Six Shots or Five?

I wonder if others out there feel like things come together in waves of good and bad luck. Luck is something that I hear people talk about as though one can own it, have it or not have it. People talk about luck as though it is the very cause of our good fortune… good things are happening because we are lucky. It’s perverse, in a way, that we do this, because luck isn’t cause… it does not exist in any kind of chain of events as one dominoes in a line amongst others, generating fortuitous consequences.  Luck is not a force amongst other forces that we can posses and wield like superheroes. Luck is just the word we use to describe events when they have gone our way, especially when the outcome was against the odds. Luck didn’t bring the event about, it is just the way we interpreted it after it happened.

So when yesterday I faced a dull ache in my mouth from an infection, pain in my eyes and temples from an out of date sight prescription, an email from Paypal declaring that they would be holding funds in my account for 21 days before could withdraw them, an aggressive email from an Ebayer who is trying to fleece me, and discovered that the car MOT had actually run out at the start of the month… it was very, very tempting to feel like some external force was at play, raining on my parade.

Luck is something that we humans have certainly invested a lot of energy in; many cultures and religions have some sort of numerology at play, lucky and unlucky numbers, and preferential numbers. I, like may others, have worn pendants and rings in the past with the purpose of bringing me luck, owned a lucky pair of socks, exercise good luck rituals connected with the sequence I do things in. I guess in there is the superstitious creature that inhabits us all. A human search for cause and effect that sometimes leads us down cul de sacs of understanding. Somewhere in there, when the hourglass of luck was inverted in our understanding to be cause rather than effect, luck became interchangeable with hope and a means for controlling fear and managing stress. A soothing tool (we all need those). And soothing tools are no bad thing… usually.

But does ‘believing in luck’ necessitate believing too in bad luck? Just as luck gives us hope, when the grey clouds gather overhead are we robbed of hope? If that is the case then when things don’t go our way, against the odds, I for one start to feel a bit helpless. The uneasy feeling of not being able to touch the bottom of the ocean with my toes, left to the will of tides and the wind curled waves. When you are convinced things are not going your way, that ocean is not a good place to be. Worse still, worse than feeling things are out of control, is that I stop trying. The inevitability of bad luck extinguishes hope and the energy it gives us.

Luck then, as a way of describing events that happen to us, seems harmless enough. But to invest in luck, to store it up in charms and rituals and to bathe in its warmth when we are ‘feeling lucky’ and look to take more risks with the expectancy that things will go our way, that sound a little dangerous. That is to invite luck in to be the friend of hope, precious hope. I could live without luck, but to live without hope, no way. Luck is a fair-weather friend, whilst hope will see me though the good and the bad. When luck is running low, it will press hope to leave too. Inviting in luck is a dangerous thing.

Every Man an Island

He wasn’t really what I expected when I arrived. Over the phone he had mentioned that he had worked in law for many years, it was a strange thing to throw into the conversation – I took it to mean he might be a bit strange, strange or just a little drunk. I would learn that he had been a senior barrister’s clerk to a London based chamber, a very well paid job indeed, and something that clearly meant a lot to him.

He sat with me on a bench beside the window as I cut out the old putty from around the broken glass. You can usually tell when people want to take part in a little conversation, so I asked him the usual: renting or purchased; been here long; where did you move from; what do you do for a living; do you enjoy it… I’m not good at small talk so these stock questions seem to serve me well in situations like this. He reciprocated with similar questions and seemed genuinely interested, even a little intrigued. I could see him edging down the bench as I worked, looking up at me with puzzled eyes and an approving smile.

What seemed to have him so mystified was how it came to be that an architecture graduate was happily repairing his broken window. I think it’s the happiness part that he had the most difficulty with. I learned a little about his life as a barrister’s clerk, and how that came to be a story from his past. It was a past he was proud of and he still hadn’t come to terms with their decision to let him go, despite the passing years.

I tend to notice where I am, it is the architectural eye, and his spacious Victorian flat had the feel of faded wealth; it was starting to make sense. Something else I had noticed was the small white box marked Mirtazapine on the bureau. It just caught my eye, the familiar proportions of that little white box with its coloured banding. I might never have noticed it if I hadn’t known it so well.

