Present Perfect March/April 2010

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"Identity is an assumed role; it is like being in a theatre where everyone is given a role to play."

Joseph Ki-Zerbo

IN THIS ISSUE

  1. Dear Present Perfect readers: Making space for maintenance
  2. Celebrity vs character
  3. Acknowledging the negatives
  4. Smile or Die
  5. Food for Thought: Wabi-sabi - a delicate balance

MAKING SPACE FOR MAINTENANCE

Dear Present Perfect readers,

In the middle of January my partner had a hospital appointment in out-patients for a mini-operation on his shin. It was a fairly routine skin procedure, but he'd waited a while for the appointment and we were relieved to be getting it over with. Or so we thought. We prepared well for the day: I would go with him, we decided. We arrived early and he was called in quite soon. All seemed to be going according to plan.

He emerged eventually. No complications with the procedure apparently, but he had sheets of instructions about dealing with post operative pain (we hadn't really thought about that), about visits to the GP surgery to change the dressings on his leg (we hadn't thought much about that either but not only did he have a huge bandage knee to toe, he'd also needed a skin graft and had a huge bandage on his thigh too), about not walking much in the early days (he who walks everywhere) and making sure not to get any of the bandages wet (but no tips on how to keep clean when you can't have a bath or shower for weeks).

Here then was the first inkling that whereas we'd been focusing on the procedure the real impact on our lives was going to come from the consequences. Most markedly, driving him to the GP surgery several times a week in the early stages when the dressing needed frequent changes and he was instructed not to walk much. Suddenly nothing was simple, neither washing nor getting places. And it had taken us by surprise, we realised. Why? Because we hadn't factored in the maintenance factor.

Hidden costs

And this was not the first time. Could it be, I wondered, that maintenance, the constant upkeep of all the stuff in our lives, including our bodies, is the great unrecognised drain on our time and energy? Unrecognised, perhaps, because maintenance tasks are far from glamorous and often downright tedious. But they're there all the same, piling up if we try to ignore them, gnawing away at our well-being.

Signs we may not be giving enough attention to maintenance are obvious once we start looking. They include:

Realistically, the more ingredients there are in our lives, the more maintenance time we are likely to need. Enrol your child in a Saturday morning gym class and you commit to regular maintenance activities of driving and collecting. Set up a blog or a website for good business or personal reasons, and you commit to maintenance activities of regular updating.

Glossing over the maintenance activities our lives require can result in our being completely unrealistic about what we can get done. And then blaming ourselves for not achieving as much as we think we ought! There's no easy answer, but one step forward is to bring maintenance into the mainstream, to be explicit and realistic with ourselves about what's required.

Where does maintenance sit in your life? At work? At home? Who does most of the maintenance tasks? What doesn't get done? What are the consequences?

Very best wishes for a well-maintained month full of fruitful consequences

Chris Carling

PS: a benefit/maintenance calculation?

Some long time ago, inspired by the Best Buy section of a newspaper, I bought a juicer. A large one, which took up lots of space on the kitchen work surface. No matter, I thought, it makes heavenly juice. Pity it needs such complex and long-winded cleaning afterwards. I used it for a time enjoying apple, carrot, peach and even beetroot juices. But eventually the thought of the tedious maintenance required for every glass put me off. My juicer languished for months, then years. Until the other day I decided it had to go. The maintenance required was just too high for the benefit of fresh fruit juice, however, exotic. Could this be a calculation we should be doing more often, I wondered: setting the benefit of a new gadget or a new activity or scheme against the maintenance required?

CELEBRITY VS CHARACTER

It was because I was thinking about consequences that I noticed this remark of Gordon Brown's reported in The Independent on Sunday. Talking about certain newspapers being hostile to him the PM drew a distinction between celebrity and character:

'Celebrity? Celebrity is when you walk into a room, listen to what people want to hear, and then present yourself in a way you think people will want. Character is being prepared to go into the room and say: 'Look, this is what I believe in. This is what I'm for. This is why I am against what some of you are saying.' And facing the consequences.'

Facing the consequences means being aware that the ways we act, behave, communicate have an effect, sometimes positive, sometimes negative. One way some people try to escape what they fear may be negative consequences is by agreeing, by trying to please. The need to please is strong in many of us, not just celebrities. But the effect of wanting to please can be negative if it means we only show others sides of ourself we think they'll find acceptable. Or if it means we can't say no or we are unclear what we really think or believe so used do we get to fitting in with others.

How much do you need to please? And who do you feel a need to please? At work? At home? What do you think might be the consequences?

