Turning Pain Into Knowledge

Sometimes when I think back on various phrases of my life, it’s hard not to think of all the hurt.

The misunderstandings, the pain, the missed connections. The ways that I screwed up.

The residual frustration about all the ways that other people - weren’t able to be the people I wanted them to be, which by the way is not their fault!

All that time spent being annoyed about how hard it is when you "can’t get blood from a stone".

My focus was in the wrong place.

But here’s what the Word of the Year reminds me to do:

I am allowed to have my grief and my pain. And I can also look at all that agony and remember that it’s business school tuition.

Instead of a diploma, I can just frame the Word of the Year and put it on my wall. And look forward to the next one, because it will be unbelievably useful.

We all have our stuff. We’re all working on our stuff. It’s a process.

We let people have their own experience, and we don’t give unsolicited advice.


"Those who have knowledge, don't predict. Those who predict, don't have knowledge."
~~ Lao Tzu


Spent a lovely day with Charlie and Joseph on 13 April 2011. We caught a ferry from Manly to the city and Charlie who is not quite seven took this photo of the seagull landing near where we were sitting.

Turn The Page

I threw my phone books out the other day. For months they'd sat in a corner of my office, unopened and unused, victims of a world where, with a click of a mouse, I can get anyone's phone number, their educational history and a tour of their street.

Beyond its cockroach squishing properties, the phone book has outlived its usefulness. Yet parting with something as archaic and unwieldy as the telephone directory came with some unexpected nostalgia.

When compared with other anachronisms such as the typewriter or Polaroid camera, the space the phonebook occupies in my cumulative reference library of associations is limited. But as I dropped the volumes into the recycling bin, I felt a little of my life went with them.

It is difficult to comprehend a world without the phone book. How to forget the hours trying to find the number of a teenage crush. And what of those black-and-white scenes of detectives drinking coffee and spending all night calling every "Schultz" in town until the mystery blonde in the negligee picked up the receiver and whispered: "Be careful my husband might be listening". Does Sam Spade googling photos of someone's company fun run carry the same air?

A future without phone books is a radically unfamiliar world. Corrupt policemen will beat suspects with modems, and strongmen in sideshows will tear laptops in half. Interior designers will add "period" touches to the apartments of investment bankers by scattering copies of the Yellow Pages.

Every year the world and I grow a little more unfamiliar. No one sends postcards anymore. Wallets are being replaced by mobile phones with built-in credit cards.

Life before Twitter, cyber bullying or Paris Hilton had something to recommend it, if only that it didn't have any of them.

It was slower, knowledge was more precious for having been hard won, there was no glowing oracle to tell you every answer. If you wanted to find that forgotten high school love, you had to open a book and start turning, one page at a time.


"Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers."
~~ Charles W. Eliot, The Happy Life, 1896


My bookends

Different School of Thought

You have heard the saying "Ignorance is Bliss", well maybe there is merit in this school of thought.

Here are some prime examples:

I would be much happier not knowing that the saying, "Don't let the bed bugs bite" originates from the fact that there are thousands of dust mites living in my bed, eating my dead skin cells. If I were ignorant to this fact, I would be happier, and as such in a state of bliss.

Once a conjuring trick is explained it loses its magic.

The excitement of a game of football is in not knowing who is going to be the winner.

I think that there are some things out there, we know nothing about. That lack of knowledge allows us to sleep soundly at night.

Ignorant people don't have to worry and try to fix things themselves, instead they think that someone else is fixing the problem, or there is no problem.

Also if we do choose to solve the problem, it is the exciting part, NOT knowing the answer!

The government preaches ignorance, advertises it everywhere, and bombards us with propaganda, so that when we are happy in our ignorance, they can go about controlling the world without us worrying about what they are doing.

Maybe Ignorance, after all, is Bliss!


Postscript
Healingstones, a very wise and thought provoking blogger wrote this comment below which presents both sides of the argument VERY sustinctly.

"I agree that ignorance is bliss but there is something that goes alongside it: knowledge is power. Even though I hate politics intensely there is an argument for keeping clued up on what is going on in the world. Ignorance wasn't bliss with the recent sub-prime fiasco. (But then how on earth were we supposed to know when even some of the big financial institutions didn't twig!?)
On another level, ignorance can sometimes mean life - I have heard of people who have lived with cancer only to be 'diagnosed' and go swiftly down hill".



