Patience in a Broken World

It was a bold move getting the retired pastor to preach on patience.

Nothing to do with his competency at carrying out such a task but the risk of a congregation remembering the opportunities he gave us to learn to be patient. The most stinging being an occasion when after delivering most of a forty minute sermon from memory having lost his notes he proceeded to give the same sermon again having found said notes.

I like a twenty minute sermon, there is a lot to be said for shorter sermons. Twenty minutes is about the threshold anyone can stay focused on any single task. Even stories usually have a change every twenty minutes either a chapter break or scene change. With only twenty minutes you have to work very hard to keep attention and say all the important things, longer than that and you just allow people to wander, to dip in and out of the task. So it goes.

Patience, which is, really, the ability to diminish the feeling of time spent and increase the attention you give without feeling cheated, is an odd virtue.

Patience stands unique as the only virtue that is regularly claimed to be taught in solely in opposing circumstances. Your learn patience with late buses, whilst on-hold, with the checkout assistant who has made a gaffe, etc.

We are not told we can learn humility by being in situations where we can boast. Nor that we are told that we can only be kind in situations that would warrant unkindness. Nor for gentleness, nor for forgiveness, nor for goodness.

I personally, impatiently want to see a stop to this.

Patience is no different from those other values, née virtues. Virtues is the right word though we do get to choose if we value these things. Those virtues are supposed to be woven into our character and it is deeply discomforting to me that I am told I am only able to learn patience by being forced to make that conscious choice in situations that otherwise demand me to lose my cool.

I can be patient, I think I default to that unless I am dealing with myself, but that patience is a conscious choice. Just as it is a forced decision to exhibit any of the virtues. But that patience was hard earned, is hard earned, not seperately but inclusively of all those other good, godly, virtues.

The tacit thing that goes unsaid is whilst being impatient can be okay and we can struggle with it ias we make our ways through a demanding life but woe betide anyone who struggles to be kind, gentle or forgiving.

It is the unsaid message in this that bothers me, it ignores all the brokeness of this world in order to claim it is just a demandingly busy one.

Fast and Loud

Every now and again my brain goes into conniptions, arguing with itself about things that don’t matter all that much. Everything slowly then quickly becomes a little too much.

It starts simply enough with that niggling task that never gets done finally getting done. Like finding a proper place for the DVDs on top of the bookcases. So they come down and a space is found at the back of a wardrobe which displaces some miscellany.

Then the miscellany needs a place to go. A rummage through it produces piles to keep, to discard, to use one last time before taking to a charity shop, to discard after shredding into fine little ribbons of disorganised paranoia.

I mentioned a similar winnowing of the DVDs into such piles happened as well right?, it happens often. Every month a galvanising of the increasingly obviously erroneous, but ignored, view that I do watch these films more than once. I used to when my mind raced or crawled and needed to sit to recompose itself for a couple of hours but that daily deed, daily need is long since past.

So the DVDs are now safely housed in some place I’ll likely deem inappropriate sometime in the next few weeks and my floor is covered in piles of things. In for a penny, in for a pound I decide to indulge the part of my brain with delusions that this is somehow a fecund state.

There are piled papers and moved books and miniature painting canvasses and folders full of old P45s and P60s and and and and and…

It is all too much. I have too much, in my life, in my brain

Then I want to rock back and forward until those with a starched white jacket with buckles down the back come to reassure me it will all be okay.

Of course we have progressed from the days of being told to go two stops from
Dagenham or round the bend, so I try to think myself out of a thinking problem.

I need lists, no a database, something to help reform, reaffirm this catastrophising mind that just wants a little organised bastion to hole up in, I had a database app before that I decided I didn’t really need so I download it again now that the need is great.

Halfway through organising the fields of the form I realise that this is too much taxonomy and it isn’t really helping and oh! Holy molé my iPod is awash with stupid apps, misplaced for ergonomics based on use. Maybe I could, no should, track how often I open any given note taking application.

I put the iPod down and back away slowly. The busy visual noise or the shut-eye induced audible internal machinations of a brain too fast.

So I leave the room, count to one hundred and feel ever so slightly but enough off edge to be safe for release into the wider world. I have to otherwise my tiny, cacophonic brain would pop.

This too will pass.

The Bells

Dad I broke my promise to you
if you’re wondering where I’ve been
I thought I knew what I was doing
but i was wrong again

The Bells by Pedro the Lion

Those lyrics say it pretty well.

