Thoughts of Departure

Senility must feel like a pretty bad trip. I sometimes wonder what it might be like. A complete lack of coherence in the Story that you inhabit.

Even now, thoughts come and go and their coming and going stresses me out. The fear of forgetting my own thoughts stresses me out. Not that they're such valuable insights, these thoughts, but their unruly coming and going stresses me out. Is why talking and writing are such boons. You can relax, because there is something or someone to collect, into half-coherent piles, the fluttering scraps of thinking which the minutes blow continually off the desktop of your conscious attention.

What was I thinking just now? It felt valuable. Valuable to me, at least. What was it that I was trying to remember?

Blank.

I think I was quite old when it first dawned on me that what I'd come to call my memory was evermorphing. I know that sounds stupid, but I really did think of myself as a static entity. An ego swimming in the same loch of thoughts, year in after year out. I guess I started reading more and reading was the sputtering stream of fresh imaginings.

But what is memory?

My flashbacks are like the remembrall in Harry Potter - cartoonish clips of myself telling myself to not forget something I've now clearly forgotten.

I think: memory is two things - the facts I observe and the story I tell about those facts.

So then past and future both are these strange fact-based stories, complex artifacts of the mind. Part reality, part invention. The facts remain fast, but the story is ever changing. The story has to change, because every new fact changes the meaning of the facts that you know already. Like the twist at the end of Usual Suspects. Of The Sixth Sense. I think: the facts - mercifully - remain fast. But walk down the multi-tunneled catacomb of memory and on every navigation you take a slightly different path: return with a slightly different story. Sometimes a different story from the very same set of facts. Facts like stars - steady and still. Stories like constellations - drawing facts together in orderly, coherent patterns.

The stories make all the difference.

I think: stories only exist because Time exists. I think: only conscious creatures are aware of Time. I think: stories are coherence unfolding over Time.

Frame after frame, the immersive illusion of consciousness. OK.

Q.v. Alain de Botton: "Happiness is the telling of a better story from the same set of facts".

Q.v. David Foster Wallace, when the story becomes unendurable, taking it one frame at a time:

Gately remembered some evil fucking personal detoxes. Broke in Malden. Bent with pleurisy in Salem.....Cold Turkey.....Feeling the edge of every second that went by. Taking it a second at a time. Drawing the time in around him real tight. Withdrawing. Any one second: he remembered: the thought of feeling like he'd be feeling like this second for 60 more of these seconds - he couldn't deal. He could not fucking deal. He had to build a wall around each second just to take it. The whole first two weeks of it are telescoped in his memory down into like one second - less: the space between two heartbeats. A breath and a second, the pause and gather between each cramp. An endless Now stretching its gull-wings out on either side of his heartbeat. And he'd never before or since felt so excruciatingly alive. Living in the Present between pulses.....:living completely In The Moment.....

He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. And the projected future fear of....of a lifetime on the edge of this bunk....., remembering. It's too much to think about. To Abide there. But none of it's as of now real. What's real is the tube and the Noxzema and the pain. And this could be done just like the Old Cold Bird. He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over.....

What's unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting. But he could choose not to listen; he could treat his head like G. Day or R. Lenz: clueless noise. He hadn't quite gotten this before now, how it wasn't just the matter of riding out the cravings for a Substance: everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed.

But though it's easy to forget everything else, one thing is ironically impossible to forget: Time. Awareness of it pulls you out of the present and out of the meditation. And again you start telling tales about the past, about the future. There's no getting away from it, if you want to be living. The only Life we know is this one, which exists inside Time.

I'm really not sure what is the meaning of Time independent of consciousness.

Age 3, a year of Time feels like eternity. Age 30, and you're in perpetual confusion at your own shifting perception of it. Q.v. special relativity. Time gets funnier and funnier and my head hurts more and more.

But the point of all of this is that these days I can't get away from this feeling: that I inhabit the story I'm in the process of creating. Every waking minute. And I can make the story go any which way I want. All I need to do is imagine.

