Walking Slowly

I have started to practice walking slowly.

As a little boy, around fifty years ago now, I decided that there was something virtuous about walking quickly. I suspect that this is a common phenomenon among little boys who go walking with their fathers; fathers have longer legs and just cover the distance faster. And therefore, because little boys look up to their fathers and want to be just like them, they decide that it must be good to walk quickly.

At any rate that’s the way it happened with me. Walking was primarily a way from getting from A to B, and it was obviously advantageous to do so as quickly as possible.

As an adult, many years later, I discovered another use for walking; exercise. In a society in which we have become increasingly conscious of things like cardiovascular performance, body-fat ratio, the potential health dangers of obesity, overeating, and a too sedentary life-style, keeping physically fit has taken on many of the characteristics of a religious proscription. To admit, as I do, that I find every kind of sport (personally practiced – being a spectator is something quite different) supremely boring is comparable in many circles to someone confessing in medieval Spain that they were a Jewish atheist with an interest in witchcraft.

Walking then was something I saw as a possibility to combine the necessary with the useful. If I did have to walk somewhere, then the thing was to do it as quickly as possible; get the old circulation working, push the heart-rate up, get the muscles flexing and bunching, burn up some of those endless extra calories which would otherwise (in a lipid form) congeal around the waist-line or (more dangerously) within the artery walls.

Necessary. Useful. But never really pleasurable. The idea of “going for a walk,” something millions of people unselfconsciously accept as a normal form of recreation has never really appealed to me. I have always tended to see the time needed to get from A to B as a period to be practically and rationally managed in order to reduce it to the minimum possible. Which meant that if I was going to walk anywhere I planned the time necessary on the basis of a brisk – a very brisk – walk.

Last April I moved house. It was a project which was quite significant for me, in all sorts of ways, most of which I won’t go into here – not now anyway. But one aspect of my move was that my new flat was much more central than my old one. And as the summer bloomed and I finally started to feel settled in, I made a resolution; with butcher, baker, supermarket and pharmacy all just a few hundred yards away, and my place of work only a fifteen minute walk distant, I would consciously strive to walk when I could – thus ensuring a minimum of exercise and even massaging my liberal light-green conscience about the size of my carbon footprint.

Life was good, and the future was bright, bright. Only by the end of August I was forced to the realisation that I had slowly, unknowingly been slipping ever deeper into a condition which I knew all too well. Knew intimately and still not recognised in its insidious approach, even as it dug its talons deep into my soul.

I have written about depression on this blog before, a number of times, and I don’t want to go into too many details about it; it happened, it was bad, I’m slowly coming out of it again. The frightening thing about this episode was that there was no real reason for it – everything was okay, I had the feeling that I was in control of my life in a way which I hadn’t been for years. In retrospect I was able to identify certain factors which had possibly (probably?) triggered it, but I have had to face up to the unpleasant likelihood that this is a condition to which I am simply prone. I have to accept that it may happen again, and that there is little I can do to prepare for it, except practise a certain kind of relaxed watchfulness so that I am not quite as blindsided as I was this time.

Indeed, in writing this it strikes me that the roots of this last episode may be even farther in the past than I have realised up to now. It is well over a year since one of my creative wellsprings started to dry up – by this I mean my inclination to write. My essays here became more seldom, and harder to write. If I had had to explain it last April or May, I would have simply said that it was due to the increased busy-ness and heightened stress involved in moving house, a few months later, when I finally accepted that I was at the bottom of a very deep pit, the idea of writing was simply unthinkable. If this is really the case, then the fact that you are reading this is a sign that I am well on my way back to the light (though I’ll make no promises about how long it will take for me to post the next essay!).

But even at the worst of the depression in September I still walked. On the occasions when I had to leave the flat, something I found hard to do, I marched forth, desperately striding to an appointment or to the supermarket to buy groceries.

And then one day, returning from a session with my therapist (seven and a half minutes brisk walk away), I realised something. There was no reason to hurry. I had nothing planned for the rest of the day. It didn’t matter a fucking toss whether my walk home took a few minutes longer. It was a beautiful autumn afternoon and the more my pace slowed, the more I found myself appreciating it. In a seeming inversion of the logic to which I had chained myself, the more leisurely I walked, the more time seemed available to me. And the more time there was available, the more my racing thoughts slowed, my mind moving into a freer, more relaxed space, a space which it had so desperately longed for and needed.

It was not a miraculous, spontaneous healing, that would be a drastic exaggeration. It was, rather, an intuition, an inkling, a brief glimpse of a reality different to the negative, worried, obsessively and futilely circling inner world in which I was captured and held.

Like most such inklings, this one was quickly gone. I completed my short journey home (walking slowly) and then forgot the experience. But the next time I was returning from a therapy appointment I remembered it once more, and once more I slowed down. I remember consciously deciding to generally walk more slowly when I was returning home from therapy.

Initially, my thinking was still typically purpose driven. I found myself formulating the explanation that I was giving myself this extra time afforded by walking more slowly to reflect on what had happened during the hour of psychoanalysis, what insights I had achieved, how the whole process was progressing. An opportunity to increase the value of the session, to retrospectively continue to mine the depths just plumbed. For I am, indeed, a typical child of my time and culture, formed by and embedded in a world obsessed with development, with efficiency, with optimizing, doing things better, and faster, and more comprehensively, and (usually presented as the most important of all) more economically.

