The School of Life

Dying of Nostalgia; Thomas Dixon Explores Homesickness

Dr Thomas Dixon, writer of the excellent History of Emotions blog, recently interviewed Professor of History at Weber State University, and a leading historian of emotions in the United States, Susan J. Matt. Her first book, Keeping Up With the Joneses, was a study of envy in modern consumer society, and her latest work tackles another emotion: homesickness, in a book titled Homesickness: An American History (Oxford University Press, 2011) which explores how homesickness and nostalgia were transformed from deadly maladies to allegedly un-American emotions. 
 

 

Thomas Dixon [TD]: Hello, Susan, and thanks for talking to us. Perhaps I could start by asking you what got you interested in homesickness?

Susan Matt [SM]: The original impetus was that my own emotional experience of mobility didn’t match up with the mythology of American restlessness. Commentators like Tocqueville and Frederick Jackson Turner as well more modern observers all claimed Americans were naturally restless, that somehow it was in our cultural DNA to leave home. I didn’t find it so effortless or easy to move, and began to wonder if I was alone. Perhaps there was a flip side to American mobility–a hidden history of homesickness. Homesickness also interested me because it seemed in many ways to be the opposite of an emotion I had just been studying–envy. Envy sparks aspirations, pushes people forward, often causes mobility. Homesickness pulls backwards. Both emotions play a role in modern individualism in the U.S.. Americans are encouraged to repress homesickness so they can leave home, be independent, seek more of the world’s goods, act on their envy.

TD: It’s interesting that it was your own emotions that fuelled your desire to revisit their history. I suspect many historians of emotion are in that position. So, what surprised you most about what you discovered when you started digging around in the history of homesickness?

SM: First, how prevalent the emotion was. I thought it would be difficult to unearth, but instead, evidence of homesickness was abundant and easy to find in just about every archive I worked in. Secondly, and perhaps more provocatively, I was surprised at how many Americans died of homesickness, or nostalgia as it was called. I knew there had been European epidemics of nostalgia in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, but didn’t know of American ones. But indeed, the disease of nostalgia was widely known in the United States–during the Civil War, there were 74 deaths from it on the Union side, and more than 5,200 cases of it in the Surgeon General’s records. 

SD: It became such a problem that army bands were sometimes prohibited from playing “Home, Sweet Home,” which at that time, was the most popular song in the country. In peacetime, civilians suffered from nostalgia as well.  The prevalence and intensity of nostalgia and homesickness throughout U.S. history – from the colonial era to the present - ultimately led me to question whether we were and are the individualists that we are so widely reputed to be. I think we’re not.

TD: I’ve been struck too by the great power of the passions in earlier periods – to cause illness, madness or even death. Medical sources of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries abound with fatal bouts of emotion. Is it possible to pinpoint a date after which this changed – when homesickness and nostalgia became mere feelings rather than powerful and potentially fatal mental conditions?

SM: It gradually disappeared as a dangerous disease in the first half of the 20th century. The U.S. Army provides a useful gauge in its records. One soldier in the American Expeditionary Force reportedly died of nostalgia during World War I. Increasingly during the War, however, many of the symptoms associated with nostalgia came to be defined as signs of the newly established syndrome of shell shock. While the diagnosis of nostalgia stayed on the books up through World War II,  and while there were many reported cases of it among soldiers in that war, there were no deaths. In short, from the early twentieth century on, the number of cases of deadly nostalgia declined, although less lethal cases of homesickness continued (and continue) to abound. It seems worth noting that as nostalgia’s cultural meaning underwent this transformation, the tolerance for the acutely homesick declined, since their condition was now seen as less dire.

TD: Historically you clearly have a really fascinating story to tell about nostalgia and homesickness as modern emotions experienced, as all emotions always are, within a particular geographical and cultural situation, in this case in modern America. I wonder what you think about the contemporary importance of this research, and also of research into the history of emotions more broadly?

