image: jam343

This is cathartic for me. Currently I am ill. Not debilitatingly ill but ill enough to be pissed off with it. It’s some kind of ear infection thing which gives the impression that you could put your finger in your ear and keep on reaching in like it was a tunnel. Also moving the jaw is painful.

This is why I made three posts yesterday, I’m avoiding things I have to do because my energies are low. I went to the gym and knew that I couldn’t get myself in the place I like to be, the one where I am sweating enough to feel like I’ve pushed myself and am tired but not exhausted from my exertions.

I should have trimmed the hedges and cut the grass on the lawns, I should’ve washed the car, we went away for a family wedding at the weekend so the car needed a freshen up but I managed to procrastinate. That’s not like me so I know that I’m out of sorts.

I attended meetings I had to, and will do so again today. People told me I looked serious, more serious than usual, I went into the office and also arranged a delivery of a consignment that I had to take to the carrier’s depot personally to make the deadline so I’m not on my back but I’m not firing on all cylinders.

The reason I’m writing this is not pure self indulgence, although I’m sure that is in there, but because I want to make the mark of doing this, of writing something and of putting a certain signal out. You become what you think about, you are the synthesis of your efforts and what you want to be is what you become.

Each morning I get up at 6.00am and think about things. I set my mental process for the day, and plan what I will do with that day. That has to fit into a cohesive plan that puts me where I want to be.

I am acutely aware that I live a life of comparative luxury, I can define pretty much what I want to do and what I want my days to be filled with. It’s not something that happened overnight, it’s what we all work for all our lives, to place ourselves in the driving seat and to assert as much self determination as possible. My focus has to be on complacency, I run successful businesses and to many people I would seem to have made it, but that isn’t it, that isn’t enough, they are a means to an end. The end being that I have spent over thirty years amassing a wealth of learning and wisdom. When I was a child in a completely dysfunctional setting I pondered the significance of these things, my setting, who I was, why sometimes outrageous fortune landed itself upon the innocent, why villains got away with it and prospered.

I wondered what exactly made the Universe tick, who had the answers, where and what was the truth. So I began searching hard, since I was very young I was inspired by the masters of the Renaissance and viewed them as friends, companions, I assumed that they were the natural synthesis of what we all become in our lives and so determined to be a renaissance man myself.

I then discovered that there was no need for renaissance men or women in the place where I grew up, a vast industrial city that made its fortune on supplying the paraphernalia of world domination to the empire. The strange thing was I grew up in it as it exhaled and was being replaced on the world stage by the fledgling manufacturing industries of south east Asia. Little yellow men somewhere on the other side of the world who were prepared to work a week for a bowl of rice stole my heritage and robbed me of the opportunity to become apprentice to a metal presser or a machine operator. Thank god for those people whoever they were because it shook up the old order, the status quo.

Now I have lived my life in an era of change, rapid and unprecedented change. Doing things like this is an enigma for the generation that precedes my own yet they did things that had a history of centuries and many generations with little or no change. So my brothers and sisters are like chameleons, we are the shape shifting agents of change who are both witness and protagonists in seismic shifting of the weights and balances of human culture and societies. 

The desire to know and to understand has always compelled me, why do people do what they do, how did we become like this and where to next? These are issues I have given much thought and reasoning to. I had to find out or, as William Blake so eruditely put it, be enslaved by another man’s system.

So here I am this morning, leading up to the start of the working day, my jaw aches and my ear hurts, I don’t feel 100%, yet I live in absolute luxury and am bathed by privileges that most of the human race can only dream of. My question to myself is what will I do today that pays back for the magnificence of my existence and the unparalleled opportunity my life represents?

image: edward dullard

Development. Fulfilment. Happiness.

I used to wonder about the size of the Universe when I was a child. I lived in an urban sprawl, right in the middle of a seething city, where millions of people lived out their various hopes, fears and dramas. At night sometimes I would listen to the sound of industry working non-stop. The stockyards and the trains shunting goods wagons about the place, the sound of steam, the noises of the urban night, sounds that get lost in the day becoming amplified and points of focus for my attention.