"Sometimes I sits and thinks; and then again I just sits."

Only, I found myself gradually realising, it wasn’t true. The therapy session may have been very productive, I may have found myself suddenly exploring a whole new area of my psyche, or achieving a wonderful new insight about the way I tick, but I wasn’t using the more “relaxed” state of consciousness I was achieving by slowing down on the way home to reflect on and deepen the therapeutic experience I had just gone through. Instead, I was using it to do … nothing. Oh, I might start thinking about something, but, I realised, my thoughts usually petered out, spreading out and thinning before vanishing into emptiness like the fractal silhouettes of the leafless winter trees I found my wandering gaze idly and momentarily focussing on before moving on.

I have started to expand the experiment. I no longer just walk slowly when I’m coming home from therapy; I now try to do it whenever I’m walking somewhere without a definite time that I have to be at my destination. Which means, for example, that I continue to walk briskly to work but when I walk home from work I do it slowly.

I usually work the night shift, which means that my journey home takes place around 7.30 in the morning. It’s an interesting time to be on the move if you have the leisure to do it slowly in a relaxed way. There’s a grammar school on my street, and a primary school at the end of it (and German schools generally begin their day at around 8.00 a.m.) so there are lots of kids underway, the small ones lugging bags on their backs nearly as heavy as themselves, most of the older ones in groups practising and living the all-important and ever-demanding teenage attitude of cool. A splash of headlights, brake-lights and rushed activity in front of the schools as hordes of parents fulfil that basic, most essential parental duty, being a taxi-driver for their offspring, the cars backing up behind halting school-buses. Adults on their way to work, moving determinedly, their faces generally closed and concentrated. At this time of year it’s dark when I begin my way; by the time I get home the sky has lightened and the day has come. And I’ve found myself noticing and rejoicing in the fact that, as the planet precesses on its cosmic path deeper into 2014, the dawn begins a few minutes earlier from day to day.

It still doesn’t come naturally to me; this strange exercise of walking slowly. The habits and attitudes of a lifetime are deep, and I often catch myself unnecessarily striding forward and have to remind myself to slow down. But maybe, for me, walking slowly is something like playing the piano or learning to drive a car; something I have to practice quite a bit before it starts to come easily or naturally.

It’s a mild January afternoon as I finish writing this – the sun breaks out frequently from behind a scattered cloud cover.

I think I’ll go for a walk.


There were lots of musical options for this topic; Dionne Warwick, "Walk on by," Fats Domino, "I'm walking," Katrina and the Waves, "Walking on sunshine," etc. In the end, it had to be Lou ...

Images sourced from:
 http://www.pittsburghlegalbacktalk.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/FestinaLenteCorrect.jpg 
 http://johnesimpson.com/blog/2012/02/sitting-silent-open-minded/ This quotation is most often - incorrectly - attributed to the baseball player Satchel Paige. Some say its author was the great philosopher, Winnie the Pooh (sadly it isn't, though it suits Pooh). In fact, the first use of it seems to have been in this Punch cartoon, over a hundred years ago.

Human Dignity; My Friend Jimmy

For all of my working life in nursing – over twenty years now – I’ve been involved, in one way or another, with the basic limits, the boundaries of life. Either in geriatric care (accompanying people who are coming to the end of their life’s journey), or with people suffering from such serious, complex, debilitating and restricting illness that their continued survival would rapidly be impossible without the comprehensive, continuous support of professional health workers (in my case, people in Persistent Vegetative States). Even in the little group of five children with whom I currently work, three are in a PVS.

It is an area where some very fundamental questions arise. What’s the basic point of life? What is tolerable, intolerable? Where do we draw the line, or can we draw any lines at all? When is a life not worth living any longer? What does “basic human dignity” mean?

Hard questions, questions for which I am ever more unwilling to offer comprehensive answers, or even any answer whatsoever. There are those who find such things in faith, or dogmas derived from faith (though most believers who actually work in this area – in my experience – aren’t big into dogmas), but many of us are not believers, or don’t find our motivation to continue actually doing this work in any kind of religious faith.

I suppose one of the basic things which keeps us at it (apart from the fact that we know how to do it and we need to earn a living) is the very practical experience that this is work which has to be done; done now, done immediately, done continuously. I think it is this daily experience which leads most of those of us who do this kind of thing to a reaction of genuine bewilderment when others praise us for it, you know, “I really admire you for the work you do…” that kind of thing. There is, I suppose, a kind of deep satisfaction in doing the kind of work which you know (at some level) makes a literal life-or-death difference every day, every hour you’re doing it. It certainly beats processing piles of paper or data (something I once did for a year, and which nearly drove me batshit crazy), even if the ultimate results of being a part of such a complex process actually means that practical things happen somewhere.

Nonetheless, we do often find these deeper questions coming up in the course of our daily work. It’s inevitable in this kind of job. And, as I’ve already mentioned, there aren’t any easy answers. Sometimes, faced with someone who seems to be suffering a lot and, at the same time, doesn’t seem to be able to just die, there are no good answers at all. You learn to cultivate a kind of staid attitude of compassionate resignation; you do the best you can, the best possible for the person you’re looking after and try to leave the questions aside. Because, honestly, they don’t help.

No, I often don’t know any answers. What I do know are some stories, one of which I’d like to tell now.