Except, of course, imagining new things is very hard. Is something hardly any of us ever do.

And maybe story is the wrong metaphor. Maybe life is more like a house, because this story (of past and future, of who we are and who we might be) is one we actively inhabit. Like a house.

And if I look around it, I haven't been that original with it. I've cobble together a pastiche from whatever models of living were available. I cobble together still. I look around, see people in relationships, and fancy maybe getting into one myself. I see people in successful careers and try to emulate them. I get my likes and dislikes from the paper, my taste for food from restaurants I happen to visit, my interests from friends and role models and the books I happen to know about. I look around all the time, like a shopper in a furniture store, trying on in my imagination how these models of living might play out in my own house. I furnish my existence from what's available. It's never seriously occurred to me to question the fundamentals of experience and create my own life. Make my own clothes, build my own furniture. Because what do I know about furniture?

But then I see that you can connect these dots any which way and I feel this strange urge: I wonder what would happen if I did something different. Maybe bad things would happen, the story would go all haywire and all chaos would break loose. Then again, maybe trying it on now will make senility more endurable.

,

The Mater of Mater

I've been living near Victoria Park for close to two years. That's enough time to notice a change in yourself. But the question is - would I have noticed that change as much as had I moved elsewhere?

This park is teeming with flashbacks. Along my running route lie piles and piles of my past me's, discarded versions of potential selves like spare parts in a ghostly puppet-making workshop. Or a painter's studio. Everything that didn't work, that didn't make the cut, is scattered here.

But it's the park itself that holds the memories, like an external storage device. I never think about these things unless I'm here. And then I remember them the way that Robert M. Pirsig's schizophrenic character in Zen or the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance remembers the life of his alter ego: they are sudden, fragmentary flashbacks of how I used to feel.

I used to feel very very afraid. I felt weak, unsure that I'd manage to handle the overwhelming challenge of a full scale adult existence. Anxious to achieve some form of success and fearful that I would fail to achieve it. But I don't feel like that anymore. And it's not as simple as saying that I no longer feel anxious about achieving success.  It's more like that my categories of thought have shifted so much, mutated so that the old notion of "achieving success" simply no longer exists in the same format, the way an egg no longer exists in the same form, once you add it to the dough, knead and bake it in the oven.

Trying to empathise with your past self if an eerie exercise. It's sometimes as hard as trying to empathise with another person ("what was I thinking?!"), except that glimpses of what you were thinking will now and again flash through your mind. And they are alien-familiar. What mind reading would feel like, if it existed. Say, what it felt like to be in love with someone, or not to be in love with them. Alas, you can't unknow things.

So then space is important. Objects. People. Those elements outside of ourselves that store our thoughts, our memories, our sense of passing time, of who we are, of change. Is why I missed London during my long exile. Is why, in London, I miss travelling and the places in which I used to live. We're weird creatures, with weird selves that span spacetime in weird unexpected ways, like forests, like bacteria.

Duality

"According to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome, the social presence of a woman is different in kind from that of a man. A man's presence is dependent upon the promise of power which he embodies. If the promise is large and credible his presence is striking. If it is small and incredible, he is found to have little presence. The promised power may be moral, physical, temperamental, economic, social, sexual - but its object is always exterior to the man. The man suggests that he is capable of doing to you or for you. (...)

By contrast, a woman's presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defined what can and cannot be done to her. Her presence is manifest in her gestures, voice, opinions, expressions, clothes, chosen surroundings, taste - indeed there is nothing she can do which does not contribute to her presence. (...) To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman's self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. (...) From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. 

And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman."

John Berger, Ways of Seeing

In writing to a man, for instance, you notice this distinction with unmistakable clarity.

