It hardly needs saying but I’ll say it anyway: we live in hard times. Things that some of us thought could and should have been solved haven’t been solved. Things that some of us thought would show signs of progress haven’t progressed. In many ways, wherever we look – locally, nationally or globally – there are things that have got worse. I don’t need to list them.
I’m going to make a big claim: we can’t do anything about the things that bring us down if we are oppressed and depressed by them. We have to have hope. We need to be hopeful creatures in order to live. No matter how much events seem to point towards despair, telling us to be pessimistic, I think we have to find strategies and techniques to be hopeful. In spite of everything, we have to find reasons to go on. As someone once put it in a book, “We can’t go over it, we can’t go under it, we’ve got to go through it.”
I’m inspired by two pieces of writing: one by the poet Philip Larkin and the other by the singer-songwriter Sheryl Crow.
Larkin wrote: “Days are where we live.”
Like Larkin, I’m of the view that this “day” is where and how we live. We live “day by day”, “taking one day at a time”, “living from day to day”.
It’s true, of course, that our thoughts break out of the capsule of the day by going back into memories and forwards into possible happenings, but my argument here is that we live those emotions in the now, in the day. There’s nowhere else to live them. We go through the acts of remembering (past) and thinking ahead (future) in the reality of the now. The now is in the day. In that sense, even our mental life is in the day.
Sheryl Crow tells us that “every day is a winding road”. As we go through a day, it winds around places, people, events, feelings. It’s a good metaphor.
She also says that every day is a faded sign.
Yes! Our days are full of the faded signs of our own lives. We go through a day with fragments of our past life coming up on our mental TV screen. What follows are some thoughts about hope and even ways to be hopeful of having good days. Feel free to adopt them, adapt them or, better still, come up with your own. It all helps!
Always experiment
To experiment is to do something new, it’s to discover something in the world around us, it’s to discover something about yourself. And a big discovery (or it may be a reminder) is that we don’t have to be passive receivers of what the world throws at us. We can take any part of the world and experiment with it, see what happens if …
The scene: it’s 10 o’clock at night. I should be closing down. Not looking at a screen. Not eating or drinking. Then I remember that in the freezer is the tub of Belgian chocolate ice-cream I bought the other day. I say to myself, “This is silly. You don’t neeeeeeeed a bowl of Belgian chocolate ice-cream. You don’t need to taste shavings of Belgian chocolate ice-cream sitting on your tongue, melting slowly and slipping down your throat. You so, so, so don’t need Belgian chocolate ice-cream.”
For some mysterious reason I then find that I have found my way into the kitchen. And, very surprisingly, I’m standing next to the fridge.
I open the freezer drawer. O my, poor little Belgian chocolate ice-cream tub, all on its own in the freezer basket.
O my, it looks to me as if there are about four spoonfuls left. The problem is we don’t have any spoons. O we do!
But we’re talking about experimenting. Surely there’s no experimenting left to do. I have the tub. I have the spoon. I don’t even need a bowl. It’s a done deal. Just get on with it.
Ah but …
It’s at this moment my experimenting mind turns on. What if (and that’s the key phrase in the world history and practice of experimenting) … what if, I were to add something to the Belgian chocolate ice-cream? That old roast potato that’s sitting in the fridge? Belgian chocolate and cold roast potato? Maybe not. What about … raisins?
My experimenting mind says, why don’t I rearrange the known world, and add raisins to these last four scoops of Belgian chocolate ice-cream?
And so it is that when I open Michael’s dried fruit cupboard, there they are, each sultana with a smile on its face, saying, “Eat me.” And, I have plans. I am going to drop and scatter a few on to my four scoops of Belgian chocolate ice-cream. It’s an experiment. I want to know if this is a great combination. I’m not a gambling man, but I’m thinking that the odds are good. I scatter the sultanas. I dig in.
There’s a moment when I pause to take it in. Has it worked? Or have I ruined the day?
It has worked. The flavours match perfectly. But then, as with all good experiments, there’s an unexpected outcome. I was all prepared for an interesting clash of texture: the freezing-melting of the ice-cream with the chewiness of the sultana. But something else happened. The ice-cream has frozen the sultanas. They have turned into resistant toffee-like pebbles. So as the chocolate melts, the sultana, in this frozen state, persists and can only give up its flavour if I give it a good old chew. What’s happened is that the whole business of this 10 o’clock snack has slowed down. It’s become impossible to consume Belgian chocolate ice-cream laced with sultanas quickly. It can’t be rushed. It has to be taken step by step. With pauses. While the flavours and textures blend.
I’ll leave you with that image, if I may.
To have good days, you need good nights
If our nights are crap, our days are crap. We’re irritable and ineffective. We find it hard to concentrate, hard to remember stuff, hard to relax, hard to think, hard to be nice to anyone, more likely to fly off the handle. And that’s just the stuff we can see and be aware of. We can be pretty sure that all the parts of our body that need to rest in order to recuperate, repair and regenerate are having a hard time, too.
I have one big insight into this. In 2020, I was put into an induced coma. It lasted for around 42 days. While I was put into this coma, I was intubated and ventilated – meaning that the doctors and nurses put a tube down my throat and pumped air down the tube into my lungs.