SM: The history of homesickness explains a great deal about modern American culture and our national identity. Adults in modern America have learned to repress overt expressions of homesickness, for it has come to connote immaturity, a lack of ambition, and failure. It is out of step with the ethos of modern capitalism, which prizes mobility and individualism. However, while they may not discuss their homesickness publicly, in daily habits and behaviors, American make their feelings about displacement manifest. From ethnic groceries that sell the tastes of faraway homes, to sports teams which symbolize loyalty to a hometown, to our addiction to Facebook, cell phones, and emails, Americans routinely show their preoccupation with staying connected to distant places and people. While we may think of ourselves as an individualistic society, our everyday lives suggest otherwise. And our history – full of people suffering and sometimes dying of homesickness - makes clear that mobility has in fact never been an innate trait of Americans. Instead, they had to learn to leave home, and they have still not completely mastered the art of rugged, restless individualism.

The history of the emotions offers historians and the public a new set of tools to assess the past. Rather than merely judging history on the basis of external behaviors, we can bring in people’s motivations and intentions. These often provide a completely different understanding of social life and revises many of our longstanding narratives about national identity.

 Dr Thomas Dixon is Director of the Queen Mary Centre for the History of Emotions. 

Image: American sheet music of ‘Home, Sweet Home’ arranged for piano and violin, c. 1870s. Source American History Online

Oliver Burkeman on Self-Improvement and the Law of Reversed Effort

We've grown accustomed, in recent years, to news stories and psychological studies purporting to show that happiness isn't all we might have imagined it to be. Increased economic growth doesn't seem to lead, in any reliable way, to happier societies. More choice often makes us more miserable. Positive thinking can make at least some of us feel worse (read this).. and so on. In the years I've spent exploring some of the more dubious corners of the self-help industry, I've certainly encountered plenty of prescriptions for happiness that turn out to be utterly counterproductive. To me, though, the compelling philosophical question is whether these wrong approaches to happiness might all be wrong for a similar and interesting set of reasons. Is there something about the very act of striving for happiness that sabotages our efforts to attain it?

The observation that happiness seems to come most easily when glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, rather than aimed for directly, is an old one. ("Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so," noted John Stuart Mill.) But the question remains urgent: what, if anything, can we do about this seemingly intractable paradox?

In the book on which I'm currently working, I've been exploring this idea of a "negative path" to happiness — that it's our constant efforts to eliminate the negative (uncertainty, unhappiness, failure) that causes us to feel so anxious, insecure and unhappy — and that there's an alternative approach that involves coming face-to-face with, perhaps even embracing, many of the things we spend our lives trying so hard to avoid. Aldous Huxley was getting at something similar when he wrote of the "law of reversed effort"; the Sixties counterculture philosopher Alan Watts called it "the backwards law".

Take, for example, the advice of the ancient Stoics to practice the "premeditation of evils" — to spend time visualising not the best-case scenario, as hyperventilating motivational speakers would have us do, but the worst-case scenario, both to heighten an appreciation for the advantages we currently enjoy, and to remove the gnawing fear that we wouldn't be able to cope if the worst befell us. "Set aside a certain number of days," advises Seneca, "during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with course and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: 'Is this the condition that I feared?'" Or consider the Buddhist notion of non-attachment, which runs so directly counter to the mood-boosting advice of our present-day self-help gurus. Instead of trying to fill your brain with positive thoughts and emotions — a ceaseless struggle that, ironically, isn't really enjoyable at all — learn instead to step back from identification with thoughts and emotions, letting both negative and positive ones be. Which, apart from a potential path to spiritual enlightenment, happens to be excellent anti-procrastination advice: instead of trying to psych yourself up into the right mood to act, learn to act alongside whatever mood you're in.

There are countless other approaches, from ancient philosophy to present-day experimental psychology, that belong on this "negative path" to happiness. Deep in the human psyche seems to lurk a fundamental ironic principle: striving for what we want seems all too often a recipe for not getting it. Learning to work with that irony may be the happiness technique we've been missing.


Oliver Burkeman will be leading our event:  'Self Improvement' on 19 October.  Sadly tickets are now sold out, but a collection of his Guardian columns, entitled Help!: How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done, has just been published in paperback. His blogs at www.oliverburkeman.com and is @oliverburkeman on Twitter.