ACKNOWLEDGING THE NEGATIVES

Sometimes a consequence of standing by what you believe can be disagreements with others. And disagreements can be healthy, an opportunity to air differences and arrive at better solutions. And they can be less healthy, becoming personal, escalating into full scale disputes.

I used to train groups in mediation skills. In an exercise we did at the start of the training I got the group to think about a dispute they'd been personally involved in. After a few minutes I asked them for words that came into their minds when reliving these disputes. This was always a powerful exercise, people coming up with expressions of anger, hurt, unfairness, of feeling powerless or bullied or undermined. Everything they volunteered went up on the flipchart.

Though most of the contributions reflected painful emotions some people also came up with positives about their dispute such as 'clearing the air', 'bringing problems out into the open', 'a chance to sort things out.'

To sum up the exercise I read out all the words on the flipchart so we could all appreciate the strength of the hurt and pain that can be generated by quarrels and disputes. Acknowledging that much of the emotion expressed was what we think of as negative in being painful, I then ringed the positive phrases, going on to explain how mediation can help translate what starts as a painfully negative experience into a much more positive one.

The important point here is not the power of positive thinking. Instead I was bringing out the need to acknowledge and accept painful feelings before we can move on to more positive action. Getting these feelings acknowledged and accepted at the start of the training usually meant the group was more open to learning skills that could help in getting disputes resolved.

OK to be sad

I stress the importance of acknowledging painful feelings because of the pressure we sometimes feel to act as if everything is just fine even when it's not. The case of a teenage girl* from a close and loving family who developed very serious anorexia illustrates this type of pressure. Part of her recovery involved family therapy which revealed that her family had been 'close, chatty, social, bubbly', which sounds fine but for her, she realised, it had meant she had been afraid of expressing negative feelings. As she reports in a Guardian interview, 'Somehow I had thought shouting and anger were really bad and I couldn't show them to anyone, that it would mean I wasn't a good person. Part of the family work was about unlocking that and realising you are allowed to be grumpy or scared and it's a normal human emotion. Not being afraid to say, 'Mum, I'm feeling quite sad today', rather than having to struggle on my own and having to feel I had to be happy all the time.'

And, of course, acknowledging sadness or other 'negative' feelings doesn't mean wallowing or getting stuck in them. It simply means that it's OK to feel sad or afraid or angry and to say so. It is by allowing space for our emotions that we are able to accommodate them and move on.

* Mealtimes and Milestones: A Teenager's Diary of Moving on from Anorexia, by Constance Barter

SMILE OR DIE

One person who feels strongly that positive thinking has a lot to answer for is journalist Barbara Ehrenreich whose angry book ('Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World') starts with her experience of getting breast cancer and eventually realising, as she explored all the self help and support groups available, that thinking positively about your diagnosis and treatment was a requirement. She came across little sympathy and some hostility when she expressed the anger and fear that she actually felt. Instead sufferers were being encouraged to view their illness as 'a gift', an opportunity to 'work on themselves'. What made her particularly angry was the way sufferers whose cancer did not respond to treatment somehow felt it was their own fault for not being positive enough.

In a later chapter she draws a parallel with white collar layoffs and associated redundancy seminars in which, again, those affected are invited to see their job loss as 'an opportunity'. All this stress on the positives, she argues, makes it much easier for employers to get away with large scale layoffs, and again, for those laid off to feel it's somehow their fault if they don't manage to bounce back.

Though she overstates her case in some of the chapters, hers is a thought-provoking book that puts positive thinking in a refreshingly different light.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

WABI-SABI: A DELICATE BALANCE

A good friend gave me a gift recently, a book on the Japanese concept 'wabi-sabi' ('Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers' by Leonard Koren). I was particularly struck by this passage:

Get rid of all that is unnecessary.

Wabi-sabi means treading lightly on the planet and knowing how to appreciate whatever is encountered, no matter how trifling, whenever it is encountered. 'Material poverty, spiritual richness' are wabi-sabi bywords. In other words, wabi-sabi tells us to stop our preoccupation with success - wealth, status, power and luxury - and enjoy the unencumbered life.

Obviously, leading the wabi-sabi life requires some effort and will and also some tough decisions. Wabi-sabi acknowledges that just as it is important to know when to make choices, it is also important to know when not to make choices: to let things be. Even at a most austere level of material existence, we still live in a world of things. Wabi-sabi is exactly about the delicate balance between the pleasure we get from things and the pleasure we get from freedom from things.'

Definitely food for thought!

PRESENT PERFECT: PASS IT ON

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