reality

[Joy2day]

I was reading a book recently by a fantastic author that I read sometimes. He has written the following which made me smile so much!

'…I feel the self help movement grossly oversimplifies the mechanisms for success. Indeed grossly oversimplifies life, full stop.

'Just maybe if your father has been diagnosed with a terminal illness (as mine has been), it is not appropriate advice to imply that imagination and commitment are going to sort things. Or that positive thinking is the answer. maybe what’s more important is loving, supportive, empathetic acceptance of the reality of the situation. We seem to spend far too much time looking for evidence that life is both fair and controllable, when the obvious truth is that life is blatantly neither. S**t happens, as they say.

'This is not a charter to simply give up and stop trying to improve your circumstances or the circumstances of those around you. It is instead a plea for some more honesty. I love thinking positively and consistently striving towards some worthwhile goal… And yet, and yet we need to keep a grip on reality else we start believing a whole lot of bollocks that can actually be extremely damaging.

‘I believe its potentially disastrous to give ourselves over to experts or gurus completely. Its important to retain your independence of mind. If you think a ‘leading authority’ is talking bollocks, its just possible that they are. Irrespective of how successful or eminent someone is, if they are talking cp, it is still cp’. (Nigel Marsh)

Lord grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

I thought these were wonderful words, especially since there seems to be so much 'cp’ and victim blaming by people these days. If st happens, its not always your own fault.

 

[Joy2day]

And further in his book he describes his life, which he considers could also be the ‘reality’ for many of his colleagues.

He describes: ‘Even if every now and then you wake up wondering ‘is this it?’, its just simpler to ignore the little voice inside you and carry on as before. Work, earn money, buy things. Work earn money buy things. Workearnmoneybuythings. Everyone else seems to be on the same conveyor belt, anyway, so it can’t be all that wrong. Don’t ask why, just earn as much money as you can. Because, the bloke with the most money and toys when he dies, wins. Doesn’t he?’ (Nigel Marsh).



(Actually our politicians advise young people to do just that! - we voted for them…)

 

[Joy2day]

But he gets a bit confused:

‘by the same token, no one’s going to pay for you to be an enlightened SNAG who does the school run each day, either. It was one thing coming to the realisation that I was not the man I wanted to be, another to work out the type of man I wanted to be - and yet another thing entirely to follow that through. In real life. Day to day, here and now.’ (Nigel Marsh)

He quotes Socrates who says that the unexamined life wasn’t worth living.

 

[GEddie]

SNAG???

 

[GEddie]

As helpful as the positive-thinking movement may have been (and it might have run its course), it does generate the mirage that there is nothing that positivity won’t overcome. The fact is that human life has hard limits, that we have to face them, and some of them are physical.

ICXC NIKA