Captives of the carelessness of cashiers

my first attempt at art/calligraphy - I will get better!

Waiting in the bank with ticket number 187 in my hand. The predicted waiting time for my ticket is one hour and 40 minutes! What is it about waiting that plunges me into instant despair? For people, for buses and even for guests.  Is it a sudden awareness of the passing of one’s life? The precious days, hours and minutes allotted are bled painfully and uselessly. Surrounded by others bound in the futility of acquiescence. Nothing else to do in this queue but to stare at each other banefully. We were all thinking roughly the same poisonous thought. “But for all of you and I’d not be stuck here waiting! Your very presence is my captivity. You might just as well wear prison guard outfits”.

Here we sit captives of the carelessness of cashiers. They seem to be on a permanent go slow. For the thousandth time, I think of conducting a time management experiment. Timing how long each cashier takes. While waiting in queues in Malta, in banks, I’m convinced that they take exceptionally long with each customer. Mind you, my father used to describe one cashier in Northern Ireland who was so exceptionally slow that “the lice are dropping off her!”  It is only today I worked out what he meant. Obviously, she was so slow as to appear dead. Hence the lice were jumping ship since their prey had died and they require a living host. Makes me wonder at humanity's present state. How many qualities that we normally associate with a healthy living humanity are jumping ship too?  Is our humanity, compassion, courtesy, empathy, justice and kinship also deserting us? Is this civilisation bleeding away the very life forces that sustain growth and development? Has the carcass of this civilisation become the dining table of the carrion? Devouring its innards with rapturous ecstasy? 

Well No! There are amazing people everywhere working hard to make positive change in their neighbourhoods and further afield. Eager to contribute to the betterment of society. You find them in all walks of life, from all backgrounds. They roll up their sleeves and look around to see what the needs are and get stuck in. They are rarely publicity seeking. Because praise is not their motivation. Since we so rarely see their faces dominating our media, in print and on our screens,  it is worth sharing a little light on individuals that should inspire us all. They come from a wide range of nationalities and beliefs, in case we mistakenly think that the goodness comes in one sex/colour/culture or religious background. 

people who made a difference

Until we look around us and are inspired by the pure-hearted we will ever be drawn to the blood-thirsty vultures and their greedy feeding frenzy. Staining our soil and our souls.  Twisting our perceptions of the choices available to humanity.

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I have returned my ticket, seen my cashier and return triumphant with my task completed.  As I leave the still packed vestibule of the bank with others still holding tickets in their hands, I wonder what gems wait here with only good deeds to speak of? Perhaps we will never really know what good others are capable of until we find our own capacity for change.

Life choices, nose picking and animal heads

People who kill animals to hang them on their walls are like ear or nose pickers who insist on examining the fruits of their labours.  It gives them some sort of satisfied pleasure that just defeats me on all levels.

It obviously makes them happy, but it makes you think about the choices we make and how they influence our lives.  Relationships are another example.

People who are miserable because they have not found the one, should be aware that they are probably not miserable because they are alone.  The more likely explanation is that their unhappiness is their own making.  The world is full of people who tell you they are unhappy because either they lack that certain someone or because the one they have makes them miserable.  The sad fact is that most of us are alone because we prefer it or together because we chose it.  If our choice has made you unhappy – then accept the role you played in that path and do something about it.  Blaming everything and everyone around you cements your powerlessness to change any of it.

Mind you at a wedding I remember my Dad giving a speech.  He concluded by wishing the couple well and said, that "we all marry who we deserve".  At that point almost every couple in the room seemed to look at their partner and think, “What the hell did I do to deserve this?”

May your pain be short and your pleasure long!

I have always been bad with pain.  The tiniest cut, from an early age, brought forth howls of despair. Usually, this would be followed by requests for bandages, the bigger the better.  At times my mother was placing bandages on wounds that were so small she could not even see them.  As I grew older, I became aware that I had a remarkably low pain threshold.  Watching other children in school fall and bleed only to get up and run off amazed me.  As I progressed through adolescence my mother would remark, “What on earth are you going do when you have to give birth?”  It was one of those questions that an adolescence feels a parent asks just to manipulate you.  Akin, to her other favourite, “You must learn to cook and clean now because one day you will have your own house!”  To this I always smugly replied, “Don’t worry, I’ll always have servants!”  This must have been particularly abrasive to my sweet mother who carried trays of breakfast to all of us in bed every morning, while Don Williams filled the house with his songs.  I only have to hear one of his songs to find myself hungering for tea and toast on a tray.

Being a coward about pain I asked everyone about what giving birth was really like.  One said it was the most amazing experience of her life.  Another babbled on about this small baby and how beautiful it was.  A third said ominously that one soon forgets the pain.  My mother said, in her day, you were expected to give birth in silence, a slight whimpering was tolerated but not for long.  You were expected to approach birthing in a ladylike way.  She looked at me with a forlorn expression before repeating, “I really don’t know how you will ever get through it!”  When I was pregnant people became much more honest.  One friend told me it was like having a knife plunged into your innards and twisted.  This was altogether too frighteningly honest I felt.