Wellbeing on Campus

 According to the popular image, most students indulge in years of hedonism capped by raucous post-exam celebrations – a privileged minority enjoying the “best days of their lives”. No doubt there is some truth to this caricature, but a recent report from the Royal College of Psychiatrists reminds us that every silver lining has its cloud.

 

Mental illness is a serious problem on UK campuses, explains the report, which is entitled Mental Health of Students in Higher Education. In the last ten years, studies have shown as many as 65% of female and 54% of male undergraduate students scoring positively on the General Health Questionnaire, which screens for minor psychiatric disorders. One team of researchers found 29% of students describing clinical levels of psychological distress, whether anxiety, depression, obsessiveness or social alienation. More recently, a survey of higher education institutions revealed that, of those who responded, 80% recorded an increased demand for mental health provision over the previous five years.

 

Why? The report cites a range of possible explanations. Financial difficulties among students, pressure to perform in anticipation of a competitive job market, misuse of drugs – especially alcohol – and higher rates of family breakdown. But the facts remain obscure. There is, the authors warn, a ‘paucity of recent, high-quality research into the nature and prevalence of mental disorder… in the UK student population’. What is certain is that ‘it is unrealistic now (and probably for the foreseeable future) to expect health or counselling services to be able to offer direct face-to-face therapy for all those who may wish to avail themselves of it’.

 

That’s especially tough when you consider that, bizarrely, another group which students generally aren’t face-to-face with enough is academics. Here the report’s explanation is more obvious: ‘Academic staff are under constant pressure to maintain and improve research output’. To hear confirmation of this, just spend ten minutes in any research department. Academics don’t agree on much, but there’s one thing they all agree on: the pressure to publish has become excessive. It emanates from the government and is transmitted via university administrators through Big Brother-like ‘productivity’ dictates – such as the following which was levied at members of Imperial College's medicine department: ‘publish three papers per annum including one in a prestigious journal with an impact factor of at least five.’

 

You might think that a kick up the backside is just what researchers need, but they don’t. Recently I was chatting to a senior academic who explained how she and her colleagues used to be perfectly capable of balancing and policing their own publishing and pastoral priorities; another lamented the fact that her publishing load is so heavy she barely has time to read: a ludicrous, counter-productive irony (apparently everyone’s speaking and nobody’s listening). Then there’s the more subtle fact that pressure to churn out papers stifles deep thinking, creativity and originality. At worst, academia has become an arms-race of hastily-penned pedantry, a situation perfectly captured in the slogan “publish or perish”, leaving researchers wearily bereft of the opportunity to cogitate in the way that their vocation would ideally allow them.

 

The Royal College’s report, in effect, advocates using one stone to kill two birds – addressing the problems of demoralized staff on one hand and distressed students on the other. The authors call it a ‘settings-based’ approach, one in which ‘the university or college is seen not only as a place of education but also a resource for promoting health and well-being in students, staff and the wider community’. I couldn’t agree more with this ethos – and it’s great to see innovative new organisations such as Mental Wealth setting the agenda in this direction. But I’d emphasize the importance of relieving publishing pressure in order to achieve the desired ends. For one thing, freeing up academics’ time will enable them to interact with students more, thus increasing ‘social capital’ in universities, which is a well-known protector against mental disorder. Why not, indeed, get students more involved in running and even maintaining their department? That way they’ll gain valuable skills and help reduce costs too.

 

But, most importantly, this amounts to a call for wisdom. Universities should primarily be institutions for educating and inspiring – thereby producing confident, considerate citizens and future leaders. Key to this ideal is the learning dynamic which exists between profoundly thoughtful, patient teachers and engaged, nurtured students. By relieving publishing pressure on academics – or perhaps by them recovering some of their old activism and demanding change – we can make our universities places where teachers can read deeply and profess sensitively, and become role models from whom students can learn the knack of living wisely and happily.

