Monday 24 December 2012

existence pros and cons


Why are we so mean to ourselves?   What did we do wrong?  Why, if we are the best that evolution has tossed up so far, are we so abusive to ourselves. Each of us has a nagging parent implanted in our heads. ”Don’t do that…why didn’t you….you should have….but you didn’t” on an endless loop tape. (My mother would say she was only telling me what a failure I was because she loved me). Most of us if we ever compared our inner leit-motif, would sue each other for plagiarism; our internal themes are so alike.

No other species is as cruel as we are to ourselves. We’d never dream of treating our pets the way we treat ourselves.  We whip ourselves to keep moving like we would an old horse till it falls over exhausted; the hooves made into glue. We even treat our own underpants with more compassion, delicately spin drying them, adding softener so they don’t have such a bumpy ride, hanging them to dry in a cool breeze. I have asked so many people if they have ever had the voice in their head say,  “Congratulations you’ve done a wonderful job and may I say how attractive you are today.”  The answer is no one.  I’m sure they’re out there I just never met them.

  
 The problem is that now we use words and when we do underperform, the inner voices begin with ‘I should have ’ and ‘I could have.’ That old familiar tune.


 Here’s another way in which we distract ourselves from the big question; we have an aspect of the human condition that might not be as positive as we’d like; our obsession to keep busy. There is no time to rest, no time to think about what we really should be doing. I’m not criticizing I’m as driven as the next person.
It got so bad that when I went into labour while doing a TV show, the floor manager gave me “5-4-3-2“ someone would cut the cord and “Action.”
Ghandi said, “There is more to life than speed.”  Unfortunately he didn’t tell us what, he just left us hanging while he pranced around in his nappy.

4 comments:

  1. Absolutely. I threw away all the labels me and others had stuck on my back when I was made to ask myself the simple question - "Who made that true?". Just because someone in your childhood says you're a disorganised mess doesn't make the thing indelible.

    Excellent post to read this Christmas Eve morning.

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  2. wonderful,and made me think of this book http://www.amazon.com/Neuropolitics-Thinking-Culture-Theory-Bounds/dp/081664022X

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  3. It is a good idea sometimes to divert the negative inner voice out to someone else and imagine using that voice out loud on them. Our upbringings put that voice into our heads but to some extent we chose to continue to listen to it and not replace it with something else.

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  4. Humans area clever but are not smart. As you go up the intelligence ladder, there is not many primates. And they tend to last 100000 years. We are nearly there.

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