The surveyed: buoyant, filled to the brim with living emotion, alive, absurd, intense, short-sighted, impulsive, unpredictable, sensual, demanding, loving and in love, confused, afraid, enraged, enthralled, ecstatic, thrilled, intemperate, playful, silly and fun, despairing, sincerely attached, suffused with the awe of being and of the other, attentive, curious, engaged, capable of infinite healing and unpredictable growth, but fragile, but funny, but silly, and sad.

The surveyor: sometimes embarrassed on behalf of the surveyed, sometimes tyrannical, sometimes begrudging. Maybe the sort of attitude inherited from one's parents, who themselves were embarrassed by their own humanity, tyrannical dictators of it, frustrated managers. Maybe dictated by the community, which needs you to be predictable and well-behaved.

But what does the surveyor convey for others to understand? There is a midpoint between the two endpoints, between sincerity and politeness, between being fully yourself and being something that fits within the bigger picture. And the midpoint varies from situation to situation. And I don't know what forces pull in each direction.

In the personal, we champion the surveyed. Who today won't tell you to show yourself, to do you, to be honest, and bold?

In the professional, it's the surveyor that often or usually gets the praise. The very word "professional" suggest a person who has mastered herself and can mould herself to the required interface. In work, the community must win over the individual, because that's how anything gets done. We put aside our whimsical multicoloured selves for a while in order to build the city. It's the sacrifice we make in order to have cities. And everything else that membership of the human community affords us.

And sometimes when you work all the time, the surveyed grows riotous from suppression. Can you be yourself and still do good work? Can you even do better work by being yourself?

The answer, as ever, is balance. Bowing yourself to the greater cause of Building is not a problem to be done away with. The sacrifice can be awe-inspiring, grand. There is a Building instinct within us. Such as there is a Social instinct within us, for which being polite at the cost of sincerity is a joyous sacrifice.

Falling in Love

Some time ago I fell in love with Being. And this is a thing I've been failing to communicate to people ever since. This falling in love thing. With capital B Being. This how I went from thinking that the being alive was maybe a bit of a not even an especially funny joke to perceiving long stretches of moments of breath and consciousness and thought as staggeringly, transcendentally beautiful, maybe not continuously perceiving this but reliably, that moments of being are self-evidently filled with awe and laden with meaning, grounded, large, rooted in time, rooted in space, connected, rich, and good, exactly. It came down mostly to eyebrows lifted at angles and cocked heads and wry smiles to signify a thinking person's sophisticated scepticism. And that maybe can they have some of whatever I was on, please. 

But then they always say this of people in love.

But so I take my validation and approval from books, however. And this life affirming love of living is something many millions of people have arrived at over the years, independently. Here's, for instance, Virginia Woolf:

Or here's David Foster Wallace in this is water, the spirit of whom I'm currently being inhabited by, in case you couldn't tell.

Or indeed here's Leo Tolstoy, whom if you find yourself judging and deriding and dismissing because of the God references in the paragraph below, then maybe perhaps best to stop reading this right now, because this whole philosophical essay is maybe just about beyond you at this point in your character-building journey. I'd venture to tender.

Because the language of mysticism sort of works here and maybe is needed here, to hint appropriately at these mysterious facts of being. The language of music, the language of the visual arts. The language of the beyond-articulated-meaning and so on.

Because this life-affirming love of Being is an in-place gestalt in perception rather than a journey to some elsewhere [q.v. M. Proust "The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another" etc]. It's a telling of a better story from the same set of facts, as it were, to paraphrase another of my heroes. But not in the self-delusional sense of believing a lie rather than having the steel cohones to face the meaninglessness of existence, like a real man, I should like to make clear.

Because the fact of the matter is that the meaning of existence is not an illusion. It's always there, if you know how to look at things. Through this seeing with the new eyes.

Because meaning then reveals itself to you like the 3D object in a magic eye picture. Can you see it?

Deviant Art

Stereograms are the perfect visual metaphor for this, I think.

Some people seem to simply get it.