 

Ben Irvine is editor of the Journal of Modern Wisdom. www.modernwisdom.co.uk  

For more details about The School of Life's Psychotherapy service and MOT for the Mind click here.

Happiness Is Just a Neurochemical Spurt

Happiness is just a neurochemical spurt. Different happy chemicals produce different ways to experience happiness.

Endorphin happiness is triggered by physical pain. The body's natural morphine masks pain, which allowed our ancestors to run from predators when injured. Humans experience endorphin as euphoria, but it obviously did not evolve to trigger a constant feeling of joy. You would touch hot stoves and run on a broken leg if your brain were always releasing endorphins. Nature saves them for moments when they help you do what's necessary to survive.

Dopamine happiness is triggered when you get a new reward. When you see a finish line, your brain releases dopamine. It's nature's reserve tank of energy. Dopamine keeps you going until you catch the prey you've been stalking, even when the chase is long and frustrating. If you surged with dopamine all the time, your energy would be depleted when you really needed it. We evolved to save dopamine for those moments when an important goal is within reach.

Oxytocin happiness is triggered when we trust those around us. It promotes bonding between mother and child, and between sex partners. It's stimulated when you're with a group of like-minded people, or when you get a massage. But we did not evolve to feel oxytocin happiness all the time because there's no survival value in trusting people who are not trustworthy.

Serotonin happiness is triggered when you feel important. Animals release serotonin when they dominate a resource. Their serotonin falls when they cede a resource to avoid conflict. Being one-up feels good, but conflict can cause painful injuries. The brain is constantly analyzing information to balance the risk of pain against the satisfaction of winning.

Each of the happy chemicals evolved to do a job. They work by making you feel good, which motivates you to go after whatever triggered them. You have inherited a brain that motivates you to go toward anything that promotes the survival of your DNA.

Sometimes you stumble on happiness. When an ape accidentally stumbles on a luscious fruit tree, its brain surges with dopamine. That creates memory, which helps the ape find the tree in the future. New rewards trigger dopamine whether the rewards came by accident or with sustained effort.

The happy chemicals feel so good that we use our big cortex to figure out how to get more. Apes negotiate groomings with each other, and it stimulates their oxytocin. Apes dominate their troop-mates when they think they can get away with it, which stimulates their serotonin. Apes invest time teasing termites out of a mound, and it stimulates their dopamine. Apes are not known to hurt themselves in order to get an endorphin high. People do all kinds of things once they find that it stimulates their endorphins, or their dopamine, or their oxytocin, or their serotonin.

Sometimes it works.

But the brain only releases happy chemicals in limited bursts for specific aims. It did not evolve to release them all the time. If happy chemicals flowed all the time, they could not do their jobs.

When your happy chemicals dip, however, you notice. Something feels wrong.

Nothing is wrong. Your happy chemicals evolved to ebb and flow. But if you attend to this feeling that something is wrong, it can preoccupy you. Your cortex will scan the environment for evidence that something is, in fact, wrong. And it will find evidence to confirm that feeling.

If you expect all the happy chemicals all the time, you're going to be disappointed. And if you focus on that disappointment, you wire your brain to see the world through that lens.

Try as you might, you can't control your environment in a way that ensures a steady flow of happy chemicals.

You could instead accept the fact that happy chemicals evolved to promote survival behaviors, and just appreciate them as they come and go.

Loretta Breuning is author of ‘I, Mammal – Why Your Brain Links Status And Happiness’.  For more details visit her website at: www.imammalthebook.com . 

Happy Day Image: Pavel Sevela / Wikimedia Commons 

F.S. Michaels on Monoculture and the Stories That Shape Us

"It is easy to forget how mysterious and mighty stories are. They do their work in silence, invisibly. They work with all the internal materials of the mind and self. They become part of you while changing you. Beware the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world." - Ben Okri 

As human beings, we’ve always told stories: stories about who we are, where we come from, and where we’re going. Now imagine that one of those stories is taking over the others, becoming something we take for granted as our very reality - a governing pattern that the culture obeys, a nearly-invisible framework that structures our lives and narrows our diversity, creating a monoculture.

