“Everyone is nice until the cow gets into the garden”.
– Irish Proverb
Changing the World
This morning someone told me of a saying that regularly makes her chuckle when she goes to the toilet at work. On the back of the toilet door there is a sign that says,
“Everybody wants to change the world,
but nobody wants to change the toilet roll.
BE the change.“
I LOVE it!
I am SO tempted to “play” with this quote, to make it into a bog – oops, blog – but I will restrain myself in the interests of propriety.
Connect me to a human
This is Robin speaking – the real, live, non-AI Robin Prag.
It’s Saturday morning 27 April 2024, in Perth, Western Australia, and I’m doing some revisions to my website.
I nearly cried a couple of hours ago as I lost an hour’s worth of work – changes and updates on my website – due to a computer glitch that has never happened before, and is totally unrelated to anything that I have or haven’t done.
Aaaaaaargh!!!
I search for help; I wade through and push aside multiple cobwebs of “internet fluff” preventing me from finding what I actually need to resolve this issue.
Eventually I find a “happiness engineer” to help resolve the problem for me.
It’s a long time since I’ve contacted a “happiness engineer” – in the past, when they got back to my email query, they were mostly super helpful, so I eagerly look forward to his (the name is male) help.
He gives me loads of useful information, but something in his response doesn’t ring true to what I had written. I reply and tell him that no, the issue is not resolved, but there’s no response.
Then I scroll down and wade through the morass of information he’s given me, and I’m about to reply again when right at the bottom together with a heart-warming, wonderfully politically correct, personal encouragement of me in my life, together with supporting emojis, I see the following concluding words:
Remember, if you need to talk to a human, just type ‘connect me to a human’.
!!!!!!!!
The future is NOW.
And it’s only getting worse.
Could it be that the global epidemic of depression, anxiety and multiple major mental health issues (gotta love the alliteration) is in some vague, roundabout way related to the fact that we are so DISCONNECTED FROM OTHER HUMANS???
They’ll never prove it – try and make that evidence-based!
I’m very grateful to and appreciative of AI for all it can do for us.
And some fantastic pieces of AI generated art I’ve recently seen.
I love the humour it has provided me for this post.
But I worry for the future generations as we become more and more disconnected from our fellow human beings; as we live in, get our information from, and base our Life Decisions on algorithms and ARTIFICIAL Intelligence (which, in truth, is artificial MIMICRY).
And what about the day, when our request to ‘connect me to a human’ can no longer be granted?
I’ve had a great life, and here’s hoping I won’t be around to witness that.
Great Marriages
“Great marriages cannot be constructed by individuals who are terrified by their basic aloneness, as so commonly is the case, and seek a merging in marriage. Genuine love not only respects the individuality of the other but actually seeks to cultivate it, even at the risk of separation or loss. The ultimate goal of life remains the spiritual growth of the individual, the solitary journey to peaks that can be climbed only alone.”
– oops, I lost the source of this quote!
The Partner We Choose
“If you look at the person someone has chosen to be with, you will see what they think of themself.”
– George Lucas (quoted by Carrie Fisher in her autobiography, The Princess Diarist.)
Hope
This little frog was given to me a few years ago by a long-term client. Through much of her distressing life circumstances, this client has done everything she can to hold on to hope.
As a psychotherapist of more than 20 years, I have received many little gifts of thanks from my clients but somehow it is only this little frog (now named Freddie) that I have ever displayed in my office.
To this day Freddie Frog still sits there, in prime position, proudly exhibiting his message of hope.
Often, during the course of a psychotherapy session I will point to, and talk of, Freddie‘s gift – because in the midst of the never-ending human struggle with Life, it seems to me that when all else is lost, hope is often the only thing that can motivate us to keep placing one heavy foot in front of the other.
Paradoxically, when I reflect back to a client on their lack of, their loss of, hope, almost always the client releases their tension, relaxes their posture, and I see a visible “lightening” in their whole demeanour.
That’s some of the magic of psychotherapy – when something important, even a devastating loss, is deeply acknowledged and validated, people often seem better able to move on, to move forwards in their lives.
In 1891 the great American poet Emily Dickinson, who herself often struggled to hold on to hope, wrote a poem, Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul / And sings the tune without the words / And never stops – at all.