At these times I would wander through the various models of the Universe that I had constructed, shapes, sizes, boundaries, edges. I could never build an adequate representation of the enormity that I felt before I drifted off into sleep. It seemed impossible to comprehend quite what I was in.

The greatest mystery of all for me was just what it was all for. What purpose did it serve, what was my place within it? What reason could I try to divine from the fact that I had consciousness and was able to put the thought process together that resulted in the asking of the question?

I never fully understood, and if truth be told I still don’t, my place within the scheme of it all. What was I supposed to do? How was I supposed to be, what were the fundamental principles of living a life, did such things exist?

My initial response was one of hedonism. I heard people say things like, “You’re here for a good time, not a long time,” and I thought that was great. But then I lived the hedonistic life and found that it did not fill the gap in my reasoning that demanded to know why and how.

I did many of the things that young and misguided people do. I experimented, went too far, fell flat on my face, became involved in underground scenes - they still existed then. I was left with the feeling of the shallowness of it all, like it was some role play game and I found myself skeptical of friends and acquaintances who raved about drug and alcohol induced states that produced some allegedly profound result.

People that I knew crashed and burned. They died prematurely, or at least they died young. Wasteful deaths, and survivors who parked themselves in the cul de sacs of life, watching as the Universe went by, soaked in their own excesses. Who am I to judge? they may have been right, they may have had a point.

Yet I spoke to people that I no longer recognised. Miserable and shadows of the bright young things they had been. Cynical, lost and desperate. Desperate to reconnect to the initial vigour that they had felt as children. Desperate to reconnect to the mystery wanderings that told them life was a great adventure, that there was magic to be experienced and that it was all around. It simply needed a key to unlock it.

Try to avoid the pitfalls, the mantraps in the jungle. The world we discovered ourselves to be in is so far removed from the place that it could be. A child would call it unfair. An adult would try to explain it to the uncomprehending child and realise they were making excuses for the inexcusable.

Blake said, “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.” There is no need to create a system, the system exists, a system of interconnected universal laws that define our existence. Creation of a system is not the way, understanding the system that already exists is.

True sanctuary is found in the contemplation of such matters. They are the springboard to an elevated level of perception. Getting it is not difficult. What is difficult is recognising the need and being able to act upon that. 

image: projectarchive.net

Normal is a state of mind. Whatever environment you grew up in was normal. This is why a full man can’t understand a hungry man, the rich can’t understand the poor. Not accurately. They can appreciate and sympathise at an intellectual level but true empathy requires for a person to have walked that walk themselves.

It is why rigid social structures prevail despite not promoting the best for everyone. It is, crucially, why we live in a world of such unequal opportunity. The imperative to change is not there in those who have power and those who do not have power have limited means by which to demonstrate their frustrations. Within each of us there is a desire to assert our own wants that manipulates us like a puppeteer does a marionette; what is necessary to bring about optimum circumstance is education.

A person with a strong desire but a weak education can easily become tyrannical over themselves and others. Without a sound education there is always the possibility of becoming the creature of whim or fancy. A sound education, in this context, is a well rounded interface between the individual and the world, an awareness of their situation.

This is why I assert that development is not a matter of where you are in isolation, but critically it is mitigated by where you have come from. Not in geographical terms although that is a factor too, but in the terms of the nature of the journey you have travelled between two points. Regarding biographical stuff, consider the following. 

My father was a violent criminal. A gangster who used firearms in the 60s, a time when gun related crime in the UK was a very uncommon phenomena. As a child I did not understand that not every-one’s father lived this way and I saw a world that for me was normal. The criminal underworld is a place of outlaws, a world within a world that has its own warped values, dispenses its own retributions for perceived slights and is a very unstable place indeed. It is composed of people on the make, on the run, looking over their shoulder, mistrustful of everyone and ruthless opportunists whose only loyalty is to themselves.