A monoculture doesn't mean that we all believe exactly the same thing or act in exactly the same way, but that we share key beliefs and assumptions about how the world works and what our lives ought to look like. Because a monoculture is mostly left unarticulated until it has been displaced years later, we learn its boundaries by trial and error. We somehow come to know how the master story goes, though no one tells us exactly what the story is or what its rules are. We develop a strong sense of what’s expected of us at work, in our families and communities — even if we sometimes choose not to meet those expectations. We usually don’t ask ourselves where those expectations came from in the first place. They just exist — or they do until we find ourselves wishing things were different somehow, though we can’t say exactly what we would change, or how. 

Monocultures rise and fall with the times. In sixteenth-century Europe, the monoculture centred on religion and superstition (think of Galileo being accused of heresy by the Catholic Church for claiming that the sun and not the earth was at the center of the solar system). Roughly a hundred years later, the master story was about the discoverability of the world through science, machines and mathematics.

Now, in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the monoculture is economic. Because of the rise of the economic story, six areas of your world are changing - or have already changed - in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. How you think about your work, your relationships with others and with the environment, your community, your physical and spiritual health, your education, and your creativity are being shaped by economic values and assumptions. And because how you think shapes how you act, the monoculture isn't just changing your mind - it's changing your life.

F.S. Michaels is the author of Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything, in stores now.
More at www.fsmichaels.com

Ben Irvine on Working Definitions

“I'm a bit of a perfectionist… See, for me, it's got to be the best, or it's nothing at all. Like, if things get a bit dodgy, I just can’t be bothered.”   Spud, Trainspotting

The Journal of Modern Wisdom, a new volume of essays of which I am editor, is imperfect. And I don’t care. Don’t get me wrong: I care very much about promoting wisdom. The point is: I believe that doing so is important enough that even imperfect wisdom is better for the wellbeing of society than none at all. 

To judge by the irate emails I’ve received from a few philosophers, you’d think I was working for the Thought Police. Apparently “you can’t define wisdom” – or at least not without, bizarrely, recognizing the impossibility first. That’s funny, because contributors Richard Layard, Theodore Dalrymple, Judith Rich Harris, Stephen Bayley and David Cooper, among others (not to mention numerous lexicographers), have all had a good crack at it.  

It’s tempting to dismiss the pedants by pointing out that if you can’t define wisdom you probably can’t define ‘email’ either, so they needn’t have bothered sending me one. But that’d be to fall into the same trap. Sometimes it’s preferable and more progressive to rise above constricting debates. That, indeed, is the key idea behind the journal; along with the contention that the more intellectuals do the same, the more society as a whole will be becalmed.

Those emails remind me of the scene in Trainspotting in which Danny “Spud” Murphy attends a job interview and tries to give the impression that he wants the job (otherwise the DSS will cancel his benefits) but without actually getting it. A delicate balancing act, which he clumsily fails to pull off. “It's got to be the best, or it's nothing at all”: the joke is that Spud’s ‘perfectionism’ is as unlikely to achieve perfection as anything could be. As Winston Churchill pointed out, ‘success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm’.

If, like me, you’re a recovered philosopher, you’ll see what my analogy is getting at. The definition (oops, there I go again) of traditional philosophizing is to demand perfection, whether in knowledge or ethics or wisdom, while doing none of the usual dirty work necessary to achieve these things in the real world. Scientists get nit-picked, psychologists hen-pecked, activists scoffed at, and politicians sneered at. Anyone who rolls up his sleeves and has a go – armed only with a working definition and a working mentality – can find himself the target of cynicism from phoney perfectionists.

So let’s do some more workaday defining. ‘Spud’s law’ states that if you insist on possessing only the perfect definition of an ideal then you are significantly less likely to bring about that ideal in the real world than if you attempt to do so by means of an imperfect working definition. Let that be the rallying cry of the Journal of Modern Wisdom.