Jimmy was the son of immigrants to Germany from a Mediterranean country. They had left their homeland as young adults over forty years ago, with little education or training, no knowledge of the German language, and very limited concrete knowledge of the kind of life they were going to lead. All they had – like millions of other migrants – was the hope that life elsewhere would offer them and their children more possibilities than a continued existence in the place of their birth.

They quickly found somewhere to live, and jobs to do. There was plenty of work available, even for people without high levels of training and very rudimentary language skills. And, though the work was hard and often monotonous, the money was good and the standard of living (material things like electricity and washing machines and motor cars, and other stuff like health care) almost immediately available to them was far beyond what they could have attained in the old country. Certainly they were homesick, and getting by in a foreign country was often stressful, but they felt sure that their decision had been the right one. If nothing else, their children would have opportunities which would have been impossible at home. And they themselves could dream of moving back home when they retired, the modest amount necessary to build a really comfortable house in their home village saved and a good German pension to give them security in their old age.

They soon had a daughter, but she died shortly after childbirth. And then Jimmy came along. It was a difficult birth and the doctors told the mother that there would be no further children. But Jimmy was a healthy and happy baby and grew up to be a healthy and happy boy.

He became the repository of all his parents’ love, and all of their hopes and expectations. And he lived up to all of these splendidly. He was a lively, fun-loving kid, bright as a button at school, helpful at home, popular in the neighbourhood. He became an altar-boy and learned to play the piano. After finishing secondary school with very good grades, he went back to his home country for a year to do the mandatory military service demanded of all young citizens, even those born and living abroad. When he came back to Germany, he could have gone to university, but elected instead to train as a bank-official. It meant he could continue living at home and it offered him the kind of career his parents could never have hoped for. While Jimmy could have aimed higher, he was quite content with the choice he had made and the life which was unfolding for him.

He had saved some extra money from summer-jobs he had done during his last years at school, and his parents topped up those savings and bought him a car for his twenty-first birthday. And, a few months later, driving to a placement in a branch of the bank which was training him, a few miles from his home town, on a cold January morning, Jimmy hit a patch of ice in a curve on the road and collided with a tree.

The tree won.

The car wasn’t the newest, which meant in January 1997 that it wasn’t equipped with airbags. And, if truth be told, Jimmy was probably travelling a bit faster than was wise when he hit that ice – he was, after all, young and didn’t have all that much driving experience. At any rate, when they pulled him from the wreck he had broken fourteen different bones and had a very serious skull fracture.

For months he wasn’t expected to survive. But his condition slowly stabilised, he came off most of the machines and started to heal. The problem was that skull fracture; Jimmy had very serious brain damage which was irreversible. But he had regained consciousness, and that was both the wonder and the tragedy.

Apart from leaving him almost completely paralysed, the brain damage had wiped out large parts of his rational capacities. It’s hard to really describe his situation to those who do not know him. In a vastly simplified sense, he is frozen at a mental age around equivalent to that of a six-month-old baby. Speech is beyond him, though he is able to understand some of what is said to him. He has a generally friendly disposition, though he is inclined to be a bit reserved with strangers – for he is able to recognise people he knows well. He can shout, or rather, howl, which is something he does continually when he is in discomfort or pain, a situation in which he becomes quite agitated. This happens regularly when he is being washed, cleaned up, or dressed, for all of these operations are both stressful and painful for him. Jimmy’s paralysis is that of the spastic variety, one with an enormously increased muscle tone. This means, for example, that his left forearm has – in the course of the years – completely pulled up flush with his upper arm, so that it takes all the strength of an adult to pull it far enough back to wash it, and check for irritation in the crook of the arm, something which frequently occurs as a result of skin chafing on skin and which then has to be treated. Something Jimmy does not enjoy. Or that his fingers are hopelessly twisted around each other.

As I mentioned, describing his mental state as that of a baby is only a first approximation, for it is no more accurate to describe people with traumatic brain injury as children, than it is to use the same comparison for people suffering from Alzheimer’s. There are superficial, almost coincidental similarities with babies (such as incontinence or linguistic inability), but the basic situation is quite different. And Jimmy has retained some capabilities which are far beyond those of a six-month-old.

Chief among these is a sense of humour. In one sense it has become a little cruder than it used to be – or it may be that some adult limiting conventions have just been burned away. At any rate, Jimmy loves slapstick, the broader the better. Somebody stubbing their toe and then cursing loudly in annoyance will send him into peals of laughter. Abbott and Costello or Laurel and Hardy would be right up his street, but – for some strange reason – Jimmy doesn’t seem able to process TV pictures. The sound alone of somebody cussing is something he finds amusing and the fouler the language the better, as far as he’s concerned. I’ve often driven him into paroxysms of laughter (and distracted him from the most uncomfortable aspects of what I was doing) while caring for him just by making farting noises.

The marvellous thing about Jimmy’s sense of humour is that it’s completely honest, and absolutely total. And it is a gift which he is capable of putting to work in a delightfully mischievous manner. Imagine a group of people sitting around a table, engaged in a serious discussion. Then imagine that Jimmy is there too. This can happen, for he is often sitting in the day-room of the ward where he lives during a staff meeting. Sometimes he simply appears thoughtful, lost in his own special world. But sometimes he feels like establishing communication and he starts looking around at the group, trying to catch someone’s eye. Beware – for if you look at him you’re lost!

