When you get the choice to sit it out or dance, I hope you dance. [Lee Ann Womack - I Hope You Dance*]

Yesterday, on my ‘experience’ wanderings (that’s what I like to call them) I happened into a bar where a few, maybe 30 or so, people were learning to salsa.  As a side line, at £5 a head, that is not a bad little pocket money enterprise.   Salsa is big in the UK and I think most major cities have at least one salsa night at some local establishment.  Dozy Wolverhampton apparently has three!  Members of my family have occasionally tried to tempt me into ‘trying’ it.  It got me thinking.

I do not believe there are bad dancers; I believe that most bad dancers are people dancing to music that is not them.   Dancing to me is like dreaming awake, the music takes you on a journey in your head and your body wants to go with the flow.  Your thoughts are your body’s teacher and the dance may change depending on the mood, depending on the music.  It has been said that music and by extension dance is something we are born with – that is why mothers sing to their babies – and every human culture has music and dance.  It is part of being human.

I don’t like salsa or other types of learned dancing, a fact my mother realised when she stopped trying to teach me to waltz and foxtrot and that other nonsense.  I am a thinking man, translating other people’s actions into my own takes time and when the motivation is not there, it tends not to happen.   Yet I dance all the time. With young people in my household, music is always a background noise and if I like a song, I might do a quick few steps or a few more at anytime, just like that, sometimes to the embarrassment of my children.

Seriously though, if you have been told you can’t dance, you can, find the right music and keep dancing.  If you don’t dance, start right now, it is like a breath of fresh air for all of those 3 minutes worth of song.  Do it alone, do it with others whatever you do take a little time to dance.  If you really must take some salsa lessons near you and you get to dance with lots of girls/boys….

And here’s a plus.  My dear 60 plus mother, no actual age given due to the danger of her spoiling her chances of finding me a new step-father, has used her love of dancing to lose weight and keep it off.  She has done fantastically well.  With over 300 songs on her MP3 player – she is hardly likely to get bored very soon and she spends just an hour a day dancing away in her own little piece of heaven.  Not a new idea by any stretch of the imagination, you could use that for exercise instead of the tedious gym trips.  I plan to dig up some dance music later, time to follow my own advice.

May you find the balance.

*written by Mark D. Sanders and Tia Sillers

“I am available on most weeknights, not degree educated but well versed in matters of politics, economics, religion and the like.  Personal disasters like career disappointments and failed romantic encounters can be discussed and I am not too averse to bouncing balls, kicking balls and hitting balls with a bat but much prefer the kind of play available at the local night club.  I can hold my liquor quite well and am unlikely to return any curries eaten under the influence.  Being a little on the large side enables me to fireman lift any friend to whom the excitement becomes too much.  All this for the price of a taxi ride home!  Bookings being take now, form an orderly queue please, we’re British.”

Yes, my friends, this what we have been reduced to, on top of rent a TV, rent a fridge, rent a lady for a dinner date , we know can rent someone we can bore the pants off.  Unlike real friends who can piss you off, ask for their money back or simply disagree with your fascist views – this one you get to choose from a wonderful list of rental friends.  Be very careful how you type that into Google, will you please, we would want you finding out what other kind of ‘friendly’ services that are for rent.

Ignore these sourpusses at the Independent and at the Guardian, just because they have the time to be making friends and putting up with their boring lot, we know in the real world we need to get what we want and get it now.  I am sure the bank manager, a good friend if there ever was one, will authorise the overdraft extension to take out a friend a week,  Oh, OK then may be too much, once a fortnight then.  The rest of the time we can concentrate on working hard to pay of the overdraft – maybe two jobs will do it.   Apparently there are jobs currently available undertaken by illegal immigrants that no-one else would do for love or money, where a good British born worker would be gratefully received.  Who knows you might make an immigrant friend, you know the one you can say ‘I have a ….. friend’ in conversation with your rented friend.

By the way those of you on my Facebook friend list, please send me your credit card details, it’s nothing personal, just business.

On the other hand, go out there, meet people and make some friends.

May you find the balance.

My 60 year plus mother holds some very set view about certain sections of society that may have some basis in experience but most likely does not.  Since she comes for the generation of the great –isms, I assumed that my siblings and I just brushed off these prejudices, sometimes with argument. Imagine my surprise when discussing a certain serious family issue with one of my siblings when they strongly expressed an opinion consistent with one of my mother’s which I know is not based in their experience. 