Ben Irvine is editor of the new Journal of Modern Wisdom. www.modernwisdom.co.uk

 Image: Spud (Ewen Bremner) from Trainspotting - directed by Danny Boyle

 

 

 

 

 

Dr Mark Taubert on How To Think About Death

“Where was it?” said he to himself. “Where was it that I read of a condemned man who, at the hour of death, says or thinks that if the alternative were offered to him of existing somewhere, on a height of rock or some narrow elevation, where only his two feet could stand, and round him the ocean, perpetual gloom, perpetual solitude, perpetual storm, to remain there standing on a yard of surface for a lifetime, a thousand years eternity! – rather would he live thus than die at once. Only live, live, live! No matter how, only live!”  - Raskolnikoff in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment

This particular passage in the novel 'Crime and Punishment' captures perfectly that very chilling fear of death. I sometimes think of it when I see people as part of my work as a palliative care doctor. What must it be like to know that time may be short, that death is close and to live with this notion day-in, day-out?

I work in a hospice. At the time of writing this, I have finished seeing fifteen people on my ward round. Of these, some may have years to live, others months, some only weeks or days. We work to try and address a lot of the symptoms people can get when their illness advances. But we would not be doing our jobs well if physical symptoms were all we dealt with. There is a whole person here, with often a whole host of other people around them and they are of course frightened, have a lot of baggage and have questions upon questions. “How long have I got left to live, Doc?”. Our team have to address this very common and reasonable question daily. Rarely is it phrased that clearly or said in quite that straightforward a way, and unpicking what someone is really asking requires skill and time.

For many reasons it is a difficult question to answer. Every illness is different, although it may be called by the same name. Every individual is different. Every treatment has the potential to have a different response. Add in the newspapers that will inform of a new miracle cure on their front pages about once a week and you have more questions and sometimes dashed hopes. The truth is that no one really knows the right answer, no one is perfect at predicting the outcomes of a terminal illness other than to say that it is likely to lead to death at some point in time. If I personally were to find myself in a similar situation, as a patient or as a carer, I would ask exactly the same searching questions of whichever professional I was seeing. It is a natural thing to want to know. And it is not uncommon to discover that there is another, underlying question to the one above. Often the real question is "Are you someone who will listen to me and who will be frank and honest- when I am ready?".

How important this supportive communication is, was highlighted by a nurse who was dying of breast cancer. Days before her death she wrote: “There are so many questions, concerns and problems to face in the lightening ball mirror. To overcome the sense of powerlessness the traveller runs through a maze seeking someone who might actually listen to their pleas for help, someone who actually knows that the traveller is there.” (Bushkin E. 'Signposts of survivorship' Onol. Nurs Forum, 22(3), 537-43 1995).

Death is a certainty and we know it is inevitable. But some events in life bring it into much closer focus. The death of a friend or loved one, or being told you have a terminal illness, are just some examples. Health professionals can rely on the latest scans and blood tests to tell us what is happening within someone’s body at a given moment in time. Add to that some intuition, as well as past experience with similar pathologies and we might hazard a guess. Weeks, perhaps, days, not months? We are often inaccurate in our predictions, as research has shown. But what we can do is listen, discuss and maybe help the person to achieve what is important to them in whatever time they have left.

I try to explore what people are most frightened of: dying or death itself. The process of dying is for some the most distressing thought. Will there be suffering, pain, agitation, breathlessness? Then there is the perceived loss of control in those final hours or days. For a few, even the final years seem unbearable, knowing that the illness will catch up with them eventually. How futile an existence that must end soon! Then there are those with the overwhelming fear of death itself as a construct, that sheer panic when someone realizes that their essence, their being, their self will at one point no longer be there. Void? Nothingness? What? Yet again these are issues that need to be explored in the context of an individual and the people closest to those in this terrifying situation. And talking about it openly helps.