When he gains eye-contact with you, he grins. Almost instinctively, you smile back. That’s all the encouragement he needs, indeed, even if you don’t respond, catching your gaze is usually all he needs. He starts to chuckle and this chuckling quickly develops into hearty laughter. Trying to hush him only makes it worse, as he finds such attempts hilarious.

It really doesn’t matter what you do anyway, because Jimmy’s laughter has another killer characteristic. It is irresistibly infectious. There is something so honest, so complete, so true about his laugh that it conquers all attempts to gainsay it. Before you know it, you are laughing too, in the way that you found yourself uncontrollably laughing at something you found funny when you were a child. And, just like it used to happen when you were a child, you soon find everyone in the group trying unsuccessfully to control that urge to laugh, to laugh until your belly hurts and tears are running down your cheeks.

Jimmy has done it again. Wrecking all the pretentions of serious adults at a meeting, he has given them – us – all the priceless gift of joy, taking us beyond the mundane concerns of our reality into a realm of simply revelling in the sheer inexplicable fun of just being alive.

When I hear people discussing situations in which they imagine it would no longer be worth living, in which they feel they would rather be dead, I often find myself thinking of my friend (for this is the best word I can use to describe how I feel about my relationship to him), Jimmy. He is confined to a wheelchair, is incapable of almost every voluntary movement, drools and dribbles, has to be fed through a tube, would lie in his own piss and shit if he were not cleaned up regularly. Is his human dignity worth any less than mine – or yours – because of all this, and because he has been so severely mentally damaged? Is his joy worth less than that of a physicist discovering a new sub-atomic particle, or of a musician in that moment of performance when everything gels, or that of lovers during a shared orgasm?

Despite the conventional tragedy of his story, Jimmy is possibly the happiest person I know. The price he has paid for it in his life is, seen in a conventional way, unacceptably high – one none of us would willingly pay. The loss of the Jimmy who was, all that potential, the life destroyed the moment his car hit that tree, is, of course, heartbreaking. Yet does that detract in any way from the value of his happiness as he is today; make it somehow worth less than those all too seldom and fleeting moments of unalloyed joy the rest of us have to get by with?

I don’t have any answers to questions like that. But then, when I see Jimmy, I don’t need them.

Pictures retrieved from:

http://wallpoper.com/images/00/32/45/90/pink-floyd_00324590.jpg

http://www.medexassist.com/images/Odyssey/pc/fall-08/car-crash.jpg

http://jameswoodward.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/laughter1262542393.jpg

Little Old Lady

The reason I was at the telephone shop is one of those complicated modern stories of the science-fiction world in which we live, which would have been incomprehensible to all of us twenty years ago – and in the end, rather boring for anyone else to read, or even for me to tell. It involved a change of internet and telephone provider, a defective router, the impossibility of sorting anything out over the telephone with a call-centre, the (already mentioned) defective router being sent back by mail and then disappearing somewhere in the bowels of the provider, another router … I won’t go into any more details; those of you who’ve been unfortunate enough to be in that awful situation when your (in our weird, wonderful and complex global village) absolutely essential telecommunications configuration suddenly gets majorly fucked up will know how I was feeling. The fact that this all happened last summer when I was also dealing with personal problems like burn-out and depression just added the icing to the cake.

In fact, I was lucky. I’d managed to stick to my guns, not lose my temper too badly, have all the relevant bits of paper together, note the names of the various people with whom I’d spoken at the call-centre, etc., and finally managed to get it all sorted out. Today was the last chapter; I was bringing an unopened package with a new router I’d received via DHL to the telephone shop to hand in there and get the € 129 in cash back which I had at one stage in the sorry story shelled out there so that I wouldn’t have to spend weeks cut off from the internet – one weird phase in this awful story involved a miraculous multiplication of routers.

Going into the shop, in which I had spent many frustrating hours over the previous month, I was glad to see that Gerry, the assistant manager with whom I’d done most of my negotiating during that time, was on duty behind the counter (so that I wouldn’t have to start telling my complicated story from the beginning to yet another person) and that there was only one customer ahead of me. Great, I thought, five minutes, maximum ten, and I’m out of here … with my money. End of story. Game over.

Just one customer ahead of me. A little old lady, wearing a hat and a shabby, unprepossessing coat, one of those hundreds of people you hustle past on the street every day without even registering them. But there was something about her, a combination of subliminal signals which set alarm bells ringing with me. This, I realised, could take a little longer than five minutes.

“… and Frau Müller was supposed to ring me back about a new appointment with the doctor and then she didn’t and then I tried to phone her and that’s when I realised that the phone wasn’t working …”

“But you mentioned that you’d had a letter from the telephone company before that, explaining that you’d been cut off …”

“Yes, but Frau Müller had fixed that. A man was supposed to come yesterday morning and reconnect me.”

“And even after he was there, the telephone still didn’t work?”

“Oh, but he wasn’t there. Or maybe he was. You see, I wasn’t there. I had an appointment …”

“But, Frau Schmitz, if you’re not at home, the man can’t get in to reconnect you!”

