Lady and The Tramp

We all have our Pet Hates – whether that’s people, or situations. In the case of irritations, like that, for us all there is a sliding scale from a mild or minor irritation right up to the pinnacle – the top tier, the two or three that just dig their nails into our sensitivities and won’t let go. It’s the “PH” red zone – way above the peeve factor, into the GRRR area.

Now there’s always a danger when we become PH intolerant, when we have an overload of PH.  Richard Wilson’s character Victor Meldrew in the BBC Comedy series One Foot in the Grave was hugely PH intolerant, and for him there was no sliding scale. The ludicrous nature of his intolerant reactions was the comedy factor, plus the fact that the sheer volume of his Pet Hates seemed to bring him an ever increasing number of mishaps, accidents and grief. He reaped a constant harvest from his own particular Law of Attraction.

 

Deeply embedded

In the structure and familiarity of our own particular Pet Hates there is longevity to them. They go back a long way, often to our childhood – and this being so, every time we have experienced them we’ve flagged them up accordingly and coded them into our memory, all lit up like beacons.

Not being a tall person, I experienced many childhood instances of being ignored or passed-over, particularly when waiting in queues. They grew into contemptuous put-downs due to my physical inferiority in the height department. My personal vulnerability and insecurity and low self-esteem was then – at any time - able to grow this purely height-related inferiority into a full-blown personal attack.
Neurotic and paranoid – yes!
Elicits irrational behaviour – yes!

 
Cars

When we are behind the wheel of a car it is like we are in our ultimate “safe zone”. We are hermetically sealed from regular human interaction – and can release all our social conditioning. Of course, this affords us full expression of any and all PH intolerances we encounter while driving. Traffic hold-ups and other idiots are everywhere, aren’t they? So we can, if we are so inclined, keep up a running tirade of invective – which of course turns us into a driver far worse than the ones we are complaining about!

So what am I beefing about on this particular occasion?

Bête noire

Following After School Cricket Club this week I went food shopping in my local Marks & Spencer’s. I was clad in track suit and trainers.

As I approached the checkout with my basket, the lady in front of me was unloading her basket contents onto the conveyor. At this stage of the story timeline, in my eyes, she was still “A Lady”. She was smartly dressed, aged between the ages 55-65, and clearly shopped at M&S as it befitted her social standing. Even the contents of her shopping basket designated her as being of such a “type”.

Now in my view of the world every woman is someone’s daughter and – possibly – someone’s Mum. Plus, in the panoply of human life we are all equal, in my book.
Anyway ...

When she’d finished unloading, rather than stand aside and let her walk to the end of the conveyor with her now empty basket, in order to put it on the “empty pile” – I held my hand out for her to hand me the basket so I could stack it for her. She passed me her basket as if I was the servant, her personal serf – with no word of thanks, or even a smile – just a cocked nose in the air and a contemptuous curl of the lip.

In the days of my personal Yore, I would have probably said something sarcastic to her – however, another of my flagged up experiences has been that the type of women prone to this particular type of behaviour, are impervious to sarcasm or any kind of criticism, veiled or overt. They have obviously breezed through life, carried by a stream of minions and doormats, whom God – and their particular God - has put on this Earth for one purpose only.

So I remained mute, although bristling, and with rolling eyes.

I wondered if it was my clothing. Perhaps if I’d been dressed in a suit or at least smart causal, she would have afforded me the common decency of even a “knowing nod”, for my small Random Act of Kindness.

Then I surmised that perhaps this was a human remake of Lady and The Tramp? Although after reading this entry on Google I had my doubts:

Live the journey of Lady, a beloved cocker spaniel, and Tramp, a mutt with a heart of gold, in one of the best loved stories of all time.

She may possibly have been someone’s beloved Coq Espagnol, but I wouldn’t describe myself as “a mutt” even though there are some who think I have a heart of gold!


Life

The thing is - life is not necessarily Disney-style with fairy-tale story lines. It can be ugly and sordid as well as be filled with amazing and wonderful Gentlemen AND Ladies.