Let me join other writers on this site by inserting a quote from someone famous; Bob Dylan said “Those not busy being born are busy dying.” This wisdom in part depends on your outlook on life. Here in the hospice, we meet a broad spectrum of people who know they will die at some point in the not too distant future. Of course, they all have different outlooks and personalities. Some spend the last days/weeks/months/years of their lives focussing on living, some on dying. Most do a little bit of both. What makes me most happy is to see those people who know they are living with dying be able to lapse into moments of fulfilment and contentedness; to this effect we try to help fulfil some of their wishes, some of the things that make life worth living. Pain-free time with loved ones, enjoying a meal without feeling nauseated, organizing a trip or even just going back to their local pub for a drink or two are some examples of what we can try to achieve. Some think of hospices as dark and miserable places, but only yesterday I arrived on the ward and there was laughter, a patient leaning over the nurses station and telling staff and fellow-patients a joke (it was rude). No one was thinking about dying.

Sometimes, open discussions about what happens at the end can help people prepare, and they can address questions like where they would like to be in the final days and hours and with whom. Hopefully this collaborative approach means that less of us will feel like Dostoevsky’s afore-mentioned condemned man on his rock, but can prepare for death, with support, comfort and knowledge about what may happen, by living, not dying to the end.

Dr Mark Taubert  - Consultant in Palliative Medicine, Marie Curie Centre Penarth, Cardiff, Wales

Limited tickets are still available for the 'How To Think About Death' class on Wednesday September 26 at The School of Life, Russell Square. Click here for more details

Geoff Dyer on Our Fear of Conversation

For a while, on flights back across the Atlantic from America to Euroland,  we are under the spell  of America. Instead of plonking ourselves down next to someone without a word  we  say, “Hi.”  Maybe even indulge in a little conversation, though this American readiness to chat is counterbalanced by the fear that once we’ve got into a conversation we might not be able to extricate ourselves from it. By the time we’re mid-ocean a kind of preparatory freeze has set in.  As the flight stacks up in the inevitable holding pattern over Heathrow we begin to revert to our muttering and moaning national selves.  But, for a week or so after landing, a form of what might be called Ameristalgia makes us conscious  of a rudeness in British life - a coarsening in the texture of daily life - that had hitherto seemed quite normal. 

Geoff Dyer is author of several novels including the recently published collection of essays ‘Working the Room’ and the wonderfully titled: ‘Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It’. http://geoffdyer.com/

Join us for the first of our autumn sermons on Sunday 18 September that will challenge our engrained ‘British’ ways of approaching life. For further details about this and the rest of the autumn series, click here.

Image: Ryan Bartaby at YCN

Lizzie Shupak on Kriya + Kindle Deprivaton

This week, Week 4 of my journey of creative rediscovery, was pretty dramatic as far as I'm concerned.  First and foremost it was Reading Deprivation week. Cameron comments, pretty astutely, that "For most blocked creatives, reading is an addiction", and argues that instead of investigating your own feelings or ideas, it seems easier/preferable, to explore those of other people.

I think she has a point.  I know only too well how much I default to other people's ideas, instead of recognising that my own view-point could be valuable and/or interesting.  The commitment of deciding what it is that YOU think, instead of reading about what someone else thinks, is incredibly challenging.  

Nonetheless, as much as I wholeheartedly agreed with the premise of no-reading week, the reality was that after at least a year of consideration, I had finally ordered a Kindle e-reader, and of course, it arrived this week. I don't think I have ever left something new in it's packaging for that long.  This was an exercise in self-restraint on multiple levels!

This week was also the week that I experienced a Kriya... I think.  Cameron uses the Sanskrit word to describe what is basically a physiological melt-down, triggered by one or more emotional events.  In all honesty, I can't say for certain that this was what happened to me, but given that she discusses the idea in this week's chapter, and I'm honing in on synchronous events at the moment, I think it's reasonable to make the connection.

Essentially, after weeks of waiting, weeks of conversations, brainstorming, and general chatter, all kinds of things started becoming concrete, and good things started coming my way. I won an exciting new strategy project. I was lined up for a couple more. I connected with, and impressed, people who I had only ever read about in magazines… and then I crashed and burned.  First migraine ever, three days of feeling run-down and unwell, and no real explanation other than "Lizzie, you're exhausted!".  So I've called it my Kriya, and I hope it's out of my system!