And just for the record I should say that I consider myself an atheist and not intently given to any lust for magical thinking, I don't think; but I have sympathy with the religions on this. Because I suspect the Christian tradition was right, allegorically, that this way of looking at the world is not beyond anyone who genuinely wants it. But rather is democratic. Every religious tradition that I know of seems to have a version of this idea. Mindfulness and meditation, say. Apparently Carl Jung said that people do not see God because they don't look low enough.

Every moment is inexhaustible.

And I should also like to stress that this is not to be confused with hedonism. It's not meant to be hedonism, anyway. Because the hedonistic view of living is only half the story. The other half is our duty to protect Being. And a sacred duty at that, for lack of a better adjective. We are, more than just metaphorically, mere stewards of existence, really: we carry the torch of Life from one moment in time to another. We live just long enough to carry this torch for a while. And so may as well try our best not to become hell-bent on putting it out, the torch, if we can manage it. Try our best not to be resentful of what a stupid mission this is and painful and pointless, this carrying of the torch. Because while it might be, at times, (stupid and painful and pointless), but beside that it's also sacred: because Being must continue Being, you see. Because Being is good. Whatever Being is, i.e. whatever it means for something to be living and un-rock-like: it's worth having. On balance.

This is an axiom, by the way: that Being is good and worth having.

Accepting this axiom is what the religious mind means by the expression `leap of faith`, is what I gather from Mr J. B. Peterson. Live your life as if Being were good and worth having, says he, and every moment of being (an expression of Being) will reveal itself to you as meaningful and joyful and worth every bit of the very real and unpleasant hassle of living it. As overflowing with meaning, these moments, as ripe fruit overflow with juices. Something like that. Or maybe better that you listen to JBP preach about it, in much more articulated form, in this lecture series.

But so anyway, accepting this axiom is a choice, though.

The interesting thing is, being inclined to dismiss these non-hard-numbers-and-science-y ways of looking at things myself, I didn't actually arrive at this conclusion via the religious route, exactly. Though what the difference is between the religious experience and the aesthetic experience is not precisely clear to me yet. But let's anyway say I arrived at it via psychology. Via philosophy. And via the I thought secular wisdom of literature, I guess.

You could say it started with Herman Hesse's Glass Bead Game, which as far as I'm concerned is all about epistemology and a lot more fun to read than the corresponding entry on Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (which I never had the dedication to finish). How do we know what we know, and cetera. Though in higher probably it actually kicked off with the untold numbers of hours I spent listening to Alain de Botton's butter-rich voice telling me how I was in fact OK and everything was OK and always had been OK and feeling finally unconditionally loved and regarded and accepted. Or likelier still with the unconditional love and acceptance lavished upon me by my existential phenomenological therapist in the US of A.

But so anyway it's still probably fair to say that epistemology consumed me somewhat at this time in my life. And fancying myself, as I said, weary of mysticism, I turned to philosophy. Well, popular philosophy (I'm not that either smart or patient). Q.v. Truth, by Simon Blackburn, and Think, and Ethics, which I returned to. And David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity, which I've written about before. Et cetera. But it was Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, fast and slow, I think, which made me a bit more willing to consider that perhaps maybe this psychotherapeutic view of the human psyche wasn't entirely unscientifically deluded. Because here was psychology and cognitive science and neuroscience as I gathered it from Mr. Steven Pinker's several books corroborating the psychotherapeutic claims, or so it seemed like. And anyway reading Carl Rogers, and Brene Brown, and Leo Tolstoy made me feel so beloved and OK and accepted and so on.

Though it was probably War and Peace that finally sealed the deal, for me, I think. Something in that book managed to help me see Being in a whole new lighting. Or not new light exactly, as just a new framing. A wide framing. An all-encompassing framing.

Because, that's the nub and essence of it, I think, of this loving of being. It's that before I loved being consciously, I was narrow framing. I thought that Life was about my life. And it isn't.

I'll pause for a moment to let you take that in.