To say my church attendance was intermittent is to overplay it; I remained in regular contact with my church I just didn’t do the Sunday services. Which is a pretty big “just”.

Somewhere around the four months since attendance, two years since weekly attendance something changed — a really big something. I stopped shoulding.

Should is a bad word for me. Too often have terrible things come from me thinking I should. Even more nuisance have come from it.

They, Sunday services, became my weekly reminder of my once fraught social anxiety. There is more caught up and wrapped up and folded through it than that but it is fair to say that Sunday services became synonymous with feeling cocooned in wretchedness, which isn’t the point of them.

Then I let go of should.

I do better when I don’t should, when I “would like”.

It took weeks of being around Christians, but not on Sundays, to begin to get right with Him upstairs. My prayer life has improved, though not daily diligent with daily bible reading I am better at it generally and that’s enough.

I lost sight of my second favoured piece of advice[1] which is that it is sometimes better to be orientation-focused rather than goal-focused.

Now that I want to go church I do. Do I sit at the back, leave quickly after the service, and try to make little eye contact? Yes but that’ll fade with time.

I thought I knew what I was doing but I was wrong; three weeks ago I went to a Sunday service and forgot for awhile why I had not been in so long.

  1. The first being take your time and be honest.  ↩

Expectations

I think we learn all the time.  Either by design, hello students and lovers of non-fiction, or tacitly by just being alive and aware.  I think there are three rough types of things you learn.

  1. Things you are taught to expect:  Like your gran always overcooking peas and carrots.
  2. Things you are taught that can logically be expected: That when Christmas dinner comes around your gran will have overcooked the sprouts.
  3. Things that nobody thought you’d ever really encounter: That day when your gran wants to know if baked beans are vegetarian.

There is a fourth, those sorts of things that no amount of prognostication would ever prepare you for.

The older I get, the more “knowledge” I have but that is match by more and more of those unexpected things.

It is brilliant.

Bully for you

Hello.

A weird thing happened to me last night.

I ended up sitting very close to my childhood bully.

Given the experiences of some of my friends I came off lightly, but I think at the time and within my immediate peer group I got the worst of it. It was 11, finally year of primary school, and it happened at scouts. Scouts was largely based around team games and occasionally sitting in a field in the back of beyond dining on “pot au noodle”. But the weeks when we were playing games I am my friends were targeted, half  hazing initiation and half just that we were small and it was easier to win the games against us. I also frequently got beaten-up in the little ante-room before the main hall. So it goes.

I think the worst of it was lasting effect. I left scouts but still had to go to school. He, my bully, had P.E. at the same time as me. Placing thirty or so teenage boys coursing with hormones and adrenaline in a confined space is a recipe for fights, most of the ones I ever witnessed at school took place in the changing rooms, they were also more violent fights that the loose-limb swinging brawls that happened once a term. I digress. I hated P.E. mostly because I was afraid about him spotting me.

I feigned illness a lot, I had a lot of Monday morning nausea and headaches, I was for a couple of hours each week the archetype of bullying victim. The rest of the week less so, but that was mainly because teenagers are largely territorial and he always sat in the same place at intervals so all I had to do was avoid there, plus after a month I had figured out what journeys between classes I should just keep silent, keep my head down and make as quickly as possible so as not to alert him to my presence.

Please, don’t read this as a woe is me tale. Plenty of others have experience far worse and whilst it was deeply unpleasant for those four years (one at scouts, and three during our overlapping attendance at the high school) it doesn’t haunt my dreams and I don’t think that it has had much lasting effect on my personality and certainly none on my character. This is just to illustrate that largely it was only a few actual incidences (thirty maybe?) and then mostly a self-created fear that there might be more.

He, the bully, who I last think I saw five years ago, got on to the bus that I was on. I was at the back, writing something in a notebook and had glanced up and I saw him and suddenly I was twelve again. I became very aware that I was using a fountain pen and fountain pens are gay (1) so hurriedly put the notebook and pen into my bag before he could see, no point in drawing attention to myself. And he sat at the back of the bus, no more than ten feet away. And it was weird and awkward for me because the once fifteen year-old tormentor is now a thirty year old guitar teacher.

A mental muscle memory I suppose, still there, fifteen years on since the last actually incident, just latent fear. He didn’t recognise me, and even if he did I highly doubt anything would have happened.