He wanted to know how I it was that I had broken with a white collar career to become a handyman - how I had managed to start all over again. His curiosity stemmed from his own need to start again, to overcome the wounds and make a new living. Our conversation reminded me a lot about the emotional and financial trappings of our old life. I wonder how many of us, when we look back across our life’s decisions, can attribute the choices we made along the way to the will of others. The choices we made to make others happy, proud, to feel some worth in the eyes of others. He asked me a quite unexpected question; he asked if he and his partner could come to our wedding.

While he was in the bathroom the door bell rang. I answered it to a man with a beard so thick that I could barely understand anything he said. He spoke in mumbles, but somehow managed to get by communicating. He came in and made himself comfortable, taking out his tobacco pouch and cigarette papers. He was warmly welcomed. While I continued working these two men sat in the lounge making stop start conversation, seemingly eager for me to finish up. When it came time to present the bill he drew out his cheque book and very carefully touched his fountain pen to the page. What he the tore out and gave to me looked like the doodles of a three year old; it was anyone’s guess if the bank would accept this cheque. Actually they didn’t, and I wasted no time in returning to the flat to ask him to draw up another.

The bearded friend answered the door and ushered me in mumbling some more. The barrister’s clerk lay asleep across the sofa… a deep sleep. When does falling asleep become passing out? It took some time to wake him, and longer still to explain why I was there again. In the brief time that I had been away, he had downed a few drinks and passed out. When he woke he was disorientated, and then he began talking about his job again, only this time he broke down into tears. He sat there, apologising and sobbing and angry at it all, grimacing through the tears, hugging me.

He wasn’t coping, and what I was glimpsing were his habits, the daily routine that involved self medicating around 11am and the anesthetised day that followed. He wasn’t talking to anyone professionally, he wasn’t taking his medication, and his difficulties were compounded by alcohol. Wow, if I knew the hole that I had scrambled up from to get to where I am, then this was a man who had further to climb. For everything I know about my own journey, I realised then I knew nothing about the challenge that he faced or about where to start in helping him. Alcohol makes everything so complicated.

New Glasses

When I started working for myself I chose to take a fairly big drop in my salary, so from the outset Alicia and I were thinking about how we were going to make ends meet. I’ve never had any trouble spending what I earn. To be brutally honest, I’ve always spent more than I earn. Sometimes you hear people talk about what they would do if they won the lottery. There is usually a fairly crafted shopping list. People rarely say ‘Oh I don’t know’ in the way that they might if you asked them what their favourite movie is. The shopping list seems to be written, prepared, regularly redrafted, and ready for that lottery win. It is a conversation that seems, in itself, to bring people genuine pleasure. I see friends faces light up as they reel through the purchases and carve up the fictional winnings amongst friends, family and charities.

Earlier this year Chris Weir, a psychiatric nurse, and her husband Colin, a camera man, netted £161m (around $262m) in a European wide lottery. The prize was Europe’s biggest ever. The couple made public appearances, giddy, excited, energized, unable to sleep, endearing themselves by telling the British public that they were ‘tickled pink’. When the UK lottery was launched the basic idea was for the sale of lottery tickets to support ‘good causes’ as well as give players the chance to win a life changing sum of money. Just over a quarter of the money raised from the lottery ticket sales goes towards ‘good causes’. What constitutes a ‘good cause’ is decided by one of the thirteen distribution bodies. Six of these concern sport, five relate to the arts, one deals with heritage grants and one, a distributor called the Big Lottery Fund, provides funding to community groups and to projects that improve health, education and the environment.

What constitutes a ‘life changing sum of money’ is anyone’s guess. In the UK, chances are your everyday household with personal loans and credit cards is going to owe somewhere in the region of £15,000 (around $24,000), and that isn’t counting the money we owe on our mortgage. Certainly, before the credit crunch, banks and credit card companies were willing to offer me a total of £35,000 (around $57,000) of credit in the form of plastic, personal loans and overdrafts. It was for me, and I’m guessing many others, our very own lottery win. When did it become ok to dangle that sort of money in front of people? When did a ‘life changing sum of money’ become the £15K we need to clear our debts? And what on earth did we all spend it on? The total UK personal debt at the end of June 2011 stood at £1,451billion! That is £1,451billion we have spent before we’ve earned it! £1,451billion we have spent on ‘stuff’ that we told ourselves we wanted and needed. So when we compare our developed world to the developing world, is what we are so proud of, our ability to access and spend money that isn’t ours to spend? And we can’t afford it. Every 14 minutes a home in this country is being repossessed.