However, life is, generally, what you make it.

If you choose to Tramp through life believing all people are amazing and unique; enjoying your time here while wearing a pleasant disposition right down to your bones; finding the fun, the humour, the joy, and the beauty wherever they may be; you’ll find it quite straightforward to accept all the brickbats and bouquets that this buffet of cosmic catering can serve up.

If you choose to “Lord” or “Lady” it through life believing that most people are irrelevant except when they are serving your purpose; when your frown and curled lip are a constant testament to your endurance of a world that is made barely tolerable by Random Acts of Trampling; you’ll find it very difficult to accept that this particular mortal coil was made for many honest and genuine people beyond the myopic strictures of your inner coterie.


The Conclusion of Damocles

For a very brief moment, this Tramp’s life momentarily crossed that of a sad Lady. Although he may, at the time, have uttered under his breath, “You’ll get yours soon enough, Madam,” it was more of an observation than a wish.

The sadness is in her insecurity, and from her insecurity comes the need to behave in the way she does.
Rather like Damocles, she has climbed onto the throne of Dionysius II believing all that great power, authority and wealth would give her. Then comes the day in Lady’s life when she realises Dionysius has hung a sword over her suspended by a single horse hair.

Sadly, there can be nothing happy for the person over whom some fear always looms.

This cautionary tale of food shopping yields an abundance of advice to both Lady and The Tramp!

So - I would invite you to be aware of this caveat:-
In any queue, anywhere, you never know who is really in front of you OR behind you.

The Wardrobe

Casually watching Twitter posts scroll up can often be a source of amusement, interest, and occasionally a spur into experiencing connective ideas.

And thus it was, this morning, as my attention was caught by one of those time-worn phrases of the self-development lingua franca, namely:-

“Gain More Confidence – Improve Your Performance”

Now many phrases such as this are bandied about like mantras, and, as is general with mantras, there is usually a pivotal word, a keyword if you like. Rather like a hook on a clothes hanger, the pivotal word should be strong enough to hold the structural weight of the other words in the phrase as well as the implied meaning, the message in the phrase.

Of course the motivated recipient of the message will also be making use of it by draping their needs, wants and emotions over this linguistic hanger. And they’ll put it – perhaps over laden with all that “raiment” – into the wardrobe where they keep all their phrases, mantras, couplets, snazzy quotes, and other verbal investments.

So what is the pivotal word, for you, in that six word phrase that caught my eye?

Well, I expect if you were to rank them in importance 1-6 then No.6 would be “Your” – and the top two would most likely be “Confidence” and “Performance”. Stands to reason, doesn’t it?

Meaning

Of course when it comes to meaning, there are a number of other things going on that enable us to apply some make-up to the phrase, make it a bit more catchy, a bit more showy – some foundation perhaps or something personal like a little I-liner.

“More” here presupposes that you’ve already got “Confidence” and “Your” aims the whole “Performance” shebang specifically in one direction.
“Gain” and “Improve” look like the two-edged power sword of the phrase, dripping with motivational positivity. Increase this and be better at that, it seems to say with a swish of the blade!

Yet – is it BE better, or DO better?
This poses a conundrum as to what “Performance” means for you, and for each of us.

Is performance something we do – in certain circumstances – and then return to normality of the everyday hurly-burly?
I happen to see “Performance” as being something permanent – a 24/7 activity – all that that normality is. There are specific highlighted acts and scenes within our lives – but they are all part of performance. It is the way we are, the way we are being. Of course, you may hold a different perspective, rather like I did in previous years.
Neither of us is right or wrong, yet whichever perspective we hold right now colours the way we view the phrase “Gain More Confidence – Improve Your Performance”; and weaves subtle threads of our personal warped view of the world into the weft of the words we read or hear.

This brings me to the one word I’ve yet to elaborate on – “Confidence”.