Not a nice place to be. My father spent very little time out of prison in my formative years and the time that he was out was always volatile involving the police, bail conditions, lawyers and a segment of society you would not choose to mix with . There is much written about criminality and criminal psychology and I do not intend to chip into that pool of knowledge. Suffice it to say that it creates a, retrospectively, strange perception of what life is about and how to be.

My earliest memories of my father were visits to various maximum security facilities around the country. These were surreal places usually located in the back of beyond that necessitated some huge effort to get to, we didn’t have cars when my father wasn’t around. When he was they were Jags, Bentleys and Rolls Royces but when we really needed good transport it was buses and trains and taxis.

It was strange to be searched, taken through seemingly endless locked doors and into various ante-chambers before actually meeting up with your dad. Sometimes it was through armoured glass and speaking through a handset and then other times, usually when a sentence had been passed, it was in  communal visiting rooms surrounded by prison officers.

Prison officers reacted differently to visitors, particularly children. Some were pleasant and seemed to understand the stressfulness of the situation and the uncomfortability of it. Others seemed to take an almost sadistic pleasure in demonstrating to either the prisoner or their family who was the boss and who was in charge. Perhaps as though they were demonstrating to you that they had your genetics sussed matey, and were ready for you. As a child it was impossible to understand when it came time to leave why your father couldn’t come too, if only just for a little time. This was raw, and the emotional roller coaster of being in a maximum security prison visiting room was always extreme because of the rapid peaks and troughs experienced.       

Strangely enough certain protocols exist between parents and children irrespective of circumstance. In a more traditional setting a parent might point out interesting features along the way. “That’s where such and such happened” or “That was where the xyz treaty was signed”, which then opens a dialogue and informs the child. In this setting it was pointing out notorious criminals or terrorists who had been on the national news. Murderers, rapists or IRA terrorists were pointed out just as famous buildings or landmarks might be.

In that peculiar world of bespoke moralities the terrorists resented being kept with the common criminals. Their crimes were, they reasoned, politically motivated and consequently set them part from crimes motivated by greed or psychopathic behaviour. I always found it odd imagining the conversation with someone’s parents whose child had been blown to pieces while they were out for an evening’s entertainment as opposed to the parents of a child whose misfortune had been to encounter some psychopath acting out their tendencies. The terrorists actually believed, at the time, that they occupied some moral high ground that vindicated their atrocities. Either way it was a disconcerting event to be in a room filled with these notorious murderers, rapists and criminally deranged individuals. Even more disconcerting was the eventual realisation that your father was ‘one of the lads’.

There are lots of individual episodes that I could recount, some of which are very harrowing, that created an extreme framework in which to grow up. All of which were treated by me as normal. I realised soon enough that visiting maximum security jails was not what my friends did and so I contrived the tale of an international businessman often out of the country and also a military man posted overseas. We moved regularly and I could count the number of schools in double figures before I entered a more stable environment.

I don’t wish to glamorize that world, it was and is a cess pit, the odds of coming out of it relatively unscathed are very long and the values and psychologies it fosters are not useful. To give it a context, when my paternal grandmother died my father was in prison. It is usual in such circumstances to allow a prisoner to attend the funeral of a parent on compassionate grounds. At the time the then Home Secretary intervened to block such a course of action on the basis that my father was such a danger to public safety that the risk of transporting him could not be justified. To me he was just my dad.

Why do I say these things? It’s simple really, a developmental journey is not a matter of where you are. It is a sequence of events that amount to a cohesive pattern. Crucially it is about where you have come from, success, happiness are all relative states. The journey you have taken is what defines your character, the experiences you have lived through delineate the trajectory of your life and add texture to the individual you are in the process of becoming.

