Thursday 13 September 2012

Living at ease with my helplessness : part of life's rich pantomime


     As I grow older instances of wisdom occur more rarely than the number of inner conflicts which come to visit and beset me. An internal battle that frequently and readily comes to mind has lined up on one side the forces which tell me what I should and must be doing and invoke the imperative that my inner parent must at all times be assured that I really am trying to be a good boy. Otherwise...... 

     An ally of this force is a compulsion, (dispatched in the form ranting lectures mainly directed towards a televison set), to beseech those groups of people who make up giant institutions  -  like  government and its apparatus, like the media, and like the large financial organisations  -   to listen to the good sense I talk. If they have the nous to act on it they will find, ipso facto, that they have become, each one of them, a good boy just like the one I insist - without cease - that I lives in me or may be the one I think I would like become. Perhaps I'm really giving myself the lecture?

Not a good boy. He has his hands in his pockets


     My failure to be a good boy, as you may have guessed, is due to the regiments lined up in opposition to my inner parent : those parts of me which insist that I will not become the kind of person my “standing on an adult pedestal self " demands of me. These are the impulsions which say, “I do not need to be in a continual state of mental and physical activity. I can put my hands in my pocket! I do not have to be sociable. I can eat and drink what I like. It is not imperative that I struggle against my own primitive desires however aimless or indeed vulnerable they may make me. I don’t need a direction home.”

How is it at my advanced age that I still feel pressed by a need to be in control ? Why can’t I live at ease with my helplessness ?  

“I must try to keep figuring this out.”
 “No I don’t need to.” 
“Yes I do.” 
“No, I dont.......”