It is a mental construct, of course – you can’t buy it off the shelf in a shop, or grow it in a pot. Though its curious, isn’t it, that I get asked for it a lot, by clients who want some or who want some more! You can bet that if it was a tangible commodity, then someone – indeed lots of people - would be selling it because there are millions of people out there clamouring for it!
 

Confidence

Confidence is nothing more than a barometer, a measure of the level, of our security.
If I am lacking confidence in something, I am unsure – or insecure – about its suitability for the task. “Will this barrier hold back the flood waters? Well I’m not 100% confident it can – more like 60%.”

Similarly if it is someone, or ourselves, then we are insecure about their, or our own, ability in certain areas, or actions. “I need more confidence,” is merely our way of saying “I need to be more secure about my capabilities.”
However, “I need more SELF confidence,” feels somewhat different, doesn’t it?
This feels like I’m talking less about what I feel I am capable of and more about just me and the way I am. The way I am BEING in the world.

At the end of the day, when all is said and done, confidence is still just all about the Barometer – the measure of security.

For us all - security goes deep, right back to when we were babies. In our early childhood we perform in amazing ways – learning from an innate perspective about our bodies, controlling our movement and balance, the ability to communicate, and all about the myriad of things in the world around us. We don’t learn how to learn, it is just in our nature. We are precocious discoverers, curious of the mysteries and joys in all experience – utterly confident.

Until, that is, we encounter something or someone that gives us our first encounter with the barometric readout of our security. We shy away, there is a reticence in our body language, and we become guarded, unsure, in our behaviour. If we can already talk we go quiet, we are wary – looking out for ourselves, for our security. We’ll reach out for comfort – in whatever form that might be. For Comfort = Security. Once we feel secure and comfortable we come out from behind the safety of the mask of wariness.

And, as we grow up, our “Comfort Zone” for anything still means Security. And our level of Security we label as Confidence. So when we want More Confidence, is it that we want to widen, deepen and broaden our Comfort Zone? Seems to be so, doesn’t it?

However – beware the Comfort Zone! For here’s the thing:-
If we want to Improve our Performance we’ll need to step outside the Comfort Zone.

Wardrobe

Now there’s a thing we need to remind ourselves about the metaphors in our boudoir – the beds we make for to lie on, the full-length mirrors we admire ourselves in, the tallboys that hold our bigs and smalls, maybe an ottoman nobly standing four-square, the dressing tables that house our adornments and beautifications – and particularly and especially, the wardrobes for our outer clothing.

Whether they are edifices that fill a corner, or spaces behind sliding doors - there isn’t a soul on Earth who has not got a wardrobe.
Except perhaps young children – gosh, I wonder why THAT is?!

Until recently my wardrobe had a lot of stuff hanging in there that I hadn’t worn for years – yet I can still remember all those earlier times when I’d reach in, get dressed up to the nines and feel like I was the bee’s knees. Everything we have serves us well, or so we think – until the moment that it doesn’t!
“Why am I keeping this junk?” I’d ask, and then come up with that classic answer that all hoarders of clutter use, “It might come in useful someday. I’ll keep it for a rainy day just in case.” The thing is, since I’ve hung it up the rainy days have come and gone – and it was never used anyway. For many of us, our wardrobe - like that - is a kind of Comfort Zone.
It contains lots and lots of familiar clothing, with sentimental attachments.

There might be things we’d like to change in our lives, perhaps improve to help us feel more confident as we stride out into the world. Yet we want to hang on to the Comfort Zone at the same time. “Yes, I’d love to have that fabulous new outfit – but I need to hang on to these things that seem to say so much about who I am as well.” Yet, consider this when wanting to change - what are these old things saying about us, and just who are they speaking to?

There was an interesting notion going the rounds, about the human body replacing itself every 7 years. Well there’s a certain truth about cell replacement and regeneration, however it is a fanciful notion that any cyclical or total physical metamorphosis takes place for us. Still, through the mists of metaphorical curiosity I’m more than happy to grab hold of the idea that for something new to come in to our lives, then something old needs to be shed. If the car park of our life is full then nothing can move in until some cars leave. The same in/out routine applies to our Wardrobes.