This for me is a partial response, it is in many ways cathartic, to the enquiry why or how to you assess yourself as being able to comment upon happiness which, when all is said and done, is an allied state that travels among a conglomerate of positive and meaningful states that broadly define what I would call the Good Life. 

image: josefnovak33

I grew up in the 1960’s/70’s. It was an interesting time. There was social reform and upheaval occurring all round. When you’re in it, you’re the last one to know it. What you encounter sets the parameters of your experience and defines for you what is normal.

It’s one of those big stick words, ‘normal’, because it means everything and nothing at the same time. Normal is for each of us an entirely different set of weights, balances, tensions, privileges, engagements and so on. Like everyone I grew up in a normal setting. What I was surrounded by was completely normal. In this I must establish a principle of third party anonymity, those whom I refer to whose opinions I have not solicited in this context. Normal in the sense that it was all that I knew, as indeed is the case for all children, irrespective of their setting.

This subject, as I have posted previously, relates to the context of my Mechanics of Happiness work. A kind of ‘who do you think you are?’ colours staked to the mast kind of engagement. I believe firmly that a person is measured by where they have come from not by where they are at any given time. It’s a bit like seeing someone as a two dimensional cutaway as opposed to a three dimensional being. If you only see where they are now, you miss the important part, the journey they have undertaken to be at that point.

Perhaps you are familiar with the old joke, how is it possible for an idiot to earn a small fortune? Start with a large one. I’ve always interpreted that as an inheritance joke, I may be wrong, but that has always put me in mind of certain people I’ve known who have managed to take a situation of privilege and abundance and create something very mediocre from that. Those who, in my assessment, have managed to turn something shining and bright into something dull and tarnished. Of course the counterpoint is also true.

There are those who have been dealt a duff hand and managed to extricate themselves from multiple impoverishments and place themselves favourably despite this. I refer here to their psychological. emotional, and material wellbeing and not just a reflection on their bank balance, which so often seems to be the only arbiter of success in our too shallow by far culture of materialistic values.

When I was older and had moved far enough away from the epicentre of my upbringing I began to understand it better and perceive it differently. The things that for me had become normal I began to understand were far from the western nuclear family archetype. But you only know what you know as a child, it is impossible to extricate yourself from your situation because you exist as the product of that situation and until certain faculties become active in the post-pubescent state, things such as critical reasoning, it is like trying to explain water to a goldfish.

My mother had me when she was seventeen. She was a product of, among other things, the Irish Industrial school system, a state run institution whose existence is something of a national embarrassment to the Irish. Essentially this was a form of social control and state sponsored slave labour whereby children were removed from their families for the most feeble of excuses and set to work in such areas as light industry, agriculture, laundry work and so on. The system was open to abuse, the children were themselves abused and an underclass was created in Ireland of those who survived the institution of the Industrial School system. Suffice it to say that these people came out the other end, and many did not, without an education and with a whole caravan of hangups and misconceptions about life and themselves in general. I cannot speak harshly enough about the monstrosity of this system and about the Irish authorities who have tried to minimise the phenomena and particularly the Catholic church who have been in institutional denial over the whole thing for decades.

My mother and her family fled to England to build a new life for themselves. I was ultimately a product of this. I shrink from calling them refugees but by definition this is what they were. It seems odd to call a family of Irish emigres to England refugees - there were no burning cities or war-torn wastelands - and there is such a relatively huge movement of people between the two countries anyway, but that is what they were. They, my mother along with her mother and brother, arrived traumatised by their experiences and desperate to make a fresh start.   

That my grandmother managed to get these two children out of the system is miraculous enough and took monumental tenacity and courage on her part. Many involved in the post Industrial School rehabilitation work had never heard of such a thing. My grandmother had been an orphan herself as a child and when her own family had been unable to keep her she was placed in the Industrial School system. So there were two generations of people whose experiences in their formative years had been less than ideal. My maternal grandmother held a healthy contempt for Catholic nuns and priests that I never understood as a child but became more clear as I discovered the situation they had all fled from. The Industrial School system was run by loosely assembled Catholic societies with such names as the Christian Brothers and the Magdalen Sisters that were, in many instances, no more than fronts for collections of sadists and paedophiles who sheltered beneath the veneer of respectability that these ‘religious societies’ were afforded by the Irish state.  