I sighed inwardly. This was probably going to take quite a while. My initial suspicions had been confirmed by the mention of Frau Müller. It had been the pale, oddly emotionless face and the slight tremor in the hands that had first set my alarm bells ringing – typical symptoms of extra-pyramidal side-effects of neuroleptics (antipsychotic medication). I happened to know that a Frau Müller worked as a social worker in the local psychiatric hospital, her speciality is the support of patients who are being released, helping them to re-establish themselves in “normal” life. This disconnection probably had a background of unpaid bills – Frau Müller had already achieved a lot if she’d managed to get things sorted out to the extent where the phone company were prepared to reconnect. And then Frau Schmitz hadn’t realised how important it was for her to be at home when the technician arrived to reset her telephone. Shit!

“I had a letter from the phone company,” Frau Schmitz went on. “Maybe I’ve got it here somewhere …”

She started to rummage through her handbag.

“I thought I’d brought it with me, but I can’t seem to find it …”

“It doesn’t really matter, Frau Schmitz, it’s Saturday afternoon now and I won’t be able to reach the technical staff until Monday. And then a new appointment will have to be made. There may be extra costs involved …”

“Things will be very difficult without the phone. There are a lot of things I have to do …”

I felt awkward. Should I intervene? This was really none of my business. Moreover, what I felt about the whole situation here was a rapidly reached personal judgement, based on nothing more than shrewd observation and unfounded surmise. It would mean me having to tickle the role of Frau Müller out of Frau Schmitz, possibly outing her as someone with mental health issues in the process. It would all be dreadfully complicated and would probably result in nothing more than me getting Frau Schmitz’s back up, embarrassing her and pissing off the assistant manager in the process, if he got the feeling that I was just playing the interfering busybody. I decided to keep my mouth shut.

Gerry was now following another track and had recommended that Frau Schmitz might buy a mobile phone. She didn’t seem completely opposed to the idea and admitted that she had had some experience with the devices in the past.

“It was so much easier when my poor husband was alive. He used to take care of matters like these. I find it all so difficult …”

Statue of Eleanor Rigby in Liverpool

I could see that Gerry was somewhat uncomfortable. My experience over the previous week had shown me that the basic function of the telephone shop was not to deal with customers’ complaints but rather to sell telephones and, above all, contracts, so that the company could earn certain money, month after month. Such direct customer-company interfaces are becoming rarer; the telephone service providers would like their customers to do everything possible on-line – paying people to do things that software can do is not good business. If problems arise, that’s what hotlines and call-centres are for. The jobs of the people in the telephone shop are dependent on the turnover they manage to achieve and dealing with complaints, trying to give decent advice, etc., all these things take away from the time available to actually sell what they’re suppose to be selling. As it is, only the two largest telecommunications firms in Germany still have direct retail outlets – all the others work through franchisers operating on commission, and most of these haven’t a clue about the real pros and cons of what they’re selling. They’re certainly not interested in the likes of Frau Schmitz who knows nothing about the internet and isn’t interested in a smart-phone, flat-rate downloads or how many “free” text-messages per month a particular package will give her.

But Gerry is basically a decent bloke. He had actually spent around an hour around ten days earlier trying to find out just what had gone wrong with my contract before admitting that he – a professional – wasn’t really able to get any farther than I could on the phone to the call-centre. But he’d stuck at it and after a further thirty minutes had managed to cast some light on my particular situation and even work out a somewhat unorthodox but acceptable solution with me. The last phase of which I was now still waiting to complete.

So he selected the cheapest, simplest mobile phone the company had on offer and started to explain its workings to Frau Schmitz.

“Do I have to put in some sort of number when I want to use it? I don’t like that, I have trouble remembering it and the last time, after I got it wrong three times, I couldn’t use the phone at all – it was broken, or something …”

Gerry assured her that he could take the requirement to enter a PIN out. He asked her for her bank details. In Germany everyone has a bank account and he told her that the easiest way to keep the phone topped-up was to allow the phone company to debit directly from her account. It was cheaper than having to top up with cash as well. Frau Schmitz dived once more into the depths of her handbag.

“I hope I have my bank card with me. I know I’m supposed to take it with me but I often forget …”

Prolonged searching failed to produce her bank card or even some sort of letter which had her account number on it.

“It doesn’t really matter,” said Gerry. “We can arrange it to work with cash as well. But I’ll still need your identity card; we have to note the identity of everyone we sell a mobile phone to …”

At this stage, Frau Schmitz had found three purses and a somewhat larger wallet in her handbag. All of them were on the counter in front of her and closer scrutiny of the contents of each managed to produce her identity card and enough cash to pay for the whole thing. Gerry entered the details from her ID card into his terminal and spent another ten minutes or so patiently explaining the basic details of the phone to her, writing down her number for her so that she could give it to others, having ascertained that text messaging was (and would most probably remain) a mysterious world which she did not want to enter.

Finally, she packed all her bits and pieces, including her new mobile, back into her handbag, thanked Gerry profusely for his help and left the shop …

I’ve found myself thinking of her – and the many others like her – occasionally since. People who find surviving and coping in our modern, high-tech, rapidly changing society a difficult challenge. Forty-six years after the Beatles released the song, Eleanor Rigby is alive and (still not very) well.