Being is not about my being. And the good of Being is not about the extent to which my own being is not (let's be honest about how we consider things) not even good, but pleasant. Something like that. Life, in its entirety, is miraculous beyond expression, is the right way of looking at it, I think. And so no sooner I'd thought this than I began to see evidence of this everywhere. In watching London go about its life, in city lights glittering on the river, in the staggering strangeness of people going about doing their people things, in standing besides and marvelling at the ethereal beauty of Ttéia 1C and so on. I mean, it's everywhere, once the scales fall from your eyes, this truth and beauty and meaning.

And it occurs to me that I may have hated Being because I used to think this: that if my life sucks therefore Being sucks also. But in fact this is invalid. Just because you are suffering doesn't mean that everything and everyone suffers everywhere. No, indeed, there are at any given moment, scores of people in the world, non-trivial numbers of people, who are truly and actually happy. And I don't mean deluded-happy. I don't mean distracted or drugged up or horse-like beheld by the carrot of future felicity. I mean happy. And there are places on this planet of breathtaking, transcendental beauty and people beholding these places right now, and feeling nothing but hug-from-God-like bliss and joy and pure unadulterated happiness. Really. 

They say it's only at around age 2 that children begin to realise how their own emotions do in fact end at the boundary at their own bodies and how other people around them can, and in fact are, feeling differently from themselves in all sorts of ways, most of the time. But I, for one, didn't quite internalise that lesson.

But of course the thing about appreciating the marvel of Being is that you have to give up your resentment. With all the associated feelings of anger and self-righteousness and occasional malefic glee, which feel nice, to be fair. And just enjoy the possibility of happiness vicariously, if so it happens to elude you, personally. Maybe.

Though just to be clear, this celebration of Being does not in fact entail, for me at least, entering some permanent state of bliss a la Eckhart Tolle. I'm not saying life isn't suffering, because it is. And I'm not saying you should resign yourself to the suffering and injustice of the human universe, because you shouldn't. This is not about turning the cheek and accepting everything unconditionally and going into denials that there's any such thing as evil or tragedy.

(Though it's probably worth noticing that suffering is a lot oftener due to the axiomatic tragedy of being, rooted in the inherent vulnerability of all things living, than it is due to deliberate malevolence and evil. Since this helps with the giving up of the resentment project.)

But anyway back to the clarification, loving Being isn't to deny that evil and tragedy are real. The whole thing comes down to avoiding narrow framing: just because evil and tragedy are real, doesn't mean that bliss and awe-inspiring splendour of existence aren't real also. They're both real. Concomitantly.

Q.v. the concept of ambivalence.

Which is interesting because not so unlike what is required for the falling of actually in love, in the more parochial sense of with another human person. Realising how to embrace this ambivalence towards your own self as well as another's. That is to say, realising & accepting that you are both flawed creatures by necessity, mere intermittently-rational primates with a long and comprehensive list of unseemly inadequacies.

But that maybe if you really tried, you could just about make it. If you really put your mind to it and tried, putting aside your self-pity and resentment and fear for a moment, and fear of responsibility and fear of inadequacy to the side for just one minute, and actually tried sincerely to do the loving for once, active tense loving, without waiting around to be loved, and if you decided to love and participate in The Project of Being, and if you did this, at least some of the time, then maybe just maybe, you could just about make it, and manage to carry the torch of life from one end of your lifespan to the other, successfully.

Resolutions

I said to the man: I want to read more, in 2018.
And the man said: Why?
And I said: Good question.

Why's are important. When I don't feel like doing something - say the washing up, to exercise, or return a phone call - it's either because I want something else more (sleep, usually) or because I forgot why I wanted to do the thing in the first place. Chores are chores not only because they are tedious - what isn't! - but because they are imposed. By necessity, by nagging spouses, by the law. Quite often, by your own incomprehensible past self. You either never knew or forgot the why. But if you take a moment to recover the reasons, almost by magic, motivation returns.