In 1993 the one and only Paul McCartney wrote and sang of the perennial human longing for “hope of deliverance from the darkness that surrounds us“.
In 2022, to this very day, so many of my clients, and I too, still often struggle with the loss of hope, forgetting Freddie Frog‘s critical message.
But, day after day, when I enter my office, there Freddie is: tirelessly, solidly, endlessly broadcasting his 4-letter inscription – reminding me, reminding us all, of that “thing with feathers, perching in our soul, that sings a tune without words, and never stops at all”.
So thank you (you know who you are) for your precious gift – for Freddie, and for your life-affirming reminder to me, to my other clients, to us all, of the need to hold on to hope.
Gumption
Gumption.
I love that word – I discovered it many years ago in a weird & wonderful 1970’s book, Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig.
Gumption – I love the sound of it, the idea of it, the feel of it in the mouth.
I just googled for synonyms of gumption. The first link listed: initiative, resourcefulness, enterprise, imagination, ingenuity, inventiveness …
Y-e-e-e-s, kind of, but that’s not the gumption that Robert Pirsig vividly chronicled during his epic back-roads, back-country-America motorcycle-adventure with his 11 year old son.
When their motorbike broke down in the middle of nowhere and they had to fix it themselves or suffer potentially fatal consequences.
That’s not the gumption that drove Pirsig to keep submitting the draft of his book even after 121 rejections! (it subsequently climbed to the the best-seller list and stayed there for decades).
The gumption that Pirsig so deftly described in Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and that he embodied in his determination to get this cult-classic published, is the definition that hollered out at me from my screen, after I clicked on vocabulary.com:
“fortitude and determination“.
Yes!
With synonyms listed as: “backbone, grit, guts“.
Yes!
I’ve detailed Pirsig’s epic description of gumption to countless clients. Clients battling through the multiple misfortunes that no-one on our planet is exempt from.
And yes, of course we need empathy, compassion and kindness to help us prevail against adversity. But, ultimately, to overcome the challenges that Life so carelessly seems to throw at us – what we have to have, what is a sine qua non, an absolute pre-condition, is gumption.
Backbone.
Grit.
Guts.
Gumption.
The End of All Our Exploring
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
– T.S. Elliot
On Children
And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, “Speak to us of Children.”
And he said:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The Archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the Archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
– Khalil Gibran, in The Prophet
What we Need
“You can’t always get what you want. But if you try, you might just find you get what you need.”
– The Rolling Stones.
Life’s Complexity
“Life is complex.
Each one of us must make his own path through life.
There are no self-help manuals, no formulas, no easy answers.
The right road for one is the wrong road for another.
The journey of life is not paved in blacktop [bitumen]; it is not brightly lit, and it has no road signs.
It is a rocky path through the wilderness.”
M. Scott Peck.
Heart and Head
“If my heart could do my thinking
And my head begin to feel,
I would look upon the world anew
And know what’s truly real. ”
– Van Morrison (Singer & songwriter).
The Blessing of Tears
“Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears for they are the rain upon the blinding dust of earth overlying our hard hearts.”
– Charles Dickens (in Great Expectations).
Understanding & Empathy
“Only understanding and empathy have any hope of moving the conversation forward among opposing sides.”
– Catherine Ingram.
Home is People
“Home is people. Not a place. If you go back there after the people are gone, then all you can see is what is not there any more”.
– Robin Hobb
We Give Thanks for Our Friends
“We give thanks for our friends.
Our dear friends.
We anger each other.
We share this sad earth, this tender life, this precious time.
Such richness. Such wildness.
Together we are blown about.
Together we are dragged along.
All this delight.
All this suffering.
All this forgiving life.
We hold it together.
Amen. ”
– Michael Leunig. Australian writer & cartoonist.
Problems in a Relationship
“Love and war are both conditions of our human brain.
Arguably, though, the brain is wired first and foremost for war, rather than for love.
The brain’s primary function is to ensure we survive … and it is very good at this… but the things we do to keep from getting killed often are exactly the things that keep us from getting into a relationship or staying in one.”
– Stan Tatkin, in Wired for Love.