So I performed a clear out, confident that what I have left just relates to my life here in the current moment. No more did I need the hipsters, the bell-bottoms or the flowery shirts, and I severed all my kipper ties.

So what linguistic raiment is hanging on the rails in your wardrobe? Does a snappy Tuxedo of Confidence lurk in there amongst your favourite suits? Have you got some worn out and ill-fitting mantras, or some garb in the fashionable colours and material from days of yore?

And if it should be that you have a Curiosity, watch out for MY next Twitter post! It could well read –
“Gain More Confidence –
Clearout Your Wardrobe –
Improve Your Performance”

Relocating Fingers

I’ve written elsewhere about how easy it is for one or two of my fingers to become dislocated – and about how I manage to put them back in place, to “relocate” them.

In addition to the entirely physical nature of this whole set of actions, there is also – for me at least – a metaphorical angle, in terms of non-useful mental habits; of habitual behaviours and ‘trains of thought’ learnt over many years. And here is where I come to view them as being akin to dislocated fingers; except that they are dislocations that are left alone and NOT re-located.

Bodies compensate

Imagine a dislocated finger just left “out of joint”. Our bodies are very good at taking and making compensatory action – so eventually we would “get round the problem” and endeavour to use our hands, and fingers, by finding the next best way possible. We’d do this by some trial and error process, and then consolidate the change by “learning” the compensation.
It is rather like, by the same token, if we have a foot, leg or back injury. We’ll walk with a limp, or twist and contort ourselves out of shape so we can still move around with the least amount of discomfort. The longer we endure the original injury, the better and more ingrained our compensation becomes.

Minds compensate

The same applies to mental dislocations. However – the difference with mental dislocations is that we rarely have a sense that a “dislocation” has taken place. We just make the compensatory adjustments we feel are necessary and incorporate them into our lives.

Feel here is often a key component. If we make compensations that are inadequate – we’ll know about the inadequacy because we’ll still feel the discomfort somewhere, usually – as it happens - in our bodies.

To take just a couple of examples; whether it is a childhood fear of the dark, or a reaction to things said about us – they all started with something that filled us with a discomfort, an unpleasant reaction, an insecurity of some kind.

We’ll then start to assemble a strategy of compensation – rather than an action of relocation. We may well have heard that old adage about “getting back on the horse after being thrown or falling off,” but we’ll rarely bite that particular bullet. We’ll look to take the softer option by assuring ourselves that getting round the issue would cause us less immediate hurt than re-confronting it by “getting back on the horse.”

A Fear of the Dark is quite a toxic one, because it can telescope out into a fear of the unknown, of the unfamiliar, of anything new etc. Once we are aware we can grow our fears in a whole variety of ways, we might view falling off the horse and getting back on it from a totally new perspective.

It all starts with an original horse, and an original dislocation (maybe from the saddle!). If we can approach ANY original instance from the perspective that relocation is going to be better than making compensation – then we don’t put ourselves in a position of growing thoughts, beliefs, behaviours and skills that won’t in any way serve us well in the long term.

Childhood Fears

How private do we keep our childhood fears? How much do we share and how much do we keep inside?
Children tend to have extremely fertile imaginations, and the notion that almost anything is possible when we are young, including the content of our dreams, is accepted very readily. It is only life that teaches us the more likely or the more credible outcomes and considerations, as we can see here.

For Britney, at home in her darkened bedroom, the Wardrobe Monsters would present a far greater and on-going fear than any REAL burglar coming in through the window. 

For Daddy, however, the opposite is the case.

When it comes to playing out the “WHAT Ifs” – again Britney’s and Daddy’s will be quite different, although for each of them these are still played out in their respective imaginations.

The thing is – for Daddy to really help Britney and her fear of the Wardrobe Monsters he’ll need to step into her reality, her mosaic of the world, and then take the relocation journey with her. AND, by doing so, he may – just may – sort out some of his own dislocated fingers along the way also.