Pictures retrieved from

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhX4-GZ8gg-xwaaOOlqWKRKcGdSZPMreu6GfUG4t51y1ssVKUBbxehLijavJ-oCe-rX7Nz_tziQl69MBMICkCmV63UTTCnfo_0ls55dAbK5lwnEK3b_KBfJj8EQKQUg9iZpM44EBB-96I0V/s1600/old+lady.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EleanorRigbyStatue.jpg

Burnout II: Getting Back on the Horse

Over a month ago I published a pretty personal post here about the unpleasant experience of going through burnout and the practical measures I was undertaking to deal with it. As a number of things have happened since, I thought it was time to write an update.

After six and a half weeks on sick leave, I went back to work last Monday. It wasn’t an easy decision to make. The enforced pause certainly helped me to clear my head – to an extent, at least – but the renewal of energy, a “recharging of the batteries” which I had hoped for, didn’t seem to be happening. I spent much of the time sitting at home, reading a lot and the normal, unthinking energy which was available to me for so many years for doing all the myriad things from housework, to visiting friends, to managing all the basic affairs of everyday life, to writing didn’t really kick in. Oh, I did manage to do the most necessary things and even a number of other things which weren’t strictly necessary but everything was still shaded with a heavy patina of effort; the old lightness which I had realised I had lost and the loss of which had so shocked and pained me didn’t appreciably return.

Very well, I thought to myself, taking time out hasn’t been the panacea I had hoped it would be. Panaceas rarely are all they are cracked up to be anyway; cure-all nostrums are usually the province of snake-oil salesmen and the treatment of suffering in something as complex as the human psyche is also likely to be complex – a process involving various elements in dynamic relationship with each other and needing time and space to develop. I had started taking medication, I’d begun a process of therapy which will (if all goes well and my health insurance can be given the proper signals to get them to finance it) grow into a longer phase of classical psychoanalysis, I had discussed my situation with professionals, family and friends and had productive talks with my employers concerning certain negative aspects of my concrete work situation. Now the time had come to take the next step, to climb back on the horse from which I had fallen.

And so – not without a large dose of trepidation – I went back to work. One of the changes I had negotiated with my employers was that I will, for the foreseeable future, be exclusively assigned to work in the new project we are developing; a middle-term residential group for the care of very sick children (sometimes accompanied by their mothers), who are in need of continual, often high-tech medical support in order to continue their healing process, or just to go on living. At the moment, the group is composed of four children (aged between six months and eleven years) and two adults (who are only there temporarily, these places to be ultimately available to children as well) in temporary, provisional accommodation. Permanent, custom-built quarters are presently being completed and we will be moving in there before the end of the year.

Six patients all in need of extensive, complex, permanent, time-consuming intensive care, with two nurses always on duty; there is plenty to do. The first twelve-hour shift saw me exhausted at the end but it was a good kind of exhaustion – that kind of tiredness which comes from having worked hard doing tasks which offer a sense of immediate value and worth. In the course of the week I found myself quickly adjusting to the physical demands of the job. And I realised that the enforced pause had, in fact, done more for me than I had thought. I found myself better able to cope with the various time-consuming idiocies enforced on anyone working in any of the over-developed, over-regulated, under-staffed, under-paid, misfinanced lunatic complexities which are a characteristic of health-systems all over the world. The senseless bureaucratic and administrative hurdles which independently uncontrollably burgeon in any system beyond a particular level of complexity, which would have had me seething with frustration a few months ago (this itself a symptom of the fact that I had gone way beyond my own tolerance levels), I could now accept with a lot more serenity as part of the inevitable Catch 22 reality in which all of us in our mad modern society are more or less caught.

I am not cured – this will be a long journey, and relative health and sickness are always just a snapshot of an instant in the constant complex dynamic interactive process which is life anyway. But I find myself seeing things more positively and see grounds for hope that my basic levels of essential energy will increase in the doings of things rather than waiting for them to grow so that I can do things.

I decided to be basically open with my colleagues (without going too much into details) about the reason for my absence. I received unexpected support for this during the week. The manager/trainer of one of the most prestigious Bundesliga soccer teams, Schalke 04, Ralf Rangnick, resigned his position last Thursday with immediate effect. The reason he gave was the spectacular, honest admission that he was suffering from an exhaustion and burnout syndrome. While, as with most news items in our high-speed, media-driven world, it will be a seven-day wonder, such public announcements do help the process of bringing various manifestations of mental suffering and illness into the realm of more serious open discussion and further the process of dismantling taboos, clichés, speechlessness and misunderstandings about such issues which are widespread in our societies.

Returning to work, I discovered that others had very different difficulties to deal with. I have written about Jenny a number of times here before. To recapitulate: Jenny is a three-year old girl, who is deaf and dumb, suffers from a partial facial paralysis, a dangerous weakness of her respiratory musculature, an inability to swallow and some balance and coordination disturbances. As a result, she has a tracheotomy tube in her throat and spends long periods daily on a respirator. She is also very intelligent and extremely lively.

Complicated gene tests have confirmed a couple of weeks ago that Jenny suffers from something called Brown-Vialetto-Van Laere syndrome. This, of course, means nothing to her, but it tells us that her prognosis is very bad as the general course of the illness is progressive.

Jenny was dealing with two much more urgent problems. A month ago, my colleague Jan, who was the member of our team who had the deepest relationship of us all with her (in a very real sense, a replacement father-figure), suddenly and completely unexpectedly died in his sleep. He was two years older than me. At exactly the same time, Jenny contracted a very serious case of pneumonia, which necessitated a stay in the Intensive Care Unit in our local hospital. Given the fact that she is living with a hole in her windpipe where nature never intended that a hole should be, this is the kind of thing which can happen; it almost certainly won’t be the last time. When she returned, it had to be explained to her that Jan would never be coming back.

