My daughter bought me a copy of Ali Smith’s latest novel, “Companion Piece” which is, as its title suggests, to compliment the quartet of stories she wrote in the years since Brexit as a reflection of the chaos and hope inherent in modern UK society.
I am always left feeling fulfiled when I read Smith partly because I can never fully understand her on the first go.
A review of the book from an Amazon customer caught my eye.
“Rubbish,” it said.
“It is incoherent with no structure. Weird lack of grammar. it reads like a stream of consciousness by a schizophrenic on speed. Waste of money.”
I overlook the lack of grammar.
“You did indeed waste your money,” I thought, but not because of any observation you make about the book.
This week it has been brought to my attention more than once that we tend to seek simplicity instead of revelling in the rewards of trudging through hardship.
Of course, hardship isn’t much fun when you are in the midst of it but there is something about finding a way through that seems to often make the erstwhile difficulty feel worthwhile.
Finding out what we’re made of, making our own sense of something that is not laid out simply enough for a fool to understand, and reflecting on our own hitherto unrecognised resourcefulness and resilience are not only rewarding but necessary.
A written question came from a client about how one might deal with the impending cost of living crisis without sufficient financial backup.
I found myself telling the story of buying my first house in 1991 and how the following year “Black Wednesday” sent mortgage rates through the roof.
“I could just about afford the repayments at 10% but when they reached 15% in just a few weeks I couldn’t even buy food.”
“Later that year the only gas fire I had in the house developed a leak and was capped off. We spent the winter with no heating and went to bed in our coats and hats.”
We laugh about it now with the children but it was far from funny at the time. It was cold, miserable, depressing, frightening, and dispiriting.
Getting through it though, just like the pandemic, taught us something about ourselves that we otherwise wouldn’t have known.
It isn’t the tragedy itself that we ought to spend so much time focused on, it is our often exhibited ability to push through to the other side by some means or another.
Later in the week, I am having a conversation with my son and his girlfriend about “manifestation”.
“Do you believe in it?”
“No, I think it’s mystic nonsense. The Law Of Attraction seems to me to be a way of us telling ourselves everything will be OK without putting in the work.”
I scrabble around looking for my copy of “The Secret” on the bookshelves but can’t find it.
“Someone gave me a copy years ago. Perhaps I can manifest it. Or maybe I threw it away.”
My son’s girlfriend tells me, with a smile, that her friend is going to give her a copy.
I make a “tut” gesture with my head but leave out the superfluous sound.
There’s no doubting that having positive expectations about our ability to thrive in any given situation improves its likelihood, but that is different from positive thinking which is little more than “wishing”.
The hardest thing I ever got through was depression.
I often asked my numerous therapists “what should I do?” as clients often ask me now.
There are no answers that can come from anyone else because that would be like Ali Smith writing a book that could be easily understood without a shred of effort and where is the reward in that?
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