Things People Say

The internet is full of scams, some overt and some covert, designed to get us to click on a link that allows gremlins into our computer. These gremlins and viruses can infect and spread their toxicity into our security – by attacking our operating system, invading our financial and personal identity.

Most of us, by now, have become cognisant of the fact that emails that start “Most Honourable Sir,” and that emanate from West Africa, are ones to avoid and delete at all costs.

However those of us who walk within the cathedrals of social media have become subject to something much nearer home in terms of our vulnerability, viz:

“Have you read what they are saying about you?”

This tag line, plus a pernicious link, personifies how the ‘scammers’ attempt to get through our guard. They frame it up by reaching for our fingers and trying to dislocate them.

Now if we met someone in the street who actually did this in reality we’d understand the assault, and then look to get a doctor to put our fingers back right again.
But THIS is different – or so it seems!
And yet it is also far worse – for it plays upon our inner insecurities.
“What ARE they saying about me?  How BAD are these things? WHO else has, is and will be reading them? I’m under attack – I must defend. I cannot defend against the unknown so I must FIND OUT.” And so on.

If we are sensitive, then our metaphorical fingers will be dislocated on a regular basis. Our sensitivity began somewhere, and we compensated rather than relocated in that original instance. From then on we always took the softer option, until that no longer worked for us. Then we learnt how to take more soft options to compensate for the earlier softer option that was no longer working. And so the strategies build and the habit forming goes from strength to strength.
But that strength takes us further away from the most effective solution for us.

So – in the case of things people say – is that relevant? Is it important, to you, really?
We can make endless compensatory excuses to hold that relevance and importance in place – if we so choose! With each excuse, we weaken the hold on the joints of our fingers.

Conclusion

We are never, ever, stuck with having metaphorically loose-jointed fingers all our lives. We can put them back, relocate them, and build their strength. Good strong joints is the way we were born, is the way we are meant to be. With them we can then be dextrous in life, rather than distorting ourselves out of shape.

And – as always with my perspective – it is just a thought, an idea, a notion. And – as ever with your perspective – it is always there for you to choose.

Operate at 100%

Tangent

In the cosmic scheme of things, quite a profound moment for me in my mathematics secondary education was concerned with the tangent – that straight line that just touches the circle.

Now just what was SO profound about this particular geometrical “given” - for me?

Well it was the way our maths master introduced and explained it, because a classroom debate then ensued about what was straight and what was curved.

Our teacher’s premise was that where the tangent merges with the curve of the circle – in that very moment of conjunction – the circle ceases to be a perfect curve and the tangent ceases to be a straight line.
As we stand back and view the bigger picture, we see the form of both and conclude both their straightness and their uniform curvature. The thing is, we then take that impression of form and assume that (a) it is real and (b) it applies at all times.

Imagine that circle as our planet Earth, and the infinitely small dot on the surface as being ourselves. We have a perception that the Earth is flat.
Of course we KNOW it is not flat through the proof of Mankind’s scientific discoveries – yet there was a time, not too far back in history, when Mankind believed the world WAS flat.
There is another thing about Mankind’s discoveries and it is this – they unfold basic knowledge to us through time; basic knowledge that we neither saw nor knew existed until we gained some comprehension of it all. We give cast-iron credence to firmly held beliefs until they are questioned and until their reality is challenged and disproved conclusively.

So how CAN an infinitely small part of circle be a straight line? How can a perfectly straight line assume, by conjunction, to have the same properties of curvature as a circle?

 

Memory, Now and Future

I have written elsewhere about time, and where the only “pure” time is Right Now, the very present. Everything else is outside of the moment – either in the past, as memory or in the future and yet to happen.

Another thing about memory is this – if something did not happen then there would be no memory. So, for us to remember something then it had to have happened – it had to be part of our experience. Our experience is our proof that it happened.
We might never have experienced certain moments in history, but we read about them and were told about them and we accepted the beliefs of others that they really HAD happened. Because we never question literally everything we are told, beliefs about things that happened, existed or just are in being, are thus established and take their place as part of our experience; our knowledge and our proof.

