I have a slight weakness for self-help offerings on social media. “Help Yourself to Stop Drinking”, “Become the You You always Wanted to be”, or “Learn to Play the Guitar Completely Painlessly With Hardly Any Effort”.
I recently listened in on a podcast by one of these self-help gurus. It was all about, in his words, “BS”. Haha, no he did not mean “bullshit”, that was just a little dash of quirky humour there. Ironically, when I received his multiple subsequent emails which offered me more and more insistently the special price of $17.88 per month to rebuild my shattered life and become the Complete Perfect Person which I deserved to be, I wondered if he hadn’t been rather prescient after all, perhaps subconsciously truthful, although inadvertently?
I think that if one is crafty one can glean some very interesting info from the initial pitches from these people. They have to persuade you how good they are so they need to pack in a few juicy truths into their pitch. The trick is then to bail out at the right time, just when, as the French would say on a dating site “+si affinité”, meaning approximately “if we decide we like each other we can take this to third base”. This is most often indicated by a request for banking details (here I am talking about the self-help sites, not dating).
What I learned principally, of course, was that it’s all my parents’ fault, which is always deeply reassuring and, above all, convenient.
The “BS”, btw, stands for “Belief System”, and this is what governs our ability to become what we want to become. As the presenter said most memorably, “If you believe you are an apple tree you can’t make pears”. This all seemed jolly sensible to me so far.
When I write these little essays on the Absurdities of Life I always like to make at least one Serious Point in the midst of what I can only hope is a slightly amusing spew of awarenesses. In this case my Serious Point is that for me this chap hit the nail on the head, the nose on the button, or whatever one calls it, when he explained that our inner Belief System, which governs our ability to achieve our goals, constantly threatens us with “self sabotage” when we try to make progress towards a goal of which, in our inner self, we do not believe ourselves worthy.
Our personal Belief System has been built up from early childhood, and its first foundations are set in place by our parents, our siblings, our family and friends.
While it is all too easy to blame one’s parents, I have to say that my childhood was completely coloured by the fact that my parents constantly, but constantly, drove home the point that other people’s opinions were more valid and important than mine, be it they themselves, the neighbours, the policeman, my teachers at school, or the minister at church. My own personal wishes and feelings were always secondary, and of lesser value and relevance.
Was I damaged by this? Well no, not in any obvious way. I grew up in a relatively privileged milieu and had access to all of the right stuff, but I did honestly feel like the black sheep of the family, and at my school creativity was considered to be well down the list of admirable attributes, way behind scholastic or sporting prowess, for example. I was somewhat decent at playing the violin, and was leader of the Junior Orchestra for a short time. When my parents issued an ultimatum saying that I must either practise for one hour per day or give it up, I gave it up. What could have happened If they had introduced me to the wonderful jazz music of Stéphane Grappelli on violin instead?
It does seem ironic that my mother, who was a very sweet lady but capable of coming out with deeply wounding remarks, always maintained throughout my life that the first word I learned to spell was “procrastination”. Is it simple coincidence that procrastination has been a problem for me all through my life? To give you an inkling of my sweet Mama’s ability to wound, one day years ago when I was having great difficulty with making my company profitable, I said to her lightheartedly “it seems like God is telling me I shouldn’t be in business”. Her reply came quick as a flash, “Oh darling, I don’t think we really needed God to tell us that”.
After 44 years of working in the textile and clothing business around the world, I am now trying to embark on a new career as a writer, something I absolutely love doing, but have of course serious doubts about whether anyone at all will want to read my scribblings.
In a sense it shouldn’t matter, and as Kurt Vonnegut famously advised a group of schoolchildren, the most important thing is just to “do it”, meaning to write, to paint, to sing, to dance, but to express oneself creatively in some way, and not care a jot about whether what one does lives up to other people’s standards. He actually advised the kids to write a poem or a piece of prose for their teacher, and then to destroy it without showing it to anyone.
This freedom is what I desire most, and as I did on my morning walk this morning, I will chant that mantra to the road I am walking and to the trees which surround me, “I am a writer, I am a writer, I am a writer”.
The final wisdom of the BS talk, by the way, was that there are three vital steps one must take. These are Awareness, Transformation, and Reprogramming. As fascinating and no doubt effective as this may be, on balance I think I’ll stick to red wine and my mantra.
More soon from Olaf.
Skoal!!!
Olaf