This occurred to me one day when I was doing the washing up. I hate doing the washing up. It's so boring. I'd put it off and off all morning and now I had a legitimate reason to put it off further still: I was running late already. But then I remembered my why: I didn't want to be a crappy housemate. I was living with my sister at the time and I didn't want her coming home after a long workday to cook dinner in a dirty kitchen. In addition to which, I have this pact with Future Me: I do my best not to make its life too difficult and in return it doesn't judge me too harshly with the benefit of hindsight. It's a good deal. So here were two very good motives. Suddenly, I wanted to do the washing up. I was, in fact, quite glad to do it.

Why do a good thing for the wrong reason if you could do it for the right ones? When I first started to run, I did it because I wanted to be more like the foreign kids I met at university. Apparently exercising was cool in this part of the world. All the well-dressed people did it. So I started running. Then I fancied that it would make more attractive to the men. I became wedded to an image of myself that looked suspiciously a lot like what I'd seen in Nike adverts. And so I kept pushing myself to exercise, getting by turns angry and depressed whenever I didn't. But here's the problem with that logic: running makes you neither desirable by men nor trendy. Really, the relation between those two things and running is correlational at best. So then if those are your motives, no wonder you don't want to do it. Your inner sloth might be a sloth, but it isn't stupid: it knows when it's being lied to! Here's when I stopped having trouble motivating myself to exercise. When I learned that past age 30 your IQ begins slowly to drop - unless you exercise regularly. I looked it up and there is solid science behind this claim. These days, that fact has sunk in so thoroughly, that when several days have gone by without a good workout, I literally feel stupider. (It helps that I'm a bit of a hypochondriac, but still.) The point is - good reasons are good motivators.

Nowadays, if I don't return a call, attend a party, or run a chose, I always ask myself why. I assume it's for a good reason. Being tired is a good reason. Pushing yourself beyond the threshold of sustainability is like living off your credit card. It's either desperate or stupid. And eventually you'll pay for it way more than it's worth.

So when the man asked me why I wanted to read more, I was stunned. I couldn't think of an answer. Why wouldn't I, I attempted feebly. No wonder I had failed my 2017 Goodreads challenge. I'd forgotten my motives.

So why do I read? This is a good question, because reading is really quite expensive. It takes hours and hours and hours and if you take notes and write about and reflect upon your reading, it takes hours and hours still more. As we speak, it's Saturday night in London and I chose to stay in so I could finish reading my book. This is not self-evidently the smart choice for a 30 year-old single female. And plenty of people don't read. Smart, educated people, people whose brains are worth many tens of thousands of units of legal tender - do not read. Not regularly, anyway, not books. Most humans have no more than about six thinking hours in a day and most of us pledge that to some legal entity in return for money. Or invest it in relationships. Or in a million other ways to spend free time. So whatever my reason, it had better be good.

And it is good. I think. The reason is this. I read because reading, I find, is the best way, sometimes the only way, a way certainly well-trodden, whereby I change my mind. And changing my mind, no hyperbole, is the only thing that keeps me living.

I know when I haven't been reading for some time, because I feel utterly depressed, quite painfully. It's like being trapped in a room wherein the stultifying air's gone stale. It's agonising, like boredom, but it's worse than boredom, because it stretches infinitely in every direction. Everything I do feels tedious and uninspiring. There's no mystery of existence to be experienced, no magic. It's like walking on a bruise. Like watching daytime reruns. My mind is stuck on looping over the same old ways of looking at the world, my curiosity wanes and wilts and slowly gives way to cynicism and then I start to feel like death and then like dying. It's excruciating. The same old thoughts swirling back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, in endlessly recurring patterns, never jolting, nothing new, never any new conclusions. It's downright claustrophobic. And it can make for a pretty miserable existence. I know more than one person about whom I quite regularly think: if only you could move in thought-space just a little and change the way you interpret the world - just a little - how much wiser you would be and how much lighter-hearted!

Reading keeps me sane the way exercise keeps me sane. And staying sane is autotelic.