She has understood that and – we think – she has accepted, according to her own categories, that he has not abandoned her. But she misses him and suffers from his absence.

She greeted me like a long lost friend (which, I suppose, I was to her) and seems to have transferred some of her fixation with Jan to me. She stuck to me like a burr all week long, appointing herself my assistant nurse and accompanying me when I went to the other children to take care of them. This has been made somewhat more complicated by the fact that she needs extra oxygen all the time at the moment, so that I spent a lot of time lugging her oxygen tank with me.

For the events of the past weeks have weakened her. After a maximum of four hours, the effort of breathing independently has so exhausted her that she has to be put on the respirator for a couple of hours. Her continence – which she had achieved shortly before the illness commenced nearly a year ago, lost then and won back again in the past six months – has taken a hit. This annoys and embarrasses her, but she’s got enough determination to get it back once more. And she retains the capability to put all of her intelligence and creativity into continually working on marvellously extensive and sophisticated communication, despite her deafness and lack of speech.

Given her confirmed diagnosis, we are haunted by the dark suspicion that she may have already seen her physical zenith. Perhaps. But we shouldn’t write our prognoses without figuring in Jenny’s determination and stubbornness. They are part of a complex, fascinating personality which makes her occasionally amazingly frustrating but more often supremely rewarding to care for – sometimes simultaneously!

Engaging with Jenny has, at any rate, done me good. It is an intense, positively strenuous relationship which, in the way which children determine, takes place primarily on the emotional level of the ever emerging now. A condition which leaves very little room for depression. And for all that I am deeply thankful to my young friend. Having climbed back up on that horse, I sense that I am not alone; Jenny is there too, sitting in front of me.

Though the song seemed appropriate to me anyway, the fact that David Coverdale celebrated his sixtieth birthday this week makes it even more so.

Pictures retrieved from:

http://highchaparralnewsletter.com/Archives/Images/MountHorse.jpg

http://lanemetalworks.com/cowboy%20and%20girl%20on%20horse%20circle.jpg

Where The Wild Things Are

"Boys and girls may have to shield their parents from this book. Parents are very easily scared."

Slate Magazine

Maurice Sendak published his children’s book Where the Wild Things Are in 1963 and the book quickly became a classic. The book tells the story of Max, the little boy who misbehaves, is sent to bed without supper and makes a magical journey from his room to the island where the Wild Things live, before eventually returning home to discover that his supper is, in fact, waiting for him … still warm.

Forty-eight pages, mostly wonderful pictures - the written story contains only twelve sentences in all – and a tale which has captivated millions of three to seven year olds since it was first published. My daughters were fascinated by the story when they were small and my grandson, the four-year-old representative of a new generation, loves it too.

One of Sendak’s great strengths is that he deals with themes which are very real for small children; in this case, the consequences of misbehaviour and the fears which arise when you are alone and those you love (and who love you) aren’t available for comfort and security – the monsters who lurk in the dark. His treatment of these subjects means that the story is immediately accessible to small children – he is describing their actual world and, by naming and pictorially describing things openly, giving them mechanisms to help them cope with them.

Many of Sendak’s books, including Where the Wild Things Are, have been criticised for dealing with themes which are not suitable for small children. In the Night Kitchen (1970), which features a little boy prancing around naked, is still challenged and even banned in a number of public libraries in the United States. The critics, in my view, simply miss the point; children live full lives in our societies, are confronted with all sorts of things we might not wish them to be confronted with and, by refusing to discuss issues with them and give them channels to help them approach difficult themes and develop healthy strategies for dealing with them, we are not doing them any favours. On the other hand, to be completely fair, Sendak has generally reacted very sensitively to criticism and has, in some cases, exaggerated the extent and amount of opposition his books have in fact encountered – his comments on Bruno Bettelheim, regarding Where the Wild Things Are are one example of this. 

It was of course inevitable that the idea of filming such a popular classic should quickly come up. In the early eighties, Disney did some serious work on the idea but in the end it came to nothing and Sendak’s classic was spared the kiss of kitch which would have inevitably accompanied the project – though, to be fair, the Disney tendency to over-sweeten the pudding has never bothered children. Instead Universal Studios, in cooperation with Tom Hanks’ production company, Playtone, gave the project to director Spike Jonze, who, in close cooperation with Sendak, finished the film for release two years ago.

A week or so ago, my grandson was visiting me for a couple of days and we stopped by at our local electrical market. Looking over the DVDs on sale, I spotted Where the Wild Things Are and he agreed enthusiastically to my suggestion that we buy it.

That evening we watched the film. It received the ultimate accolade from Ryan who, when it was over, promptly announced that he wanted to watch it again. And, thinking about it, I realised that I did too; though my reasons were probably very different to his.

I was fascinated by the community of monsters, the Wild Things, their personalities and interaction with each other. Jonze and Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius), who wrote the screenplay together, have produced characters which work for both children and adults because they are so real, so normal and, at the same time never lose that dangerous violent unpredictability which makes them what they ultimately are – scary monsters. Thinking about this, it struck me that this is the way the world of adults must often appear to small children; big people, who are incredibly powerful and are always doing completely unpredictable, sometimes scary things and why, therefore, those adults whom you love and who love you and whose love is consistent and sure are so important and necessary in your life – even when they’re angry at you.