True to form, I was racing to hospital with every little twinge convinced the birth was imminent.  Surely, such excruciating squeezes meant the baby was on their way.   Medical staff said, in ominous tones, I would know it when the real contractions began.  Then, when the murderous contractions actually kicked in I understood exactly what they meant.  I distinctly remember not being ladylike about the whole business.  When asked about pain relief, I retorted “give me everything you’ve got and if that doesn’t work get a big club and knock me out”. At one point, I remember clearly instructing the medical staff to cut off my head and haul the baby out that way.   

My sister-in-law had an even more painful birth but within a matter of hours was saying she would be happy to have another baby soon.  It was as if her memory had selectively eradicated all the pain and suffering.  Today when reading a book, it suddenly all made sense.  It is by Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize winner, entitled Thinking Fast and Slow.  It helps you understand why we make the choices we do in life.  In one section they carry out an experiment on a group of subjects.  The experiment was simple; each person would have their hand immersed in cold water 14 degrees for 60 seconds and at the end would be given a warm towel.  The second experiment lasted 90 seconds, the first 60 seconds was identical to the first and then for the last 30 seconds warm water would be bringing the temperature up by one degree.  The third experiment subjects were told would be a repeat of either the short or long experiment.  They were allowed to choose which.  A surprising 80% chose the 90 second immersion.  Despite this being obviously longer that the first.  What was going on?  According to Kahneman,

“The subjects who preferred the long episode were not masochists and did not deliberately choose to expose themselves to the worst experience; they simple made a mistake.  They chose to repeat the episode of which they had the less aversive memory.  Their decision was governed by a simple rule of intuitive choice: pick the option you like the most, or dislike the least.”

We are strongly influenced by the peak and the end.  That feeling of warming water was such a relief after the pain of the cold it managed to over-ride our rational brain.  Obviously, endings when dramatic/traumatic enough reach parts of our brain that have little to do with rational fact but are emotionally powerful.  Our intuition has lead us to make a mistake.  So too, the pain of giving birth when followed by the joy of a baby is simply edited out.

I used to find when teaching a class you could give a truly awful 40-minute lesson, boring, stilted with little content and follow it with a five-minute exciting game to end.  The classes would invariably close with kids laughing delightedly and a feeling that the lesson had been brilliant.  They had been fooled by the end.  It had dominated their experience and effectively wiped out the previous dire 40 minutes.  This influence also indicates why coping with dementia or a pain filled death etc. creates such an overriding despair in relatives.  A whole lifetime is forgotten and the agony of the last months or years over rides everything.  It almost manages to wipe out every joyous memory of a loved one. 

Our intuition is a powerful tool but also a flawed one, on occasion.  Or, as Kahneman puts it,

“It seems an inconsistency is built into the design of our minds.” 

Our memory has evolved to register the most intense moment (pain or pleasure the peak) and the feelings at the end of the episode.  This neglect of the duration will not serve our desire for pain to be short and pleasure to last.  In other words our instinctive preferences may be seriously flawed.  He ends with this warning.

“This is a bad case of duration neglect.  You are giving the good and the bad part of your experience equal weight, although the good part lasted ten times as long as the other.”

My wish for you - May your pain be ever short and your pleasure exceedingly long!

Choose the Opposite - be wise

This is me aged 5.  As you can see I have the doll and pram but look carefully and you can see a gun and holster.  What an odd mixture, hand on gun and pram.  Perhaps it comes from having only brothers and to this day I wonder how different things would have been had I had a sister.  However, no complaints the brothers will do fine.  Only, they don’t visit me, ever!   

I used to think it was the fact I lived in Greece for a decade and that, admittedly made visits tricky and expensive.  But actually living in the same town has the same result, no calls.  But, to be fair Northern Ireland folk are pretty strange.  Perhaps it is the same where you are?  Here, people polish and clean their houses, fuss over tiles and curtains, sofas and bedding.  They match carpets to lamp shades and a whole lot of other stuff I have no time for.  Then, they establish a routine that is stuck to.  It may be watching soaps, football, endless work or hobbies but when that routine is established not even the end of days will shift them.  You sense it, when you visit, that an inner sanctum has been breached.  The place of security that homes have become and in which others should not come.   

All of us become foreigners outside our homes and feel strangely adrift until ensconced once more on our coordinated turf, remote in hand.  The only outing tolerated is to the shops and that is too is part of the routine.  Don’t vary from the norm, don’t risk changing anything, after all so much crap happens even when you have constructed this spider’s web of activity – heaven knows what might happen if routines were abandoned. 

 Well, I reckon we need to challenge the norm.  A friend once said, if you want to do the wise thing look around and watch what just about everyone else around you is doing and choose to do the exact opposite.  There is something in that.