A way of thinking

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I’ve occasionally contemplated whether I have a tendency to be pessimistic, since I often see the downside of things as well as the upside. After some thought I’ve concluded that I am, in most instances, simply pragmatic.

Pragmatism is a practical approach both to situations and problems, concentrating on facts rather than ideas or emotions. Instead of a Pollyannaville or Doomsville approach that pushes one towards unrealistic expectations of one sort or another, it’s a ‘hope for the best, plan for the worst’ outlook –  an efficient, organised and utilitarian way of being that allows one to be ready for most eventualities.

Taking the inevitable glass half full / half empty dilemma as a point in case: from the perspective of a pragmatist, it’s never an all-or-nothing scenario: the glass is simply as full as it is – so either drink the contents or don’t. I find this very straight forward and, having made my choice (to drink or not), can simply get on with the next thing and leave the relatively pointless debate to those who feel more in invested in discussion than in outcomes.

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Very probably with age everyone tends to become somewhat more pragmatic and less inclined to get bogged down in situations or endeavours that are unlikely to achieve results. This outlook should, however, not be confused with an inability to get excited at the prospect of Santa’s sack of toys (or some other anticipated event), with  being immune to surprise or with an absence of idealism. It’s simply that a pragmatist is more inclined to try to identify and anticipate likely outcomes on the basis of probabilities and thus cope more efficiently with the vagaries of life.

I have started to question, though, whether a little of the wonder at the world around us might be lost when too large a dose of pragmatism is applied to every situation.

My inner critic

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einesteinTo my mind, the word creativity carries with it connotations of originality, imagination and success. For those of us who don’t consider ourselves to have ‘an artistic bone in our body’, this feels self-limiting. Our inner critic tells us that we aren’t artistic, thus we can’t possibly be innovative or inventive, thus creativity is outside of our operational zone. This rather circular argument ignores the fact that creativity isn’t actually about being artistic. It’s about making something out of nothing, about having an idea and following it through, about implementing an existing idea in a new way. It’s about being prepared to try things out, about accepting that ‘trying’ is the first step to ‘doing’ – not the last.

Last weekend I took part in an all-day drawing workshop designed for absolute beginners, for those who – like me – believe they simply can’t draw. Over the years I’ve been to a number of writing/other workshops and, in most of them, the instructor has suggested that I silence my inner critic (MIC) and just get on with it.  Anticipating this, I asked MIC to be an observer for the day rather than a participant. She must have agreed, because I had the best day and learned far more than I expected to. I even tried sketching in charcoal, which turns out to be a very satisfying medium to work in/with. I felt very creative, very capable.

Later on I reviewed my sketches at home. Away from the supportive vibe of the workshop, I could see many more flaws in my attempts than I had in class. Clearly MIC was back in play and she was making up for lost time. Before all my confidence fled, I decided it was time for us to get to know each other a little better.  My goal was to try to establish how and why my perceptions of my creative abilities had been set and, in so doing, to figure out how MIC  could help rather than hinder me.

I started by listing the sorts of ideas that, broadly speaking, might be limiting my creativity and empowering MIC.  The first thing that leapt to mind was the pervasive belief  that creativity is inherently self indulgent. MIC does have a tendency to murmur to me that I should be doing ‘something useful’ instead of ‘messing about with mosaics’ (or whatever).  Then there’s the notion that creative pastimes require time, money and an appropriately creative environment. Considering that creativity is so broad ranging, this is clearly a furphy – but I’ve nevertheless bought into each of these ideas over the years as well. Another roadblock for many people at various times is the rather childlike need for external approval to validate the endeavour (whatever it is) – and I’m no different. However, the most ubiquitous underlying limiter I came up with is self-doubt. This is like a vitamin B12 shot for MIC – it feeds her and allows her to grow and expand her influence over what I do.

The source of self-doubt is complex, built up in layers over many years and even more experiences. This often makes it quite difficult to single out an originating point or, indeed, to know whether such an assumed point is accurate or imagined. MIC and I worked together on trying to figure this out. We eventually narrowed it down to (surprise!) my childhood, to my memories of drawings done by my mother and brothers. I remember these as things of beauty, an unreachable benchmark. I tried to draw like them and fell short, so I concluded that I couldn’t draw.

This outlook very probably shaped the way I’ve tended to approach creative activities ever since. Over time my belief that I can’t draw turned into a view that I probably can’t do other ‘arty’ things – or, at least, not do them very well. MIC and I agree that this is not an outlook that serves any useful purpose. It’s based on the half-remembered impressions of an eleven year old – a child who didn’t consider that it takes work to do something well, that her mother and siblings probably spent hours and hours sketching.