For an adult, of course, the attraction is somewhat different. Carol, Douglas, Judith, Ira, Alexander, Bernard and K.W. are a group of insecure, neurotic, very human monsters with complex personalities, problems, visions, relationships and group dynamics and issues which, I suspect, are familiar to most of us. The arrival of Max on their island acts as a catalyst to bring a lot of things into the open, maybe clarify some things somewhat before his departure leaves them with some problems clearer, some, perhaps, on the way to resolution, others basically as they were. Just like real life.

But personally, the behaviour and interaction of the Wild Things made me think of a particular period of my life and some of what I experienced then. Thirteen years ago, for all sorts of complex reasons I won’t go into here, I had a pretty comprehensive nervous breakdown. Part of the long process of recovery I went through involved spending a number of months in full-time residential therapy. It was therapy with a strong emphasis on group work and it meant that, in a relatively short time, you got to know a number of other people very well indeed, discovering things about them (as they discovered things about you) that even those closest to them had never known.

We were a motley crew; suffering from all sorts of problems like borderline syndromes, through bi-polar disorders, addiction issues and depression, to people whose life-stories and personality structures had landed them in individual psychological cul-de-sacs – or various mixtures of such problems. In many cases of what we call “mental illness,” the label isn’t so important anyway; as a therapist once remarked to me, “in our area the therapy often comes first, the diagnosis comes at the end.”

Many people, particularly those going through crises, have difficulties with group therapy. You think that you have such massive troubles of your own, that the last you want to do is to waste your time listening to the problems of others or, even worse perhaps, laying out your own horrible private stories in front of others. But if you’re able to open yourself up to it, you start to realise that this isn’t what it’s really about at all. Firstly, listening to the others telling their stories, you realise that while all stories are unique they are all very similar. You start to understand how others got into the mess they’re in, to see possible solutions and strategies for them … and then you start to realise that some of these solutions and strategies might just be applicable to you as well. Secondly, experiencing the interaction in the group – an interaction which goes on after the “official” sessions with the therapist are over, in many ways dominating your whole life during the therapy period – you start to see the way people act and react to each other (in many cases continuing the problematic patterns they have described in their stories) and, if you’re lucky, start to observe and reflect on your own behaviour (and patterns) within the overall group dynamic.

It helped me at any rate, though it didn’t work for everyone. There were some participants whose disorders could really only be handled with medication – though many of them also found the insights into their own situations which emerged through the discussions and interaction immensely helpful. There were others who just weren’t capable of climbing out of their own boxes and so basically continued to bang their heads against the same, largely self-constructed walls. And, just as I was coming to the end of my stay there, there was one participant … at this stage friend would be a better word to use … who finally succumbed to the limited, closed logic-loop of his subjective suffering and took his own life.

It’s a long time ago now and my life has moved on since then, generally in much more positive directions. But I still retain some friendships – one a very deep one – which were made in that strange, difficult, intense time. And one very basic realisation; that if you find yourself getting into a situation regarding important personal situations in life where you can only see two alternatives, black or white, all or nothing, then it’s high time you called “stop” and looked at things again. For, though decisions always have to be made and it is usually better to decide yourself rather than have decisions made for you, there are nearly always far more alternatives available to you than you can see at first glance.

And so, watching the clumsy, complicated relationships between the Wild Things last weekend, the things half-spoken, the issues not resolved, their behavioural patterns being repeated even when they were obviously dysfunctional, my thoughts returned to that group I was part of, all those years ago. The “monsters” in the film are thrown together by the fact that they find themselves together on a distant island; we were thrown together by our shared inability to carry on the way we had been going. When Max sails back home, leaving them behind on their island, we know that things will go on much the way they have been before he arrived. But we also know that they will go on, because – in their own neurotic, wounded, dysfunctional ways – the Wild Things do understand and care for each other. It’s not certain of course; Carol may go into another uncontrolled rage and kill one of the others, possibly Judith after she has provoked him once too often, or Douglas or Alexander because they are simply unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or maybe K.W., who understands him very well, will be able to avert disaster (once again).

Nothing is certain or perfect anyway, and it can be dangerous to lose oneself in the pursuit of total solutions. The suicide of my friend Jens had a lot to do with that kind of fallacy. Often the way forward is to accept that there are many partial solutions for seemingly intractable problems, that ever more alternatives start to become available once you get yourself (re)started on the adventure of life. That you sometimes just have to hope and put a bit of trust in yourself and others. The way, in the end, that Max can go back to his mother because, deeper than anything else, he knows that she loves him.

And that she would never really send him hungry to bed …

 

Many thanks to Pagan Sphinx, who gave me the link to Slate Magazine which provided the real impetus for this post. J

Pictures retrieved from:

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRJprjRKJzlEvaAgcGB8B5knp1g2fjwVnJiNQmMSxJSxleq4mCeyB8PTWevtFv8BcujGqwWDGJbLmqCdU1Nr0c-1Z4jhYvInyiecFLXXthWtlnbbz706M7AmD8vGu8MXi8sUSWlwqEV3E7/s1600/Where-The-Wild-Things-Are.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wherethewildthingsare.jpg