Fixing the Movie
“Trying to fix the world is like trying to change a movie by manipulating the movie screen. The world as we know it is simply a screen onto which we project our thoughts. Until we change those thoughts, the movie stays the same.
Whenever our outer world remains stuck, it is incumbent upon us to look, not outward, but inward. It is a call to find the places in ourselves where we are holding on to old ways.”
– Marianne Williamson
Time, the bastard Time.
“Where does the discontent start?
You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields.
And to prod all these there’s time, the bastard Time.
The end of life is now not so terribly far away – you can see it the way you see the finish line when you come into the stretch – and your mind says,
‘Have I worked enough? Have I eaten enough? Have I loved enough?’
All of these, of course, are the foundations of man’s greatest curse, and perhaps his greatest glory. ‘What has my life meant so far, and what can it mean in the time left to me?”
– John Steinbeck (in Sweet Thursday).
A Full Life
“A full life is a life full of pain.
But the only alternative is not to live fully, or not to live at all.”
M. Scott Peck, in The Road Less Travelled.
The True Purpose of Relationships
“Our most significant relationships exist for a very different reason than we believe, either personally as individuals or collectively as a society.
Their true purpose is not to make us happy, not to meet our needs, not to define for us our niche in society, not to keep us safe … but to cause us to grow towards the Light.”
– Robin Norwood
Your Memory Palace
“Our memories make us who we are…
Choose one moment in every day that is worth cherishing,
welcome that moment into your Memory Palace,
nurture it always, and it will never leave you”.
– Ross Welford in Time Travelling with a Hamster.
Death of a Relationship
“We may think that we want more than anything for a relationship to last, but the relationship itself usually signals its limitations, as the signs of old age signal death …
It takes courage to read the signals of fate asking for change, asking us to acquiesce to the bitter truths that are revealed slowly and painfully”.
– Thomas Moore, in Soul Mates.
The Meaning of Life: This Moment
“When you realise that you live in, that indeed you are this moment, now, and no other, you must relax and taste to the full, whether it be pleasure or pain. At once it becomes obvious why this universe exists … The whole problem of justifying nature, of trying to make life mean something in terms of its future, disappears utterly. Obviously it all exists for this moment. It is a dance, and when you are dancing you are not intent on getting somewhere. You go round and round, but not under the illusion that you are pursuing something, or fleeing from the jaws of hell. The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance.”
– Alan Watts in The Wisdom of Insecurity
Your TRUE Family
“The bond that links your true family is not one of blood,
but of respect and joy in each other’s life.
Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.”
– Richard Bach.
Surrendering to Marriage
“Yet, my fantasy of marriage as a wellspring of contentment has completely disappeared, and so should yours. Thinking you get happiness ever after is a ticket to divorce. I’ll tell you the four things I now know about marriage, from my own transforming relationship and from conversations with other flummoxed spouses:
A. Marriage can be hell;
B. The grass is not greener on the other side;
C. Savour the highs, because one thing you can count on – the dips are just around the corner; and
D. Nobody is perfect, so you may as well love the one you’re with.
To get to this stage took a lot of work and a lot of tears. I cannot imagine going through this psyche-searing task again with someone new. Therefore, I surrender to this imperfect marriage, because I love it more than I hate it and I committed to this man with a promise that I need to, we all need to, do our best to fulfil.
– Iris Krasnow: Surrendering to Marriage.
Let me Live my Life
– I spotted the following words painted amongst hippy flowers and peace signs, on the back of a VW Combi Van. Of course, the Combi Van was driving between Dunsborough & Busselton, WA!
“I’m the one who has to die, so let me live my life the way I want”.
Happiness
John had
Great Big
Waterproof
Boots on;
John had
Great Big
Waterproof Hat;
John had a
Great Big Mackintosh –
And that
(Said John)
Is
That.
– A.A. Milne.
God Help Us to Change
“God help us to change.
To change ourselves and to change our world.
To know the need for it.
To deal with the pain of it. To feel the joy of it.
To undertake the journey without understanding the destination.
The art of gentle revolution.”
– Michael Leunig; Australian Writer & Cartoonist.
Freedom
“The most important decision we ever make is about whether we can make decisions.
Freedom is born the moment I decide I am free to move away from what has previously imprisoned me”.
– Sam Keen.
Listening to Life 