Posted on 25 Feb, 2011 -
Is Woody Allen the director of my life?
Why I think Woody Allen may have written the script for my life this week
Why Rule No. 54 of Life is helping
And why laughter is still the best response to everything
Dear Reader,
It started in the morning when I spilled a cafetiere of coffee all over the carpet on the stairs. But that was just clumsy.
When I failed to get anywhere with work and had spent an hour Googling symptoms for diseases in a fit of hypochondria, things were turning a bit desperate.
And so that was when I decided to head up to the allotment to cut down all the old the autumn-fruiting raspberries that should have been cut down at the end of Autumn. But it’s amazing how quickly the end of Autumn turns into the beginning of Spring and there were already new buds appearing on the old growth. So now I’m a rubbish gardener.
But that was just the start. Three snips in and the secateurs decide to break so I’m off in the car to B&Q and back again. And by the time I eventually get home I realise that the kids will need picking up soon and I’ve hardly achieved anything. In fact, in terms of achievement, I’ve fallen into the red. I certainly haven’t earned the belated lunch I’m about to make for myself seeing as I’ve had to spend even more money on a gardening hobby that probably costs us more than it actually saves us…
Thank goodness for humour
Luckily for me, however, my husband was at home and my rabbited story about my catalogue of disasters, mistakes and person failings quickly turned into something to laugh about.
I am not always able to laugh about my personal failings, mistakes and pretensions because I can sometimes be guilty of taking myself and my life too seriously. But whenever I do it makes me feel SO much better.
As Golda Meir, the fourth (and female) Prime Minister of the State of Israel famously said: “Don’t be so humble - you are not that great.”
When I can admire myself for my quirky efforts instead of hoping for success then life feels much better.
In the words of the great William James:
“To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified.”
We human beings are all of us a bit rubbish and all a bit wonderful in our own completely individual and colorful ways. Nobody is perfect so we should not strive to be so.
Mistakes, disasters and person failings are an inevitable and even beautiful side effect of the boundlessly energetic and enthusiastic striving and trying that IS human life.
Instead of moping about the mistakes we make or beating ourselves up about them, we should try enjoying them instead. We can even use our disaster stories to make other people laugh - because if there’s one thing we humans find heartening to hear about, it’s other people’s disasters and mistakes!
How Rule No. 54 of Life can help a bit too
Another idea about life that I’ve liked a lot recently is no. 54 of Richard Templar’s ‘The Rules of Life’.
The idea here is that you are not in charge. Over the course of the day a lot of things will happen to you over which you have no control. And the same, in fact, is true of your whole life. Sure, we do have some control over our life and we’ve got to keep on making an effort to make the life that we want come true. But we are not, as Richard says, the driver of the train. We cannot control a lot of the things that will just happen to us.
“Once you accept that you are not in charge, you can let go of so much stuff. It’s very liberating. Instead of complaining, ‘Why isn’t it like this?’ you can accept it isn’t and let go.”
“Seeing as you are not in charge you can watch it like a movie and cheer at the exciting bits, cry at the sad bits and hide during the scary moments. But you are not the director or even the projectionist. You are not even the usherette.”
Here are a few more of the life rules for you - with a few adaptations of my own…
Rule 38: Similar to Rule 54, the message in this rule is that: You will never understand everything.
The world is so huge and works in such complex ways that human beings will never understand half of it. Even our own behaviour and even the way our physical brain functions is still such a huge mystery to scientists.
In a normal day, says Richard, dozens of things will happen around you and to you that you won’t understand. “People will behave oddly and you won’t understand why. Things will go unexpectedly wrong - or right - and it won’t make sense.”
You won’t understand, for example, why a certain person has said what they have. Or why every shop on the internet has run out of cereal bar maker machines at exactly the time as your daughter wants one for her birthday. So instead of driving yourself mad trying to work things out, just enjoy the feeling of the world’s crazy mystery.
And here’s the bit I really love: “It’s the same principle for the big stuff - why things happen to us, why we are here, where we go afterwards, that sort of thing.”
Rule 6 is that you should dedicate your life to something...
More than anything else, says Richard Templar, we should have something that we feel we can dedicate our life to. For him, the inspiration for what he dedicates his life to came when somebody once told him that if his soul or spirit was the only thing he was likely to be taking with him when he went, then it ought to be the best thing he had.
And we will all have different things that we might find or decide we can dedicate our own lives to. It might, for example, be to an appreciation of and the promotion of the arts… a desire to make the lives of other people better… a desire to be a good parent… to make advances in the study of cancer… to be richer than most people you know… and so on and so on. (And I’m not making any kind of value judgement here.)
It is nice, he says, to have something that, quietly, in your heart, you can devote your attention to. It’s a yardstick by which you can measure how well you’re doing, what you’re doing and where you’re going.
“Decide what it is you are dedicating your life to. It makes the rest much easier.”
Rule 10 links us nicely back to the beginning of this email by reminding us that: Only dead fish swim with the stream.
“For the rest of us there will be times when it’s an uphill, upstream struggle. We will have to battle waterfalls, weirs and raging torrents.”
Or - as is more often the case in the shallows - getting banged on the head by a bit of driftwood… swallowing unidentified objects… or just having a bit of a sore and tired tail…
I’ll put a few more of the rules together for you another week. But for the meantime…
Best wishes