Chris (Joseph's father) and myself at Luna Park, Sydney, May 2009 having a ride on the Wild Mouse. It was much more blissful closing my eyes in certain sections of the ride.

Answers, Questions and maybe WISDOM!

My philosophy class resumed last week for another term, so I am feeling in a very philosophical mood......it will pass, but I will take advantage of it while I am here....or should that be whilst I am here?

ONE of the greatest gifts one generation can give to another is the knowledge gained from experience!

Wisdom is a rare commodity. There are a lot of very brilliant people, bright people, clever people, NOT so many people who are wise.

Wisdom isn't an answer, wisdom IS a question! I went to see a shrink once, I was bothered by things in my childhood and my youth.......And I was so disappointed that the shrink didn't have a big bag of answers! I came to be very grateful for it later, that what they have is a big bag of questions. We have the answers....And that is when I found that the answer is invariably in the question. We carry our own question around with us.......are you still with me!

I grew up feeling unloved - all around me were seemingly happy, blissful people and my question was WHY don't I feel like everyone else.

There is no answer. It's like your Mother saying "where have you been till this time of night". The question was in the answer. She didn't want you to tell her. The question WAS the answer......And thats where wisdom is: in the constant questioning of where you are......And when you stop wanting to know, you're dead......You're walking, but you're dead.

What do I live by? - one of the things I try to do is not to believe in too much.

What do I know that's absolutely, incontrovertibly true? - All I can say is that everything changes. Thats all I know with any degree of certainty! It's all going to change and flowing within change keeps us flexible.......And helps to develop a sense of humour about everything!

Gee I am glad I got that off my chest!!

In 2007 3 friends and myself travelled to the Northern Territory in Australia and visited Kings Canyon, I took dozens of photos but this one gave me a feeling of wonderment.

Please Don't Ask Me for More Detail!

SHOCK headline this week: six out of 10 of us don't understand carbon trading. Well, let me be the first to admit it: most of us don't know anything. We are children wandering around in an adult world. Really, you'd be shocked by what your fellow citizens don't know.

I'll go first. Then it can be your turn. I don't understand carbon trading. I'm fuzzy on the history of the conflict in the Middle East. And I have no ready explanation for the success of the band Coldplay.

I am also unable to pronounce the name of the new Russian president, am uncertain how to convert metres into feet.....some things, perhaps, are just beyond human comprehension.

Antigua - you might be interested - is a country in Africa, or quite possibly an island in the Mediterranean. The Battle of Pozieres was a very important battle during World War I or maybe World War II......(If you are having a dinner party at home play for time, try to distract them, say you are going to the loo and then look it up on Wikipedia.)

What's interesting is we are all staggered by each other's ignorance.

I love the way we're all so confident of our knowledge - right up until someone asks for a little detail.

I think back to my years of schooling and try to list all the facts of which I remain certain. It all comes down to this: Hitler was a vegetarian, an oxbow lake is something to do with a river. I'm also pretty sure that the way it gets colder as you go up a mountain is called the adiabatic lapse rate. I learnt this is year 9 and have been waiting for the chance to drop it into a conversation ever since.

Some knowledge seems to stick in my mind. Elvis Presley's stillborn twin brother was called Jesse. And Pete Best was the original drummer of the Beatles. These things - once learnt - can never be forgotten.

Yet other knowledge seems to visit briefly and then leave. For several weeks now I've been listening to a series of CD's by Bruce Lipton on the Biology of Belief - how our beliefs shape our health and destiny. I understand completely what the author is on about. I am with him sentence by sentence, right up until the moment I turn off the CD. I then find - one second later! - that I can remember nothing at all. Asked to repeat a single insight from the CD, I would babble like a baby.

And so I make an effort - reading The Herald, watching the news, listening to the PM program on the radio - and still the questions crowd in. So what exactly was the nature of the Palestinian nation before the formation of Israel? Why were negotiations with the IRA suddenly successful?

Should we feel embarrassment about these gaps in our knowledge? I take comfort from the way the experts themselves seem to know nothing. Consider the sharemarket and how all the commentators are so skilled at explaining, with absolute certainty, the inevitability of every move - but only after it has happened. In terms of prediction, their record is worse than that achieved by a deranged man with a sharemarket table and a pin.

So there you have it, is this phenomenon happening to anyone else out there!

Here is a photo I took in Kenya in 2006......they say elephants never forget!