The detail of their story is a private one, though it is shared by many others who experienced similar indignities at the hands of this system. Suffice it to say that they took on board views, attitudes and psychologies that have stayed with them like parasites throughout their days. That they found themselves in these institutions was, bizarrely, a matter of shame for relatives who contrived to blame the children for their situation and shunned and disowned them. Indeed I only discovered this disgraceful history by chance well into my adult years and many relatives still deny point blank that it ever happened which is painful for those who lived through the Industrial Schools as it diminishes the validity of their experience.

These children were told that they were the architects of their own situation and that in many instances they were damned, destined to go to hell. I know that members of my family are still traumatised by this irresponsible indoctrination. They are very wary of the concept of heaven and hell, fearful of the supernatural reach of the church and shrug wistfully as if to say ‘it still goes on’ when the latest revelations about Catholic institutional abuse in children’s institutions hit the media as they wend their weary way through the courts.

The damage wraught by unscrupulous individuals in the name of the church or the common good or some other such spurious end has penetrated the psyches of these individuals deeply and left many of those children as damaged adults. I don’t really have words to summon the fullness of contempt that I harbour for individuals who can abuse positions of trust and responsibility they have been placed in ostensibly to care for lost children. If there is truly justice in this or any other world they will have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.

OK so not a jolly post I admit but it has been said that a people who do not know their history can have no concept of their future. That is as true for an individual as it is for us all collectively. If we do not know where we have come from how can we know where we are and how can we know where we are going to?     

image: mr ruffles 

What everyone wants from life is continued and genuine happiness - Baruch Spinoza 

Someone asked me, reasonably so, why I thought I was singularly and uniquely qualified to get on my soapbox about happiness. Have you ever been asked a question that resonates with you? One that seems to burrow beneath the subcutaneous layers of your awareness?

This one did it for me. I had a ‘who the hell do I think I am?’ moment. I suppose I was presented with two options at that point. Throw in the towel and shuffle off to hide under a rock or push on and persist.

I don’t think I am singularly and uniquely qualified to wax lyrical any more than the next person. I do consider myself well placed to be a pundit on the game of life having met with both triumph and disaster, and having been kicked in the teeth and catapulted to the lofty heights in my time thus far. I have little doubt that the continued unfolding of my life’s odyssey will present more ignominy, tragedy, magic, fulfilment and dynamic growth as it proceeds.

I came up with a category called ‘Biog. stuff’ which is short for biographical stuff - you see, always thinking, always planning (lol). An opportunity for me to substantiate my position via some of the narrative of my life. More than anything I want to offer something to those who feel at times a little overwhelmed or perhaps under-qualified to tackle those obstacles that they find in their path.

The Mechanics of Happiness, it’s actually a series of six books that I’ve written, came about as I pondered the fundamental nature of what we want. I saw that people want happiness; not a glitzy, sugar coated fantasy but sustained, deep and meaningful happiness. A quality that is unique to each individual because of the unique way in which we are all assembled.

I saw also that there are many barriers to achieving happiness that interfere with the smooth evolution of our own being, often in the form of external factors that we had little or nothing to do with that become like grit in our character  development. In the blog I tend to keep my powder dry, when I master the technology I will publish some book extracts here, and some people have reflected to me that they haven’t got a clue what this blog is about but find it nevertheless interesting or compelling. It’s all good. It’s all ingredients that go into the pot.

Look out for postings or pages marked ‘Biog. stuff’, keep the feedback coming. I find it extraordinary when people comment in whatever way. And to those of you who’ve said you find me a little daunting, don’t make me laugh, I’m just a kid who went on a few dates with the English language and found I was in love with her. To paraphrase Jim Royle, ’Daunting? My arse!’