Just odd how quickly that childish fear returned, alongside all that anxiety I carried, mostly through my own thinking, for three years.

Very odd.

Footnotes

  1. Of course fountain mens are not gay. Just a way of highlighting that really stupid, I think mostly male mindset, that gay is a catch-all insult and how desperate we, my peers and I, as teens were desperate not to stand out for any reason.  For a significantly smarter and funnier take on this watch just about any issue of the Inbetweeners.

Slumped S no more

Hello.

I doubt that most of us will get past fifteen without being told by somebody, be it parent, grandparent, teacher, or elderly stranger on the street, that we should sit, or stand up, straight.

I have spent most of life as a slumped S-shaped.  The early years I was just a bundle of flailing limbs, but I think pretty soon after that the slumping began. I remember being 13 or so and being taught by my mum how to walk properly; I think what she and I both failed to realise is that I had become _a teenager_. Teenagers in my experience are either brimming with energy and this never still enough to have their posture critiqued or they are not and they slump.  The also like to put their feet on things when the sit, like the chair in front or up on the desk / couch / dashboard. I am sure there is a correlation between this two things.

Shortly after leaving high school I embraced the messenger bag as my means of book-moving. A multi-pocketed number that carry an awful lot of weight, on one shoulder. I suspect this to be at least a cause, if not the cause, of my continued slumping. Indeed the one an only time I was dressed down about my posture by the person giving me a haircut was after using said bag for a few months; but that might just be a personality thing of the hairdresser.

Skip ahead five years of poor posture, messenger bags and university notes and it seems likely that some back pain would arrive, hence I have been addressing my posture. An exciting notion to all no doubt but one that has at least been helpful to me.

Gone is the over burdened messenger bag, replaced by a sensible rucksack (though it is significantly sartorially less sleek) and my back is less painful, less often.  My laptop now sits on a box so it is at eye-level, and less pain there. Tens of little twists that creating a large change, a change towards less pain which is good.

What is bad is how it is lessening. A very slow creep of pain as the muscles that should have been preventing the slumping begin to work is moving up my spine. It is a slow procedure which is fine but I am not looking forward to the two day headache that I presume will herald the end of my slumped days.

It costs nothing.

It doesn’t cost anything to be nice. Not really. Plus it is nice to be nice, a recovering alcoholic who sat beside me on a bus and started chatting reminded me of that.

The night before last I was on the bus, just like every night, but this time a slightly earlier one than I normally get.

The first stop after mine was where it started to turn. A woman got on, prolly in her fifties or maybe forties if the years had been unkind which unfolding events suggested they may have been. Her hair was tangled and greasy, in her plastic shopping bag there was a wine bottle, unopened.

She chatted with the driver, for a short while, something about losing a friend. He told to sit down and she did. She asked another passenger about her friend and all he, which would have been as much as I could, was muster was that there must be somebody she could call.

Two twenty-something shiny-suited men got on next and sat in front of them women. She tried to speak to them but they brushed her off in that way people do when trying not to be rude, by indicating they were busy. Pads of papers and plastic files and pens came out of leather messenger bags. Headphones went in and gentle ignoring moved to physically brushing away her hands resting on her shoulders, trying to encourage them to talk to her. They eventually moved to see in front of them and increased the volume of the music through their headphones.

I operate on a policy of not inserting myself into others’ lives. If the women had engaged me then I’d have spoken with her. Much like the alcoholic who reminded me it is nice to be nice. A flimsy excuse for my silence.

We, the other passengers, sat in silence actively ignoring a distressed, almost certainly due to some degree of psychosis, women having a conversation with herself.

Perhaps compassion from one of us would’ve stopped us all examining our shoes but that didn’t happen. People weren’t gracious or even just polite, and it was awkward and sad.

There is a name for this phenomenon, it escapes me now though, if a group of people witness a violent attack the likelihood of intervention drops, everyone hoping somebody else will take the lead.

Strikes me that if she had been bleeding or clutching at her heart there would’ve been no shortage of those volunteering to help.

At Bethlem hospital people, in the 18th century, would pay a penny to gawp at, but remain at safe distance from those distressed. We paid a bus fare.

Humanity is crap at times.

It doesn’t cost anything to be nice. Not really. Plus it is nice to be nice, a recovering alcoholic who sat beside me on a bus and started chatting reminded me of that.