Abnormal repetitive behaviour - what's yours

Today we had an invited speaker to the college who spoke about abnormal behaviour in animals.  Videos were shown of small dogs chasing their tail until they became a flying circle of black and white.  A mouse did repeat back summersaults again and again like an acrobat stuck in a loop.  A huge elephant, chained at the leg, swung from side to side continuously.  All of them drew laughter from the audience of young students.  Until the speaker pointed out that all of these behaviours denoted stress in the animals.  These repetitive movements were symptoms of an animal trying to cope with situations far from their normal environment.  Perhaps you have seen it in the zoo where the lion paces up and down the cage wall putting his feet in the exact paw prints that he has been making for months, sometimes years.  It is distressing to watch because once you know what to look for, you can see it is not normal.  The tragic thing is that after a period of around twelve weeks of such activity the animal’s brain becomes hard wired and it is impossible to change the endless routine.  The comfort such activities bring are an end in themselves and no matter how exciting the environment or stimulating only a slight reduction in activity levels in the repetitive activity can be ever achieved.  Abnormal repetitive behaviour is usual exhibited by normal animals in un-natural situations.  If you want to see distressing examples of this behaviour have a look at this link. 

http://www.aps.uoguelph.ca/~gmason/StereotypicAnimalBehaviour/library.shtml

It struck me that we too carry out abnormal repetitive behaviour when stressed and I began looking for signs of it in myself and others.  Overeating, endless shopping, routines at work, gossiping, mobile phones, games, gambling, drinking, smoking, cleaning, reading rubbish and watching rubbish on TV.  Could these be the equivalent of rocking to and fro getting nowhere but longing for actual life to begin?  What a depressing turn of thought.  Mind you I was happy to see how much the students loved the talk and the speaker and how they were all triggered to find ways of making life more enjoyable for the animals in their care.  It reminded me what a lovely bunch of students they are and what an odd creature I am!

Best Times Worst Times, Guppies and Adsense

Happiest moment giving birth. Just blew me away this tiny person whose arrival made me forget the pain.  Given my extremely low pain threshold generally this was no small feat!

The saddest – losing loved ones.  I remember my nephew Adam was three when my brother and his wife moved into their new three-storey home.  In the carrying things to and fro they noticed Adam in floods of tears.  After a while, once he had calmed a little, all he would say was, “It’s too, too sad!”   Following more tears, they eventually found out that a small fish had managed to jump out of the fish tank being carried up the steep stairs.  Unnoticed, Adam had sat mesmerised with horror as the tiny guppy flopped its last moments at his very feet.  His father pointed out, had he said what had happened earlier the tiny fish could have been saved.   This caused an even greater burst of crying, to have witnessed such horror and now to find he was responsible!  Poor Addie, his cry of “It’s too, too sad!” is echoed by all of us who lose loved pets. 

But when the loss is a person who has filled your life with laughter and love for decades the void they leave can be devastating.  Much, much later, when they come to your mind and bring a smile to your heart, you realize they are still there to inspire you, the distance is a mere illusion.

All of you attentive ones will have noticed the adverts have disappeared from the sides of my blog.  These were courtesy of Adsense a company that places adverts and depending on clicks earns revenue.  Today, Adsense no longer will be placing adverts, so those of you who have been bombarded with “Mature dating sites”, “wrinkle cream”, “Stomach reducing techniques” etc will no longer be subjected to these.  Weird, how they choose the adverts to appear.  Worrying at times!  I never got the hang of how to edit certain advertisers so it is with some relief I no longer have to worry about it.  I have also reduced my postings to once every two days or so, due to popular requests.  You can get too much of a good thing I’m told!

What is the source of all Good and the essence of wisdom?

Trusting in God is hard especially when times are really hard, when it seems as if not just one aspect of life goes wrong but many.  Work, family, health problems can come together in a perfect storm and when nothing is going your way you still have to trust, submit and be content with God’s will.  Such acquiescence is not easy, but it does, in the midst of great suffering, mould special strengthened souls.  Plutarch (46 – 120 AD) was Greek historian, biographer and essayist knew this when he wrote these two statements.

“Those who aim at great deeds must also suffer greatly.” 

 

“To make no mistakes is not in the power of man; but from their errors and mistakes the wise and good learn wisdom for the future.”

To be really wise is to tread carefully understanding God’s commands and His love of justice.  To live one’s life not only loving God but fearing Him also.  This fear is a sturdy shield from wrong doing and the love a constant call to do what is right and just.  I love the work of C S Lewis and this quote of his demonstrates his wisdom and insights in understanding what path to walk and how to walk it.

“Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After
all, you find out the strength of the army by fighting against
it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to
walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation
after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like
an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little
about badness — they have lived a sheltered life by always giving in.
We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we
try to fight it.”

But if we are to be truly wise we must be sure we are not sheep following blindly the path others have worn down before us.  This Welsh proverb cuts to the chase and indicates the importance of reason and rational in guiding us. 

“Reason is the wise man's guide, example the fool's. “

So I wish you strength, wisdom and reason in working out a good path for yourself.

