn all that you have achieved to date, and a great pride wells up in one insofar as one has earned all that by the sweat of one's own brow.  There are times when I say to myself some such understandable nonsense like: "Jesus, I wish I could go back to 1980 and start teaching again with all that I know now!"  Of course, I know that this an utterly ridiculous wish, though thoroughly understandable.  Age is the price we pay for experience; the price we pay for wisdom; the price we pay for whatever success we have eked out of life over the duration of our so far allotted years.

And so there are many times I moan about the stiffness of my arthritic bones and joints in the morning as my two alarm clocks rattle me awake from dreamland.  Yes, there are times one wishes one could lie longer in bed/  Yes, there are times one feels like throwing in the towel.  I have mentioned in this and other blogs that I suffer from clinical depression and have been on a relatively low strength antidepressant for the past 15 years.  However, in all that time I think I may have missed one or two days at most from work.  What I have learned is to be good to myself, to rest as much as possible, never to take on tasks that drain me and which I hate, to say "no" at least as often as I say "yes", to exercise regularly, to eat well, to think positive thoughts, to meditate, to engage in activities that I enjoy, to read and to write and to do as much soul work as I possibly can.  All of this can be called my "proactive acceptance" of my mental health situation.  I never let any debilitating self-pity creep in as that is simply soul-destroying.

The Truth That Sets Us Free  

If one studies any of the great religious traditions of the world and strip away the more denominational attire one will arrive at a very positive psychology. (Admittedly, you will have to prune the likes of the Old Testament and the Koran with a strong secateurs, but the task is worth doing.)  Basically, they are all about being true to the self (or soul).  Let's call all the religious language mere metaphor and simile.  There can be no self-acceptance without facing the bare truth about the naked self, that is the self stripped of its many masks and the uniforms of its different societal roles.  As an old friend said to me once about making any important decision in life: "If you can live with your SELF after that decision, then it is a good one."  

As I mentioned the great play Long Day's Journey into Night above, let me finish with an ad rem longer quotation from it in conclusion: Once again it is Mary Tyrone who is speaking:

I don't blame you. How could you believe me – when I can't believe myself? I've become such a liar. I never lied about anything once upon a time. Now I have to lie, especially to myself. But how can you understand, when I don't myself. I've never understood anything about it, except that one day long ago I found I could no longer call my soul my own. (2.2.132)