The future, on the other hand, is just pure imagination. Some of it is projected out from models based on certain premises, just enough sometimes to chip away at the veneer of make-believe of course. The rest is fantasy. And when asked,
“So what would you like to do? What would you like to have happen?” You then go ‘inside’ and start making some projections of your wishes and desires.

So where does Time sit with all of this you may ask!

Well all memories and imaginations are suspended in time. And by suspended I mean they exist in time, and we see them, notice them and acknowledge them as being either really real memories or really real figments of an imaginary future. If they didn’t exist in time we wouldn’t notice them. But we do, because we have placed them in time, and they hang there, suspended.

On the other hand, with Right Now, the present, TIME is suspended. And by suspended I mean it is motionless, it appears to not move along a path from A to Z. The moment we notice it has motion then we have stepped out of it, we are ‘outside time’. When we are ‘inside time’ we are totally absorbed in the moment.

 

Absorption

Being absorbed in time is not on/off or either/or. It is on a sliding scale for each of us and with everything we are engaged in.

We are, in the course of a day, engaged in many activities of partial absorption. We do, however, switch part of our conscious awareness to the idea of time – for the purposes of keeping ourselves aware of the motion of time – of time “passing”.

We need to be somewhere at 3pm – so we run a programmed loop that will keep telling us as that time approaches. We perhaps need to do things that will prepare us for whatever we are going to be doing at 3pm. Again we are engaging our consciousness with some programmed activity. These programmes are oriented in time; they have a time component to them; we are not therefore TOTALLY absorbed in whatever we are doing in the moment.

And the results of NOT being TOTALLY absorbed in what we are doing in the moment – Right Now – may often be very apparent to us. Especially if there are errors in our thoughts, words and deeds – be they errors of inclusion, exclusion, action, inaction, judgement or oversight.

“So, Pete, are you saying that multi-tasking should never be attempted?”

The key to the success of ANY tasking (multi or single) is our level of absorption and – for perfection - doing it 100% in the moment, and every moment. Multi-tasking is quite acceptable provided we are absorbed ‘inside time’.

Take driving, which is a prime example of multi-tasking. We can be doing up to something like seven different things at once when going from here to there. Watching the road ahead, using the rear view mirrors and our peripheral vision – feeling the steering wheel and gear stick, with our feet using the pedals – listening to the radio while talking with passengers – noticing the quality and contours of the road – and so on.
When we are just doing it then, in varying degrees, we manage it all pretty well. AND, because we’re only human after all, we’ve undoubtedly got an amount of low-level thinking going on inside our minds as well!

Now low-level thinking is manageable – BUT, the moment we add in “I need to get there” with some time constraints (say), then part of the absorption we previously had dedicated to the multi-tasks has now been ascribed to Time. We have diluted our multi-task absorption. Our attention fills up with more and more distractions which can be categorised as Time important. The quality of the real experience of our driving diminishes – it is impaired. The impairment may only be slight, and we may not notice what has gone on. However, if we become agitated at slow traffic or other frustrations, then the impairment is more than slight. Errors - of some kind or other – ensue. We find ourselves driving badly.

 

Reflections

So, whether you view your life as being linear, the straight and narrow from birth to death; or akin to, let’s say, the circle of life, where you see yourself on the endless path unwinding; I would invite you to take a look again at the image of the tangent and the circle in terms of how you want to live your life Right Now.

At that moment of touch at point A when the tangent and the circle are conjoined, the true nature of everything about you, and every single thing you think about and do, just IS in suspended time. These are moments that, when assembled, make up the narrative of your life.

And take it, with a microscope, right down to the Nth degree in terms of detail as well. For only in the detail will you notice the things you’d like to change or improve to make the overall sensation of life an even more compelling experience of wonder and amazement.

Just let everything come to A point.