Are You Functioning on all Wavelengths?

I remember my Dad saying some people don’t function on certain wavelengths.  Like, for example, an insensitive neighbour who would say hurtful things to almost everyone she met, but was oblivious to the effects of her barbed comments.  I could see what he meant by that and years of teaching seemed to clarify such things.  He would point out that, if a child came from a family where honesty was not insisted upon then often the entire next generation was devoid of any scruples in that particular arena.  It was indeed as if an entire wavelength of understanding was missing.  It was appropriate to take pens, pencils, money etc as long as no one spotted you.  The older I get, the more I realize that each of us has our own missing wavelengths and tests and difficulties come along and show us exactly what we have not yet mastered.  My middle son was highly tuned to people around him.  

He could sense their unhappiness, joy, intent to a degree that startled me.  I suppose you could call it intuition.  Some years ago my mother fell down a flight of stairs in a hotel and I was startled to find seconds later my son appeared.  He had sensed something wrong and run all the way from home to the hotel.  It is hard to use science to explain how such things happen.  When we had visitors, my son would whisper to me, how sad this one appeared. He didn’t seem to need to speak to them to pick up on what they were feeling.  I, instead, had inherited my Dad’s lack of intuition.  We used to joke that when buying a new car we would ask Dad which car in the whole parking lot he liked, then make sure that whatever car we decided to buy, it was not the one he picked, as it was sure to be a dud!

Walking down a street one day my middle son said “did you see that man Mum he was crying as he came out of the shop?”  My youngest son had seen the man but not noticed he was crying and my eldest had neither noticed the man nor the shop.  We seem to inhabit almost different worlds at times.  I suppose you would call it a kind of emotional intelligence.  Either you have it or you don’t.  But, if life has a purpose then surely progress is required and if we are missing wavelengths we need to focus on the ones missing and fast.  Nothing highlights gaps in our wavelengths better than learning from those who are sensitive to those very areas.  If our filters are set to cut out certain parts of the spectrum we cannot rely on our own eyes and senses to spot them.  We require to have around us those, whose filters are on a completely different range.  It can be painful to see the world anew or learn that we are not seeing enough.  Challenging to have it drawn to our attention.  But I have grown to respect that such people open us up to, not only a new world out there but, a whole world inside us that has been neglected.  We need all the wavelengths functioning!

Eating Sand and Ballooning Heads

I remember being on the beach in Portrush with my three children when my youngest son, under two years old, began eating great fists full of sand.  No remonstration on my part could persuade him to stop.  At one point my mother suggested I was making it worse by drawing attention to it and it would be better by far to ignore the practice.  I tried, and sat as if totally unconcerned while he seemed to spend the entire afternoon enjoying the beach as if it were fish and chips!  Later, his nappies were full of this disgusting grit filled paste, so I suspect most of what he digested went straight through his system.  Nowadays, the chances of animal poo/glass/syringes/heavy metals/pollution in the sand is higher and I would have found it impossible to ignore his determined efforts.  At the time, however, I remember it was the oddity of it that disturbed.  Other people’s children paddled in the sea, dug in the sand, made sandcastles and ran to and fro, while mine focused on eating all the sand within reach.  It was like a judgement call, spot the disturbed child, the mother who obviously has screwed up.  Where had I gone wrong?  How far back had I made fundamental mistakes in my child’s upbringing that he had this emptiness needing to be filled with the nearest dirt he could cram in?

Mothers are filled with such thoughts of ill ease.  There was a baby clinic opposite that I attended with each new born.  We would stand in rows handing over our little ones to be inspected and weighed by trained personal.  I remember with the first one, the woman weighed him and told me he was not putting on enough weight.  I cried all the way home mortified with my failure and apologising to my starving baby.  A month later his weight had improved but his nappy was filled with a liquid coffee-like poo that she told me meant he had diarrhoea and that this was very serious indeed.  More tears followed along with a growing conviction that I was not a fit mother.  It took an experienced friend to point out that the clinic was used to bottle fed babies whose quick weight gain and solid stools bore no similarity to breast fed babies, such as mine, to calm me.  By the time it came to my third baby I could watch mothers retire in tears from the row in front of me, while steeling myself not to be upset by what the nurse would say to me!  Then my turn came and she put a measuring tape around his head and showed me on a graph just how far outside normal his head size was.  There was a lot of discussion about brain development, concerns expressed about what was going on inside his colossal head.  I walked home sobbing in panic and fear as usual, while my baby’s head seemed to inflate like a balloon before my very eyes. 

Which all goes to show that as mothers we can feel we are on an impossible mission and are always ready to believe the worst and then blame ourselves bitterly for it all.  So if you happen to spot a baby stuffing handfuls of sand/dirt into his mouth, please just smile and act as if it is totally normal, you will sooth a troubled soul.

