Beelibee's Blog

A few years have gone by since I wrote a blog entitled ‘Losers’. This is something of a follow-up to it in which I try to take responsibility for my own ‘loser’ behaviour and to give myself a steer as to how I might do better in future. My original blog took issue with people who did not meet the 60/40 test in terms of leaving me feeling better for my association with them – where something about my interaction with them left me feeling ‘less than’, unimportant, anything but good. This blog is an attempt to learn a different (though related) lesson.

Recently, I pressed ‘send’ on an email to someone saying that it was true I had not responded to their email of some time previously, largely because when I get emails that are basically reports about what a person has done over a period of time, as in round-robin newsletters, there does not seem to be much to be responded to, as that is not what they require. To the one thing they had suggested we might do together, no, I would not be going on holiday with them, nor would it be possible for them to come and stay at my home. My main problem with this person is that the interaction they seem to favour is one based on monologue, i.e. one-sided communication, where one person dominates the conversation or written communication, sharing their thoughts, opinions or stories without actively inviting responses or feedback. The listener/reader’s role is passive – they are simply an audience, and the thing that is missing is mutual engagement. That kind of interaction is not something I think I am particularly good at.

Having had quite a lot of difficulty expressing my reason for not responding (because I do not find it easy to deliver messages that I think might be hurtful to receive), I then tried to focus on what I might learn from the whole uncomfortable experience. It occurred to me that I could also be judged to have a lack of sensitivity or awareness in terms of being attuned to people potentially wanting to (gently) let me go. You could argue that accepting to be the only person initiating contact with people – over a period of years – is either over-optimistic about the association we have with them or ignores what could be a clear message coming from them. I remember how, many years ago, someone I knew had eventually decided to convey that they were not going to continue to do what I do all too often – they drew things with the offending person to a close by saying ‘bye, all the best. I have writing avenues that don’t respond – they’re called journals’. One could suggest that blogs are another such avenue. It may be time to revisit (and possibly prune) that list of people to send Christmas greetings or birthday wishes to who either never respond or never initiate contact …

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When things feel bleak is when you might think about the time you get to spend together with the people you love. We do not normally tend to think – at least not consciously – this could be the last thing we do together with people, yet that is how it is. Every minute and every day. Life is always precarious. We are all impermanent beings. None of us really knows how long we are going to be around for, nor what we are going to have to go through. Every day I express the hope that the person I share my life with will be well, happy, peaceful and safe, that he may have good health and be with me for a long, long time, that he may be able to banish his demons, and that somehow we might throttle that black dog that gets its teeth around his neck most mornings, so that it lets go.

When things feel bleak, feelings of fear, hollowness, darkness and cold might come – you have to try to just accept them when they well up inside you, make them welcome and let them be, like strangers you have to let into your sitting room because somehow they have a right to be there. I do not personally believe you can tell them where to go, even though the notion of shouting ‘get thee hence to endless night!’ might be attractive sometimes. Maybe they come as a loving and gentle reminder to try to do the best you can in the now, and not as merchants of doom about what may lie around the corner.

I am for accepting things and going from there, hoping the fears are exaggerated and that somehow, at some level, in some way, whatever comes will not be so bad. And knowing that it too will pass because everything does.

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There is a line in T S Eliot’s ‘Murder in the Cathedral’ that goes, ‘Man’s life is a cheat and a disappointment’ – it is not a view I necessarily share, but it is a good place to start when considering the pursuit of happiness. I would suggest that, in that pursuit, it is expectations that are the problem, not life itself.

Expectations, promising a better future or a more fulfilling present, frequently sow the seeds of disappointment rather than happiness. They create a rigid framework for reality to conform to, and the more inflexible they are, the wider the potential gap between anticipation and reality. These expectations are often shaped by external influences, such as what we see in people we know, who seem to be leading the lives we would like for ourselves, or the idyllic world often exhibited on people’s social media. The result can be an unending quest for an idealised and frequently unattainable perfection that eclipses the simple joys and successes inherent in everyday life.

Adopting a mindset of acceptance and adaptability offers an alternative, opening the door to contentment. Another line from Eliot’s play goes, ‘However certain our expectations, the moment foreseen may be unexpected when it arrives’.

My conclusion is that by letting go of rigid expectations, we free ourselves from the constant threat of disappointment. Releasing that grip does not mean abandoning hope or not having goals; rather, it invites us to cultivate a mindset where life can simply unfold, unburdened by the weight of potential illusions, which will often lead to disappointment. Such an approach can enable us to appreciate life as a journey, full of unpredictability and imperfections, allowing for genuine moments of happiness.

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The maxim ‘Change what you can, accept what you can’t change, and have the wisdom to know the difference’ is hardly a new one. So, what is it that makes so many of us ‘do the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result’? Could it be that we were taught ‘if at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again’?