I haven’t tamed MIC (she is a rather unruly minx), but we’ll work together to formulate a better working model. We’ll try for one that promotes creativity rather than hampering it, perhaps by turning ‘Critic’ into ‘Critique’.

 

Imposed realities

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I was at an outdoor event recently, a lovely afternoon concert in the park. Just in front of where we were sitting was a group that included two young girls, of perhaps four and six years of age. They’d been dressed in identical flimsy, embroidered, Chinese-style tunics and their mother went to great lengths to pose the girls together, arm in arm, smiling, for snap after snap. It made me wonder whether, in years to come, those girls will remember how much they disliked the posing and how they tried to escape, without success, from their mother’s determination to record the happy events. I wondered if any of the pictures where one or both were pulling faces and squirming with irritation and a need to be somewhere else would survive the culling process. I wondered how many times I’d done that to my children, unthinking.

This  in turn led me to reflect on whether our family album contained only ‘happy snaps’, or if it provides a range of different moods and expressions, situations and contexts that more accurately reflects our lives. These thoughts sent me scurrying off to find a picture that I’ve always thought portrays something of who I was in my early twenties. The girl in the photo is the person I’ve tended not to show, because she doesn’t fit the persona that the people around me are familiar with. But she’s as real now as she was then.

The photograph was taken at my father’s wedding reception, which took place in the family home less than a year after my mum had died. I was angry and lost and bereft, but had tried my best throughout to behave in a manner appropriate to the proceedings and to make June feel welcome in our family. The inevitable flurry of photographs had been endured, with various people snapping away indiscriminately all afternoon until my face ached from smiling and my heart from trying to behave in a civil manner. The cameras kept pointing my way, at the allegedly happy daughter of the beaming groom. Eventually one of my brothers took the brunt of my displeasure, his camera the last straw. I broke ranks, bared my teeth and growled at him (apparently quite ferociously), after which I was let off the hook and felt a lot better.

When the prints were collected, there I was – growl and all. I kept the photo, even though it’s not pretty, because it portrayed my feelings far more clearly than words can describe and more truly than any other photos taken on the day. Looking at it again today made me think about the kinds of images that tend to be included in family albums. By and large they appear to be the sort that allow people to re-imagine their lives as full of smiles and sunshine, no clouds, no sulks, no bared teeth.

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What makes us weed out the sad and bad pictures and keep only the happy smiley ones? Is it social pressure that leads us to believe that our life must be seen and remembered in this way? Do we ever come to a time and place when we can say – ‘hey, hello, there’s more to me, more to my life’?

I recognised that girl when I looked at the photo today. I see her every day when I brush my hair. We’ve come to an accommodation over the years – l don’t hide her away so much and she hardly ever growls anymore. I’m rather glad I didn’t edit her out of my life.

A Five Year Sentence

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Just before New Year I was given a very attractive five year memory book. Essentially there are 365 pages, each page being designated for a particular day and each entry appearing five times on a page. The premise is that you just add the year and then write a line or two in the box – every day for f5 year memory bookive years. Because of the way the book is structured, you can then look back at any particular day and see what you had on your mind on that day over the course of the five years. It’s a way to keep track of both the everyday and the exceptional events in your life – but in brief, rather like a Twitter-log,  so that you don’t have to feel that it takes up a lot of your time or mental energy to keep it up to date.

The quandary I face is that I’ve actually kept a journal/diary and then a blog for many years and my entries tend not to be particularly concise. Whilst I do subscribe to Twitter and have learned to keep within the 140 characters that it dictates, my posts tend to be along the lines of passing thoughts or comments. I see the line-a-day diary entries as more personal and perhaps even meaningful, but have realised that I need to ‘Twitterise’ them so that they fit into the space provided in order for them to be succinct and interesting.

Thinking about all this brought to mind a Bernice Rubens book I read a while back. A Five Sentence is is about Miss Hawkins who, on retirement, is presented with a five year diary. For varioubernice rubens_a five year sentences and complex reasons, Miss Hawkins feels compelled to write in the diary – but has nothing to write about. So instead of writing about what she has done, she writes about what she will do – and then follows through on what she has written as though the entries are instructions, returning to tick the items off with a red crayon when she’s completed them. It’s a strange and disturbing little book, but a beautiful example of character development and clear, crisp prose. Sadly, I leant my copy to someone. Happily, I just found that it’s available as an Ebook and have downloaded it to reread.