But why did they do that? The theory behind it is that if you “switch off” a patient, then you give them a better chance of recovery. Because the patient doesn’t do that stuff for themselves, the regenerative powers that the body has are not in any way “competing” with the muscles and nerves of the body for energy and power.
Any doctor will tell you that one of the best treatments for illness is rest and sleep. We all know that if we try to ignore heavy colds, flu, or any other big infection such as bronchitis or pneumonia, our bodies can’t cope. Things get worse.
It follows, then, that nights are our place of healing. Nights are our rehab treatment. If we can’t sleep, it’s more difficult to rehab. (The opposite is true, too: if we can’t rehab, it’s difficult to sleep.)
Here is one of my tricks for getting to sleep. I’m not going to claim that it’s absolutely failsafe and you may want to adapt so that it works for you. Remember the principle: whatever works, works!
First step is the “one good thing” principle. At some point, at the beginning, on your way to bed, as you get into bed, as your head hits the pillow, you concentrate on one good thing that happened to you, or that you did on that day. It can be as tiny and as insignificant as how you successfully washed a burnt, greased-up oven pan!
Next step.
I bore myself to sleep.
My failsafe bore is counting, starting at one. But that’s not enough. It’s not any old counting. You have to count slowly, concentrating on each number, thinking of the shape of the number itself. However, you won’t be able to. Your mind wants to be interested in all that other stuff. So by the time you get to about nine or 10, your mind flips on to one of the anxieties or terrors. What do you do now? You go back to one. What? But that’s sooooo boring! Exactly. You start again. Slowly, carefully, thinking of the shape of each number. The moment that your mind flicks on to one of the anxieties, back you go to one.
Word of warning: you don’t do this in an irritated way. You do it in a detached, calm and contented way. You don’t even say to yourself “back to one” because that’s another subject in itself. You just go back to one, gently, nonchalantly, calmly.
Next: you must not, must not move, twitch, fiddle, scratch, rub, shift about in any way. You are a statue. Think of yourself as a statue. If you twitch, scratch, shake your leg or some such, back you go to one. Again, don’t do it resentfully or irritatedly. Just do it nonchalantly and calmly.
So you have two things going on here, counting and being a statue.
Stay united
My mother is opening an envelope at the breakfast table. She pulls out a piece of paper and, with an ironic look on her face, turns to me and my brother and says, with a triumphant edge to her voice, “I’m four-sevenths of your father!”
At the time, I don’t think I fully understood what she was talking about and it took some explaining. The National Union of Teachers campaigned for many years for equal pay for female teachers. The National Association of School Masters (as I think it was called then) opposed it. It was a bitter fight and it divided staffrooms and families, but in the end the NUT and other trade unions won the argument, convinced government to put it in place but … with one proviso: equal pay couldn’t be implemented in one go. It had to be implemented in “seven increments”, each one added on annually. So it was that I remember my mother’s exultant cry on this particular morning indicated that she had reached a point where her pay was calculated on the basis of being four-sevenths of what a man would have received.
The kitchen table was a place where I learned a lot about these wins and losses. The big one for them had been what has come to be known as the Battle of Cable Street of 1936, where a huge street demonstration (including my parents, Harold Rosen and Connie Isakofsky) stopped the British Union of Fascists from marching through a largely Jewish area in the East End of London.
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When my mother told the story it was full of colour, with stories of barricades made of beds, tables and chairs, a “spy” who stood with the BUF and reported back on what they were doing … and so on.
As an eight-year-old, this was exciting stuff for a teatime kitchen-table talk. Your mother, a respectable suburban primary school teacher, is telling you a story about a day on the streets, taking place in what always seemed like a strange mythic place and time, “the East End in the 1930s”.
As with my mother and the equal pay win, I got it from my parents that you might win something but it won’t be all. Fascism didn’t win in Britain, but by 1942, it looked very much as if it was going to engulf the whole of Europe. As my mother said, if Hitler had won, we (my brother and me) “wouldn’t be here”.
These wins and losses explain why my mother behaved the way she did during the “bus strike” of May and June 1958. By then I was at grammar school, aged 12, and for many of us, a bus journey was essential. We lived three miles or so from school. Teachers and parents ferried the school students to school. I got a lift in the maths teacher’s Morris Minor and, given that I was hopeless at maths, the journeys were a bit tense. Pretty soon, the conversation in the playground and at “register time‘” was around allegedly overpaid bus drivers holding Londoners to ransom. I came home repeating some of this. My mother said, “You’ll have to put some money in the bucket.”
“What bucket?”
“There’ll be a bucket outside Harrow Weald Bus Garage, so that you can show support for them.”
“How do you know there’ll be a bucket?”
“There’s always a bucket. It’s for the strike fund. To support the people out on strike. They’re not getting paid.”