So the banks said we could have the money, and the seductive adverts, fashions and fads told us we needed the money, but what about us? The middle men in this exchange of borrowings for ‘stuff’ and services (stuff would sometimes be referred to here as ‘goods’ - now there is a loaded word if ever I heard it). Why didn’t we put the brakes on? Why are we still out there shopping like our lives depend on it? It is as if all those old instincts and drives to seek out food and shelter, to survive, to belong, to achieve and have worth in our belonging, have been played, taken advantage of, substituted. As though ‘stuff’ has become administered like methadone to substitute the heroin we usually call ‘striving’.

I’m not name calling here. I’m at the meeting too, just recognising I’m an addict and trying to come off the dependency. We are what we are, human beings with brains that make us both of the animal kingdom and other than it. Both virtuous and flawed. Saying we are to blame is just nuts to me. We just are… this is what it is to be a human being… it’s tricky… our old instincts and drives are not of this seductive modern world, but they have to get along just the same. Sometimes we seem to elevate ourselves too far above the rest of animal kingdom, and forget we are just another primate with a few extras and some unique ways of using what we have.

Teaching in schools I saw increasingly how school just felt so old fashioned. Despite the ever flowing technology and the new building programmes, it was what schools did with it all that just felt old fashioned. The comment we’d hear with increasing frequency was ‘why do we have to be here’, and ‘why do I have to learn this’. Educationalists and parents alike try and steer a path through these very pointed questions, caught in the headlights of a youth that are ready to start buying, and feeling held on the bit by their inability to earn. And we were right to resist, and stutter out our arguments about the power of knowledge, the value of an education… but I’m not sure even we didn’t feel like our arguments were somehow being hollowed out from within. Nowhere else was belonging and worth and identity so tied up with what you had; nowhere else was the curse of the self more evident. And not surprisingly either, after all adolescence is a time in our lives when our identity is thrown open as part of everyday brain maturation.

I digress, and how difficult it is not to, and how much I want to. So whilst I’m spending like it is the last day of my life every day, along with all the other shoppers… I start wondering where all this ‘stuff’ comes from, where it all ends up. I watch The Story Of Stuff and it’s a good starting point. The prices we pay for ‘stuff’ are determined by the raw materials, the costs of manufacture, distribution and sales, and then the mysterious profit margin… which we are to understand is determined in effect by us…. by how much we are willing to pay… by the worth we place on ‘stuff’. And then there are those things which the price doesn’t reflect: the air and water pollution, the depletion of natural resources, the people whose health, education and futures are jeopardised by the need to keep production flowing and cheap. Isn’t it a strange world where in one country we protect environments and workers from exploitation, and then across the water it happens without restriction.

So I’m spending money I don’t own, to buy things I don’t need, made by people who can’t escape, on a planet that can’t give anymore. I’m not trying to make a political point here, this is personal. This is just one family’s realisation that in so many ways, and for so many reasons, we can’t keep living like this. We can’t live with our consciences if we are perpetuating and contributing to keeping communities enslaved. And we can’t afford to keep spending beyond our means. So we have taken a long hard look at what we buy and who we buy from. We are just starting out, starting out for the first time again. It isn’t about making ourselves endure some kind of suffering… it has more to do with finding happiness in pursuits other than ownership and competitiveness. It is another piece of the jigsaw that we found on the slip road as we left the rat race.