Much of this week's chapter has explored the connection and relevance of writing Morning Pages - those three pages of stream-of-consciousness writing (that this week have suffered considerably because I felt so horrible) - and the behavioural and emotional changes that may have started to appear as a result.  Cameron suggests that you might have stronger preferences about what you do and don't like.  Or find the urge to clean, and get rid of things that don't work for you anymore.  I can definitely check that box.  Two bags of old clothes are currently waiting to go to the charity shop.

Week 5 is all about opening yourself up to new possibilities, and challenging yourself with what the pay-off actually is, if you choose to stay stuck.

To avoid this, I challenge you with one of the Week 4 tasks:

1. List five hobbies that sound fun
2. List five skills that would be fun to have
3. List five things that you used to enjoy doing
4. List five silly things that you would like to try once

(Let’s just say that now I have “DJ a party” and “Learn to make a proper Flat White” on my to-do list!)

Lizzie Shupak

About Me

Wok+Wine - The World's Most Delicious Social Network

Global Lifestyle Project - A Global Experiment in Lifestyle Design

 

Lizzie Shupack on Anger and Synchronicity

Week 3 of The Artist's Way, is all about emotions.  The chapter starts with Anger.  It continues with further discussion about Synchronicity.  I found the passage about Anger extremely synchronous, given that prior to reading it, I had just had a blow-out argument, centered around my struggle to make decisions about what I want, what I need, and what I am striving for, both in this process and beyond.

Helpfully, Cameron explains that Anger is useful, and is there to be listened to.  That said, she does note that it is "to be acted upon.  It is not meant to be acted out." Oops…  Nonetheless, I am glad that the emotional turbulence that surrounds me, has some context, and I am relieved that I'm not an anomaly in my confusion.  

In my first post, I wrote that one of my motivations for embarking on this process, was to become unselfconsciously creative, and find clarity around what it is in life that makes me fulfilled, makes me feel excited, makes me feel proud of what I do.

It's a big ask to be honest.  Those are big questions.  In my case, they are also complicated by the fact that as I write this, I'm sitting in Kaffe 1668 in New York, which means that in the three weeks since embarking on this course, I've travelled to five cities; cities which are all inspiring, creative and full of people and opportunities which all contribute to my decision-making process.

However, despite all that, the biggest thing that's holding me back, is without doubt, me.  Cameron spends some time talking about Shame, which I think is deeply tied to self-esteem and confidence.  Shame is often what prevents people from pursuing creative projects; "What if my work/my idea isn't any good?", "I can't write about that, it's too embarrassing!", "If I'm not honest, this won't have integrity, and I'm too scared to be honest".  They are all understandable fears, but fears that keep us wedded to analytical work, and logic-based activities, which are all very safe.  And very boring.

Cameron therefore suggests, that you find a couple people who can nurture and protect your early work.  Your prototypes, test-cases, scribbles, stories.  They are probably not the people you go to for constructive criticism - that’s a whole different thing - but instead they are simply proud of you and your aspirations, and have the creative and emotional intelligence to help you along.

Throughout all this, Cameron advises you to be nice to yourself.  To not beat yourself up, and to accept compliments and nice things from people along the way - things like an invitation to dinner, or new socks.  She acknowledges that yes, you will be babying yourself, but that thinking positively, and kindly, will go a lot further towards aiding your productivity; creative or otherwise, than tough-love or deprivation.

Next week, Week 4, is about Integrity.  And it requires a whole week of reading deprivation!!!!!!  A whole week!!  Beyond the books, magazines and newspapers I read, I have at least 50 RSS feeds and hundreds of bookmarked articles that I look through all the time...  Help!

 

'The Artist's Way' is by Julia Cameron and can be found at amazon.com

Lizzie Shupak is a Digital and Brand Strategist.  She is also one half of the international social experience, Wok+Wine.  She is currently on a journey of creative discovery, which may or may not affect her biography, in the weeks and months ahead.

Wok+Wine - The World's Most Delicious Social Network

Global Lifestyle Project - A Global Experiment in Lifestyle Design