PS this June’s edition of Scientific American (2012) “The Scoop on Eating Dirt” highlights the fact that eating dirt, geophagia, is found in 200 species of animals including baboons, gorillas and chimpanzees.  Humans have been doing it since Hippocrates in 460 BC and the Mesopotamians and ancient Greeks used it to treat ailments, especially of the gut.  Soil contains minerals such as calcium, sodium and iron, an invaluable source especially in times of famine.  Soil’s detoxifying properties are also noted in this article and pregnant women who eat soil may be not only cleansing their system of toxins but also boosting their immune system.  Kaolin, a clay mineral, is used by the pharmaceutical industry to treat nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea.  It is found to bind to not only harmful toxins but also pathogens.  So I put forward the hypothesis that my youngest son, he with the enormous brain, was fully aware of the therapeutic benefits of soil/sand eating at the time of his visit to the beach.  As such, he was an early genius, not demonstrating mental instability at all!  Oh, the folly of motherhood!  Is there no end?

PPS (mind you don’t go eating the soil or sand around you as it is likely to also contain bacteria, viruses, parasitic worms, lead and arsenic) – according to same article

Speeches that stir

When the spirits drop it can help to try out listening to some good rants.  I never thought I would recommend Rocky scenes, but this section struck home because it echoes that feeling that all of us sometimes experience where we kind of lose faith in ourselves.  Good to be reminded of what really matters.  (so skip the silly add at the start – and apologies that it is there)

Then there is that false conviction that those who succeed are chosen or are lucky.  I like the way this second video knocks that idea on the head and spells out what really makes the difference.  Michael Jordan is pretty impressive.

If any of you have a favourite please let me know what it is.

Sexual Assault in France

I was always a nervous traveller.  I expected that on a given train there would be a few murderers and rapists, as well as at least a dozen thieves.  So travelling on a train with this mindset posed its own difficulties.  Each carriage was inspected with care.  Four guys in a carriage was just asking for trouble.  Two women of stocky build could overcome me, so their carriage was risky and  should be left as well.  I usually ended up in a compartment with a tiny elderly weak lady as I would tell myself even if she were a killer, given my size and their age, I could probably take her down.  Deciding on which carriage to travel in was a major part of the first half hour of travel and I did not rush into it. 

All of this is plain weird, I know, and will seem even stranger when I tell you that I studied martial arts for years and even attended self defence classes too.  For a whole year I attended a full contact dojo on the Isle of Wight and ended up each week covered in bruises and bumps from being kicked and punched.  I can tell you there was a world of difference between someone punching at you but stopping at the skin and another kicking you from the front as if he wanted to dislocate your spine.  I learned many things, that bigger people kick you harder, thin lean men can be incredibly strong, being kicked is much worse than being punched and why women are so often badly hurt in attacks.  Our trainer told us that women are usually in placating mode when they are attacked.  They hope that by doing so their attacker will stop hurting them.  This, they continue to do even when the attacker continues to hurt them badly.  He was full of instructions about poking out eyeballs and other   gruesome techniques. 

I didn’t like any of it and decided on my own approach – that was pre attack preparation.  My carriage checking was a way of avoiding any conflict, and I felt that it made sense to put the odds in your favour.  Another pre attack policy was never to look as if you don’t know where you are going.  Vulnerability is sensed by the predator.  For years I was amazed that the world changed when I went on walks with my sister in law.  She is terrified by dogs and on spotting one almost half a mile away would begin to dance nervously behind me arms shaking, crying her distress.  It was like an irresistible invitation for any dog in the vicinity and I was constantly amazed how dogs would come from everywhere zoning in on her distress signals.  So too, in strange cities wandering around with maps and looking lost brings upon you all sorts of weirdoes.  Instead, I developed the practice of walking purposefully, as if you know where you are going even when you are lost.  Indeed, there are several major cities where I have found myself wandering lost in areas that I can remember vaguely being lost before in! 

I remember years ago going across France and my cousin decided hitch hiking was the way to speed things up, against my heated arguments.  A tiny French car stopped with a huge fat French man squeezed in behind the front steering wheel and his seat.  His stomach made a huge indent to allow for the steering wheel to fit.  His hair was positioned carefully over a bald head and kept in place by a liberal supply of sweat glistening everywhere.  We had gone only a mile or so before he pulled into a lay-by and started kissing my cousin on the mouth despite her protests.  I thought about hitting him on the back of the head with a swift chop, from the back seat, and then worried that he might stop kissing her and pull a knife or a gun.  So I opened the back door and threw both our rucksacks out onto the road instead.  My cousin extracted herself out the front door and the French fat guy took off at full speed.  We stood there, on an empty dusty road, my cousin spitting furiously on the road to clear all taste of his assault, both of us traumatised by what had happened.  Mind you to put things in perspective, I might not have unleashed a well trained karate chop on his neck (despite years of training) but my pre attack preparation served me well.  Why do you think my cousin ended up in the front seat and not me?

 Having past the half century age I no longer worry so much about train carriages and weirdoes.  Now, I concentrate on not putting my clothes on inside out and find I have become the possibly weirdest person I am ever likely to meet.  I certainly would not choose to share a train carriage or car with someone like me and that is strangely comforting in a sad odd way.