I admit, I never really cared about the planet, but I’ve always cared about people and now I realise that the two are interconnected. When I buy something that impacted on an environment, it also impacted on a community’s way of life and their ability to sustain themselves. I can’t spend money now without knowing a bit more. And the internet has changed that, because I don’t have to take the advertisers’ word for it any more. I don’t buy clothes often but when I do, I can seek out clothing that pays the cotton growers a fair price and that doesn’t use sweat shops. It will cost what it costs and I’ll either be able to afford it or I’ll go without. But I can’t live with myself buying something that brought harm to my fellow human beings, however much they are hidden out of sight, and I won’t be duped into buying something because it appeals to my need to fit in, be accepted and add to my self worth. It is a simple life we are travelling towards and we are learning as we go.

Something that might interest you: http://www.teamsweat.org/

Epiphany, But Slower

Life for us has changed and is continuing to change in so many ways. As I grew up, being taught to believe that there was a God, now and then life would bump up against those beliefs and things wouldn’t make sense. I borrowed my belief in God, rather than owning it for myself. When I was trying to put the pieces together after another major depression, I looked into following a religion. The internet and discussion threads are full with people who recommend God to others at times of illness. My father certainly seemed to think it would do me good.

For many, many years I have been a non-practising Muslim, and therefore in my eyes… not a Muslim at all; only one by birth, if such a thing exists. One by one, each of the rituals and laws fell away from my life… except the one about eating pork. I still don’t do that, although I offer no rational explanation for why I still avoid this meat and I place no importance on this fact. I’ve always been uneasy about not believing in God though. I suppose I’ve always hedged my bets, so that if one day it turned out there was a God I might still be able to argue my way into heaven. I wouldn’t even allow myself to quietly think that there was no God for fear that God would be listening. I’ve declared myself an agnostic in the past… which is a posh word for sitting on the fence. A word no doubt invented for boys to impress girls with.

Recently, and for the first time, I’ve have accepted and I am easy with the view that there is no God. I say this without any wish to influence others and without any delusion that I might be capable of doing so. I’m ok with the idea that there is no God. I am an atheist. I can say that now without looking over my shoulder. I am not any the poorer for living life as an atheist… I like still to make sense of the world and I do so the best I can. Along the way I get stuck sometimes because our knowledge and understanding is limited. But I’m open to ‘not knowing’ and not having all the answers, and feel no pressure to substitute ‘not knowing’ with anything else.

When Alicia was pregnant with Xavier, Alicia and I had discussion over a meal about how we would approach the subject of religion as parents. My parents are Muslims, Alicia believes in God but does not follow any one religion, and I was, at the time, not sure how to characterise myself. I’ve seen others take to religion when they had children, almost out of a necessity to gem up before turning teachers to their children. Having children does bring into sharp focus questions about what is right and wrong and many people find themselves dusting off their moral compass in readiness for parenthood. We decided then and there that for Xavier, religion was part of his cultural identify and we would welcome any religious instruction from all grandparents. That said, Alicia and I would just be ourselves with Xavier, and he would come to know our uncertainties and our own personal beliefs over time. It is easy to think that this is something that can be put off and won’t apply until he is much older, but life is rich with beliefs and ritual and celebration and remembrance. As much as I want him to one day find his own path, he will be impressionable and under the influence of religious belief for a long time before he chooses for himself.

Alicia and I do our best to make sure Xavier feels loved unconditionally, and feels safe and secure through the care, affection and protection we offer him. He is a confident and happy boy and a great companion. It is possible to be a good person without religion, and it is possible to establish a bedrock of feeling loved, safe an secure without religion. We do this through our relationship with him.

Without religious belief, or what people call spiritual belief, I take time to understand better what it is to be human. We are at once falling angels and rising primates. It is why I write and read so much about our unique human brains. Why I learn about biochemistry and neuroscience and psychology. Why I see human behaviour, and struggles and delights through this understanding. I want to learn about our sameness, our unique qualities, our beauty and our flaws. I’m interested in the way we have gone about constructing societies, where these societies originate, how they shape us and how we shape them. I feel like I’m lifting my head, like I’ve been trying to lift my head many times before and not quite made it. I feel prejudice and ignorance substituted with understanding and compassion. I’m sometimes very uneasy about what I see and the temptation is to once again keep one’s head down. But like a bite of the apple, there is no going back. We look… try and better our understanding, and try to steer a path that we can live with. Life for us has changed and is continuing to change in so many ways.