I once had a small plaque, which was attached to the wall in my porch. It said ‘If at first you don’t succeed you’re running about average’. That somehow seems to highlight how I feel, with the emphasis on not succeeding.
Like most of the population, I decided that, come the New Year, I would make changes in my lifestyle. These are changes that I have known about for quite a while. So, New Years morning, bright and early, I decided to make a start…
Well, it went ‘pear shaped’ right from the start. One thing I have to admit is that I am not very good at communicating. Not only am I not good at this, but the more important a thing is to me, the more ineffectual I am at explaining. There is one memorable occasion, when I repeated the same sentence over and over again, each time louder and louder becoming more angry and frustrated at my friends inability to listen to what I was saying. When I had calmed down my friends repeated to me the actual sentence. I then understood why they did not listen. What I actually said did not make sense.
Over the years, one useful habit Dave and I have developed is to begin each day with a prayer time. This is quite ad hoc, a mixture of liturgy and personal routine that we mostly manage to sustain and, perhaps more importantly, seems to work for us.
So here we were New Years morning, sitting down, a cup of tea at hand, ready to begin. As a preliminary, we look at three aspects. We list things we are glad about, the things we want to do that day and lastly, the things that concern us. These I write down, for later in the liturgy. It is not the best time of the day to think any thoughts, never mind reflect on what was good about the previous day and what we plan for the present. Mostly, we are so brain-dead; we cannot even recall what concerns us. It was probably a mistake not to make some attempt to communicate to my husband that come New Years morning we needed to have a radical shake up of our lifestyle.
The prayers were abandoned, the tea drank in ones own company. Twenty years ago there would have been no tea to drink as I would have thrown it at him. Today, we tend to resolve such difficulties by quietly spending time individually with God. To help us focus, we often write down our thoughts as a dialogue with God. This is how we continued.
I wrote ‘…Resolve is not always an option. Failure to reach a satisfactory resolution is as much part of everyone’s life as successful resolution. You must accept yourselves. You are both the people I created. The ‘negative aspects’ of your life are there for a reason. They make you that total person. They balance and promote those aspects of you that make you unique…’. At this point I had in mind the gene that can protect from malaria. I understand it works well for those people who have one copy but in people who have two copies it causes sickle-cell anaemia. With modern medicines we forget how devastating this disease is, yet in some places the human race must have survived only because of this gene. Some years ago, Dave and I visited Ostia Antica. If I remember what I read correctly,
This, once thriving port for the city of Rome was abandoned in the space of two years, as a result of malaria.
So Dave and I talked through that upset and decided to have breakfast. During this time it became increasingly evident that one of the big hindrances to communication was the emotional baggage we carry. Things like anger, hurt, guilt and fear. It was one thing knowing what we should do, but when we started these emotions seemed to take over.
Some time ago, Dave and I went to Iona. I was going through a very difficult time. It is all very well knowing you should not stay angry. Knowing one should forgive people and oneself. But the reality of emotions is that they cannot be easily switched off. I was awash with unresolved hurt and anger. For many years I likened myself to an old fashioned house with a cellar. This cellar was kept very tightly barred as it was flooded with these horrific monsters of uncontrolled emotional baggage from my life. By the time we went to Iona this cellar door had given way, with all the subsequent destruction to the unaffected parts of the house that was me.
The visit to Iona was not a happy one, nor easy for those with me, but I was able to deal with the worst of the emotions that reeked such havoc in my life. I discovered that some people found it helpful to pick a stone and on it name the difficulty or such and throw it into the sea; this being a physical action signifying giving the problem to God. Of course, being difficult, I missed the opportunity to do this with the group, but the next day I asked a member of the group to come with me and act as both priest and witness as I gave into Gods keeping my hurts.
At first I was very careful not to take back this hurt. In fact, my actions were most singularly successful. It was this then that came to mind as we discussed the problem of emotional baggage hindering our communication and hence our relationship. But it would need to be something much more accessible than a trip to Scotland.
On New Year’s Day we discussed emotional baggage with two other people and were encouraged to pursue, finding an effective but local equivalent to the throwing stones into the sea at Iona. It seemed somehow that this involved writing down and sharing some of our own experiences. Now if it’s difficult for me to express myself orally, expressing myself in the written word takes some considerable time and effort. However bright and early on the morning of the second of January, I spent a couple of hours writing down the series of events that had led to this quest.
Mindful of the pitfalls of losing work on the computer, I carefully named the file at the beginning, knowing the machine was programmed to regularly save what was being typed up. I was then somewhat mystified to find that the carefully set up file was completely empty. Not even my clever husband could find what was lost. Although, without doubt, I must have done something wrong, as far as I was concerned the loss was an ‘act of God’ and I was pretty miffed. Especially as I felt the writing to share was something I thought He wanted me to do.
At one level I felt He had ‘kicked me in the teeth’ and at all levels I was angry.
When I returned to the Me – God dialogue I wrote as His response to my rather off hand opening gambit of ‘well!’.
‘Good, you have come to tell me what you think of me.’
I responded. ‘You know that I know, it must be more complex than that. Either that, or you do not actually exist.’
Perhaps you are becoming more adult in your relationship with me. Perhaps you need to learn how you react to put downs, so then you can change.’
I had written on an occasion before all this happened. ‘…How can I learn new ways to react to discouragement…’.
Somehow, in the two days between the first futile attempt at writing and today’s attempt, the audience has changed from a few friends and family to a Blog.
More than anything, it was the futility of that first attempt that brought to mind that plaque, ‘If at first you don’t succeed you’re running about average’. Thinking about it again, average is actually rather comfortable.
Gill