Once when I was quite young (a teenager, I think) I asked my father: what is a trade union? He said that he had once asked his Zeyde (Yiddish for grandfather) that same question. English was Zeyde’s second or even third language, with Yiddish and Polish being his first two languages. My father imitated him affectionately:
“Zeyde told me, ‘Voss is a union? A union is a box o’ matches. One match – you can break. Two matches – you can break. Three matches – you can break. But take a whole box o’ matches – you can’t break. That is voss is a union.’”
When my father’s Zeyde was talking about this, he was pulling it out of his past in the struggles for wages and equality for Polish Jewish workers in the 1880s and 90s.
I believe that the way we talk is formed through our social interactions using words and phrases developed over hundreds of years of millions more social interactions.
When we see ourselves as part of others, and others as part of us, then the idea of a union is a logical necessity.
Listen – really listen – to music
Trying to explain why we like listening to music is quite hard. You could almost say that the point of a good deal of music is that it expresses things that we can’t say in words. If we could express in words all that music does for us, there wouldn’t be much point in having music.
What I really like doing is getting to a place where, when listening to Van Morrison, I can’t say why I’m enjoying it. Philosophers have words for this feeling – words like “inexpressible”, “ineffable” and “sublime”.
For the sublime to happen, I find it’s a good idea for me to switch off the wordy stuff.
What I’ve taught myself to do is what I call “sitting in”. If I hear a tune, a voice, a band, a sound that catches my ear, I give myself the space to “sit in” with it. This means playing it over and over again. Quite often, for this to be that sublime moment, I will find that I can’t imitate it. I can’t sing it or whistle it, or play it on my harmonica. All I can do with it is to let it go into my mind and for my mind to feel around it as if I’m stroking a cat with my eyes shut.
Because some of Van Morrison’s songs are themselves mysterious, elliptical and suggestive rather than literal and obvious, there’s a mystique that feeds into something about Van the Man and his music that I find I can’t grasp. Interestingly, he has his own words for this: “the inarticulate speech of the heart” – which is both the title and one of the repeated choruses of one of his songs.
Understand death
We’ve been talking about good days, so what’s death got to do with it? Surely death is the end of all days, good or bad. Yes, but it’s my view that one way to have good days is to sort out in our minds what we think about death. I find that as and when I make peace with death, it gives me the strength to better appreciate my days.
As far as I understand life and death, I don’t see much difference between me and a dandelion or a butterfly. Reproduction produces us; we have various lifeforms; we die. I understand that, for some, this is a profoundly depressing thought. But can I turn that feeling on its head?
If there’s no afterlife, if there are no gods arranging things, if this is all we have, then there isn’t much point in being miserable. Further, we should try not to make other people miserable and, if anything, when we can, we should try to help make other people be not-miserable.
I find it easier to think of now, this day, this time here, as being the “all we have”, the time we have to get on and do whatever it is that we think is worth doing. Because, sure as anything, I couldn’t do it before I was born and I’m not going to be able to do it after I’ve died.
But what about the loved one who’s died? How could they have been so selfish to have not waited till we went first? Believe it or not, there were moments after my son Eddie died when I not only thought “it” was cruel that he died but also that “he” had been cruel to have died!
One of my main reasons for regret and sadness is that I feel cut off from conversations with him, about him. If someone dies, these come to a stop. You are stuck in the buffers and can’t go on having these conversations. Instead, the conversations become frozen, sometimes in places you wish they weren’t frozen.
One way round this is to have conversations with others who knew the person who’s gone. These can be hard. My son had a life of his own. He was nearly 19. He had several lives that were quite separate from each other: his last years at school; his time with the mates that he played sport with; his workmates in the theatre (he was a “crewman” in the West End); his girlfriend; and, of course, the life he had with me and the family. I have to admit with huge regret that I know very little about all the parts of his life apart from the one with the family.
For years, I haven’t done anything about it. Then, not long before writing this, I asked myself, “What became of Greg?” (not his real name). I remember Eddie talking about Greg as his best mate. And here we are, 25 years since Eddie died and I haven’t exchanged a single word with Greg. Or with any of his other friends.
What would you do? Would you get in touch with one or some of them? I decided to. I’m just beginning. I’ve started to hear bits and pieces about Eddie that I had no idea existed. I started to hear some things that have made me proud of him (even more proud than I was anyway!). In fact, meeting up with Greg for a couple of hours in a pub not far from where we sat with Eddie just over 25 years before was a good day! At times painful, but a good day all the same.
Another thought: whether someone is alive or dead, the past has gone. When I sit in a state of regret and loss about Eddie as a child, it can (if I let it) be a place only and purely of regret and loss. It’s as if I say to myself, “That funny moment when Eddie found a dead mouse and thought it was a gerbil is sad because Eddie isn’t here any more.” Why do I do that? Why do I spoil that funny moment by smothering it with Eddie’s death? After all, that moment is no more “gone” than the scenes with any of my other children or the scenes with my father or mother or brother. So I tell myself I shouldn’t taint these fun memories with Eddie with the fact that he’s died.
I can tell you, it’s taken some time to think that one through! So this is a way of pulling memories of Eddie into the good days. I can also say that thinking about this helps me think about what it means to die. I can live with the paradox that I think life is purposeless by keeping focus on this day today. A day in which I’ll have a go at doing something worthwhile.