How Not to Worry

I think we can all agree that worrying makes very little rational sense. Helpfulness-wise. Rarely is worrying helpful. And I full-heartedly agree with what my friend called the best career advice he read this year: put your headphones in, stare at your computer, and assume that everyone loves you until you are fired, or retire. (The Book of Mormon put it another way.)

But the truth is that demanding of yourself a stiff upper lip, when it comes to unhelpful emotions like worrying, doesn't really work. It is pretty clear to me that merely being made aware of something sensible and a verifiable fact does very little in the way of changing my behaviour. Only a crude understanding of human thought could posit that a life strategy's helpfulness as I see it carries much weight with the complex and mysterious brain-machine that is responsible for what I eventually say and do.

So if a stiff upper lip doesn't work, what does? The boring answer is analysis: many sad and lonely days slowly debugging the black box intricacies of your mysterious brain-machine.

The reason why analysis is more likely to work is because worrying is not necessarily irrational. The brain-machine has its logic, if one that gives more weight to survival than to your minute-by-minute psychological comfort. To change the outcome (worry), one must begin by assuming that the logic of worrying is valid, and then ask why.

Suppose the machine works thus. You worry about not being good enough (most common secret worry of everyone I've ever worked with). The internal structure of this worry, implicitly or explicitly, probably goes something like this: if I underperform, then I am worthless; if I am worthless, then I have no claim to other people's love and tender care which are absolutely necessary to my continual & thriving existence (because in my model of how the world works, people don't hand over their regard unless under duress from the awe instilled in them by evidence of my measurably superior intellect; and in this model I also identify entirely with my intellect, because evidently what else is there to human beings). So if I have no claim to TLC, then I am left to contemplate a combination loneliness and self-loathing in the dreary company of Netflix and nothing else. Sneer all you want at the plainly untrue, or certainly very questionable, claims in that sequence: if that is your model of how the world works, then the worry is entirely valid.

And faulty models of how the world works are no joke. Because these are not explicit, coherent, logical constructs. They are implicit, embodied, wordless intuitions built upon instinct and tradition, and half-forgotten childhood experiences, and the infinite stream of subversive media messages beamed at your subcortical systems every moment of your waking life. So, for the most part, you are not privy to the mechanics of how these world models come about. You are only privy to the result (the worry) and the dim but inescapable conviction that this worry is in fact plausible.

And not only plausible, but urgent. If fear of failure is connected by rigid conviction to a fear of rejection, then no amount of stiff-upper-lipping is going to suppress worrying. Rejection is no joke. It's not absurd to think that there might be some evolutionary logic for the emotion of rejection to be wired together with the prospect of actual, imminent and probably unpleasant death. Remember that scene in Gravity with the Hubble Space Telescope when Sandra Bullock's character is out on a spacewalk and there is a sudden wave of high-speed debris from a nearby satellite explosion and the space shuttle is destroyed and her attachment gear is wrenched off and she is catapulted into space? I submit that that's not entirely unlike what rejection can feel like: like being sent adrift into the deadly darkness of interstellar space, alone.

So rather than taking the tough-guy attitude that worrying is for women and weaklings, as a popular folk story from back home used to say, it might be more effective to engage with the worry (or - insert unhelpful emotion of your choosing) and debug it properly.

The skill of analysis and self-awareness is pretty much indispensable for an undespairing adult existence. And yet I'm sure it sounds trite and boring on paper, even if in practice I've seen it elude many a clever and educated people. It still eludes me, in the trenches of day-to-day existence, all the time.

Unconditional Positive Regard

In the real world people worry about status. They polish their highlight reels. They secret away their Impostor Syndrome. They try to play it cool. They judge and expect to be judged. They cleave the world into good and bad and winners and losers. In the real world, people understandably stick with being tough and tough-minded.

But there is another world, call it Neverland. That world which your tough-minded striver dismisses as naive, childish, impractical, and a festering ground for hippies and anarchists (you know, people without ambition, quote-unquote). I venture to submit that perhaps this other world might have some insights to offer.