It would be good to find a novel, elegant way of expressing the frustration of feeling that no matter how hard you try to improve the life of a loved one, there will be times when there is no ‘you-shaped’ solution to apply in order to achieve that goal.

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When people retire from work or any other regular activity, they often face the problem of loss of structure to their daily lives. This can result in general, unspecific feelings of loss and unhappiness, to feeling a lack of purpose and to difficulties with time management. All too often, the underlying thought is something like: ‘what’s the point, anyway?’.

It may indicate a certain degree of slight ‘OCD behaviour’ on my part, but I set great store by structure – it doesn’t have to be rigorous or immutable, but I genuinely believe that some measure of shape or routine to a person’s day tends to help more than hinder their mental health. Whether it takes the form of a meditation routine, a job of some kind (whether paid or unpaid), a word puzzle or a language lesson, those sorts of routine exercises convey something to the brain that says, ‘I’m not done yet – I still have x, y and z to do’, which may just about contribute a tiny element to getting through the day and feeling a small sense of achievement. There is a point.

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Very few people I have met truthfully echo the words that Edith Piaf sang, ‘Je ne regrette rien’, about their own life. At least Frank Sinatra made it, ‘Regrets I have a few, but then again, too few to mention’. My preferred rendition is, ‘Regrets I have aplenty, but they’re behind me’. What’s done is done.

There is a variety of wishful thinking that illustrates what seems a common human trait: a person thinks, ‘if I can just have/do/experience this, I’ll be happy’. It may work for a while but in terms of your overall existence, it never, ever works. No life is that simple. It is also akin to the notion that is behind all regrets – ‘if I had only done this/not done that, then everything would be fine’. Except there is absolutely no reason to believe that would be the case. There is no way of knowing it would have turned out the way the person thinks when they look back with their rose-tinted glasses. The ‘if only’ thing simply does not work. Even if you have the time travel kit that gets you back there to make your different decision, your making a different decision is only part of the story. Others might make different decisions too, events may take a different turn, and the end result might be that you find yourself exactly where you are now, or at least feeling no happier.

The variety of regret that relates to having hurt someone else is something I think is worth looking at in a slightly different way, though not with a view to trying to change the past. If the person you hurt 25 years ago is still on the planet and you can reach them, apologising for having hurt them is something you can do, which may help with healing both a part of them and a part of you. If the person is no longer alive, then my approach is to visualise a conversation with them in which you apologise and where you try to feel the feelings around the event as authentically as you possibly can. It may or may not help you, but it is worth a try. There are certainly psychotherapists who recommend this as a way of managing emotions that refer back to some kinds of past pain.

So, at the risk of being boringly pragmatic, I would insist on the veracity of the old adage, ‘Change what you can, accept what you can’t change and have the wisdom to know the difference’. That may seem dry and unhelpful to the person feeling the pain of regret for parts of their past, but I have yet to encounter someone who has found it effective in practice to wish now that they had acted differently then. You did it then; it did not produce the improvement or lasting happiness you hoped for or expected; you can and should feel the feeling of regret for that, but acceptance of the feeling and then allowing it to be let go has a better chance of giving you some peace and serenity than insisting on holding on to it.

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The Christmas and New Year period is a time many people use to take stock of the previous year and their lives generally. Lists of Christmas greetings and presents are a reminder of which individuals are still in our lives and which ones we choose as suitable recipients of greetings and presents. While it is not the case that friendship is a trading arrangement, it is nonetheless dependent on something mutual or reciprocal. It must involve participation by more than one side, whatever form that participation takes. One-way relationships may just about work between family members, but they are less tenable when there is a genuine choice as to whether they are to continue or not. Chain statements across social media insisting that friends can always ‘pick up where they left off’, that there is no need to keep in touch or make any effort to keep the friendship alive because friendship is somehow completely self-sustaining, have always struck me as wishful thinking by people who hope and trust that saying something is the case makes it so – that is about as charitable as it gets.

My preferred analogy is that friendship is like a bridge that is under constant construction. It needs work from both ends – otherwise it is asking a lot of the cantilevering to expect it to function as it is supposed to.

Returning to Christmas greetings and presents, the whole ritual is generally built on some measure of reciprocity. This is why it is often referred to as an exchange. If there is only ever one party doing the proffering, that does not qualify as an exchange. There are people who may choose to be exclusively givers, never expecting anything in return, but unless it is in the context of charitable giving, most of us eventually get a slight gnawing feeling suspiciously like resentment tarnishing the pleasure of one-way giving, at least when it is to people whose circumstances are not dissimilar from our own.

I have always been notoriously bad at giving up on people, and have often continued to plug away, trying to keep moribund friendships and connections alive long after the sensible decision would have been to get the message that my efforts were not reciprocated … and gently desist. A new year provides the opportunity to try to do something different.

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