Miss Hawkins and her five year diary, along with my attempts to Twitterise my thoughts for my five year diary, resulted in rumination as to the nature of compulsion and as to why people keep diaries/journals/blogs (of whatever sort). Some reading on the topic suggests that the reasons for doing so are probably as diverse as the people who keep them, ranging from tracking daily and/or special events to annotating holidays, from writing practise to therapy.

In my own case it started out as a means to discard or offload thoughts and feelings that I didn’t want to or couldn’t  share with anyone else. I was a moderately introverted teenager and had a range of complex issues to manage on my own, so I was basically writing to myself – and it worked very well. I was able to live in the moment and not hang onto angst or issues unduly and, as a result, to become somewhat pragmatic about life. This has served me well over the years.

More recently I’ve taken to writing for a wider audience, sharing my thoughts with others as a way of broadening the scope both of what I write and what I think about — and I enjoy it. This brings me back to day six of my line-a-day five-year-diary. I’ve managed five days of short entries and I think I’m getting the hang of it. I just hope that the three ladies in my life who ended up with one of these diaries at much the same time are busily writing in theirs each day too…

Self-indulgence – or self-nurturing?

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One day this week, as part of my daily activity regime, I wandered down to the local shopping centre to pick up a few requirements for dinner. In an unexpected moment of weakness I also bought a chocolate-covered, nut-encrusted ice-cream-on-a-stick. Feeing slightly guilty, I loaded all the purchases into my little backpack and started the uphill trudge back home in the late afternoon sun. By the time I was most of the way there I was tired… and that ice cream seemed to be crying out for attention… So I found a shady spot, plonked myself down… and ate every last super tasty morsel of it!

Watching the traffic and listening to the wind in the gum trees while I nibbled the chocolate coating away and then got stuck into the ice cream was remarkably restful. Ficecreamor a while I was just in the moment, completely absorbed in the taste and texture, the delicious richness of the slowly melting treat. Before long, however, I found myself starting to think about how self-indulgent I was being. I hadn’t bought ice creams to share with the rest of the family – I had just bought one. For me. To compound this indulgence, I was sitting there having a rest, not thinking about work, dogs, cats, children or dinner – I was just watching the world go by and slowly consuming my treat. Definitely self-indulgent, right?

This train of thought made me start to consider the difference between self-indulgence and self-nurturing. Like many women of my generation, I come from a background where ‘self-indulgence’, i.e. greedy or selfish behaviour, was discouraged – both by example and more actively. I assume that the objective was to instil some notion of self-discipline and restraint in us as children and to make us more inclined to think of others. If so, then this was probably not a bad thing to aim for. Whether it was successful, however, is debatable.

Talking to my female contemporaries, it seems that many of us have ended up with an inculcated notion of guilt. We feel guilty when doing things for ourselves, things that don’t directly or clearly benefit others in some way. Social conditioning as to the role of females in our society – or at least the one in which I grew up – reinforces that outlook, encouraging women to put the needs of others first. It’s taken many years of introspection and self-analysis for me to get to a point where I know myself well enough to be able to figure out what my needs are – and to use this to examine and temper those notions of externally imposed guilt.

As an adult I can see the many ways in which my mother denied herself simple pleasures so that we, as a family, would benefit. She did so willingly and as a matter of course, having lived through the post-war depression years of food and employment scarcity and thus having a very clear understanding of sacrifice for the greater good. As a nurse, the greater good was the well-being of her patients. As a mother, it was that of our family.

This outlook certainly benefited both my siblings and me in diverse ways, enabling us all to got through school and into adult life largely oblivious of the sacrifices made for us. We didn’t stop to consider the impact on Mum, both mentally and physically, or to wonder who looked after her while she was looking after us. If I could reach back into that distant past I would like to tell her to be a little kinder to herself. I would like to suggest that she stopped – just sometimes – and enjoyed an ice cream in the sunshine, putting everything else aside for those few minutes. It’s not an indulgence, I would to tell her, you’d just be taking a breath and enjoying the moment for a change. Self-nurturing is simply looking after yourself, being mindful of your state of mind, your body and the world around you  – and responding appropriately to ensure your continued good health.

Despite knowing this, and despite giving advice to others to take a moment, I still sometimes get glimmers of those deep-rooted twinges of guilt when I do so myself. Then I give myself a little mental shake and remind myself of the real necessity in everyday life for self-nurturing in all of us. Particularly at busy or stressful times, such as when the year is thundering to a close… and that ice cream was delicious 🙂