You can read about it lots of places. I was reading On Becoming a Person ("a therapist's view of psychotherapy"), by the famous twentieth century American psychoanalyst Carl Rogers and I was very glad for it. Like Impro by Keith Johnstone before it, or Men, Women and Worthiness by Brene Brown; like Book of Life by Alain de Botton; like Great Thinkers by School of Life; like War and Peace by Tolstoy and The Notebook by Agota Kristof; like Steppenwolf and Siddhartha by Herman Hesse; like Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut; and like one of my favourite books of all time, L'Etranger by Camus. Like all these books and others, and this lady speaking at Google, On Becoming a Person filled me with this joy. A joy simple and steady and tranquil, like a warm summer's day in feeling format. This was Neverland.

What was this joy, this sense of something meaningful and important, this tranquility of mind, so unlike the tough-mindedness of the real world? I kept going back and forth.

In the real world, I worry about everything all the time. Have I done a good enough job? Have I upheld my values? Have I successfully avoided disappointing the people I care about? etc.

But back in Neverland, those worries lapse. Here, Dr Rogers speaks to me with soothing reassurance thus: In my relationships with persons, I have found that it does not help, in the long run, to act as though I were something that I am not; I find I am more effective when I can listen acceptantly to myself, and can be myself [because] the curious paradox is that when I accept myself as I am, then I change. His approach to relationships is humbling. It's a reminder of how much more empathy I could bring to my own, of how I could be judging less, accepting more, and trying harder to understand rather than dictate, to help rather than demand.

Dr Rogers reminds me of the virtue of giving (provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth) and acceptance (a warm regard for [the other] as a person of unconditional self-worth - of value no matter what his condition, his behaviour, or his feelings; (...) a respect and liking for him as a separate person, a willingness for him to posses his own feelings in his own way; (...) an acceptance of and regard for his attitudes of the moment, no matter how negative or positive, no matter how much they may contradict other attitudes he has held in the past; and acceptance of each fluctuating aspect of this other person; (...) a continuing desire to understand).

Why these virtues? Because, he continues, it is only as I understand the feelings and thoughts which seem so horrible to you, or so weak, or so sentimental, or so bizarre - it is only as I see them as you seem; and accept them and you, that you feel really free to explore all the hidden nooks and frightening crannies of your inner and often buried experience. And as with you, so with myself.

This unconditional positive regards is what Neverland has that the real world doesn't.

I have a Virginia-Woolf-type archetypal memory that helps me return to this feeling of unconditional positive regard. It is December, a few days before Christmas. It is cold. The day is almost over. I am walking through Covent Garden and everywhere there are people: people doing their Christmas shopping, people drinking in the pub, people talking, people walking, people everywhere doing their myriad people things. And I reach the plaza at Seven Dials, whence seven roads stretch outwards like the seven spokes of a cart wheel. And still more people can be seen sauntering underneath the Christmas lights, underneath the decorations, sauntering underneath the crests and mountains of the darkening winter clouds. The seven roads are sprawling like wide riverbeds through the tall canyon of buildings. And soundtrack to all this is Girl from the North Country, in a version by Bob Dylan, and it's a melancholy song. But melancholy and uplifting, and light with the sort of calm composure that one feels when one has accepted one's yearning as definitely unending and as the normal condition of one's life. It is just the right soundtrack. And right there is that joy, that melancholy and uplifting joy akin to reverence, expansive and suffused with awe, at life's tremendous capacity for suffering and still more tremendous capacity for growth. It's a joy as if of standing before the Project of Being, so much bigger than oneself, or one's mission, bigger even than the ambitions of one's species as a whole. For a moment, I feel free from the tragedy of unyielding tradeoffs, finite resources and finite lives of intolerable vulnerability. And from that perspective, Neverland's unconditional positive regard truly does feel like the only sensible attitude to existence.