This got me thinking about some of the prejudices that haunt our societies today, things like racism, nationalism, tribalism and even classism.  Wikipedia states that ‘a prejudice is a prejudgment: i.e. a preconceived belief, opinion, or judgment made without recourse to reason’ and that is generally true.  I am not sure that all prejudices were originally without reason – historical reasons may have been the origin but that reason is lost when it no longer holds true. 

Many times our prejudices appear to be passed to us by other people, our parents, our friends, our governments without the benefit of personal experience.  We are also more likely to accept these opinions if they originate from one of us – a family member, a tribal member or some other member of a group that we belong to.  The thing is that is one of the things that make us human, owing to our evolved communication and empathy skills, we do not have to experience unpleasant situations if someone else is in a position to relate that experience to us.  That is how we learn.

We all know that small children over a certain age get upset if they are introduced into strange environments or to strange people, strange is anything substantially different from the norm – like a different skin colour!   There must be an inherent fear of the unknown in all humans and that would make evolutionary sense.  Until it is proven safe, we must fear it for it may be looking for dinner.  Take that built in defence mechanism and add the prejudices of the group and we have what we have. 

For that reason I believe everyone has some prejudices, even me.  It is the people who take a chance and explore and challenge the prejudices – those who have relationships outside their race, class and tribe, those who travel to experience the world and her peoples that have an increased their potential of finding happiness, finding contentment.  Many find friendship, many find love and many find their place in the sun.

Continuing to hold on to those –isms reduce your life options, hold you back from experiences that enrich life, maybe it is time to challenge them.

May you find the balance.

Unlike many of my peers, when I was in my middle teenage years, I knew that I wanted to have a family; I wanted to be a father.  I was going to find the right woman, get married, have babies and have a good job to support it all.  I knew this because I loved children, loved being amongst families, mostly other people’s, having had no real ‘family’ experience or so I thought at the time.

Eventually I did get married and I did have children and I have worked nearly all the time during the years.  Most of my jobs I suppose would be considered ‘good jobs’ by a high percentage of the population though some did, in my opinion, inadequately recompense me for my talent.  There is a little thing that spoils this happy picture; I have, on occasion, put the well-being of the family at risk in my selfish search for the ‘good job’ bit.

What is the good job?  I am not sure but I will know it when I find it.  I have an idea that it is work that will be satisfying and rewarding, something that I will want to do for the rest of my life or at least for the greater part of it.   The big question is, will it pay enough to allow me to support my family and if it didn’t, could I pass it up? 

Many people would do and feel proud that they have made the sacrifice for their family.  Many though would not even get to this stage, instead having found an acceptable, not necessarily comfortable, position are willing to sit it out to retirement.  I suppose I should be thankful for people like these because the success I have experienced so far in my life is because of their lack of ambition.

And there you have it, the description of my ailment, ambition.  I am talking about is not the limited ‘I want the promotion at work’ ambition but something bigger.   I am not the only one and I would hesitate a guess that some 10 to 15% of the grown population have this affliction.  I accept that it will vary from society to society, for instance, the US American attitude of entrepreneurship may result in a higher proportion.   

Not wanting to start a gender war here, my observations lead me to believe that a woman, who has not started her high power career by the time she starts a family, is likely to become more accepting of  her circumstances,  maybe even complacent,  and will endeavour to make it comfortable for her family.  The biological clock phenomenon is not pseudo-science, it is fact.  Nature has provided a natural ambition for the female, the production of children and their nurturing.  Additionally, the presence of a permanent partner is not a requirement but a ‘nice to have’ and most societies have obliged.  I do not suggest that is the only ambition and obviously there are exceptions to the rule.

Rarely are things that simple.  We have a fair number of men, some dragging along nervous partners and children, blundering about looking for that ‘something better’.    Here is a question, if I am unhappy, unsatisfied, discontent, how likely is it that I will be able to provide a stable and loving environment for my family in the long term?  Unfortunately, sometimes this uncertainty upsets the mother’s endeavour to provide stability and families split up.

Many content people do not do what they do for the money; they do it for the passion, the love, the satisfaction.   That is what makes this special bunch better people, better partners, better parents.  I have a burning ambition to be one of them.

May you find the balance.

We do not need to look for statistics to prove that the rate of marriage breakdowns is growing. Many of us have many have experienced it ourselves or have close family and friends who have and those of us with children will know that a significant proportion of their classmates come from ‘broken homes’.  Some of those classmates will come from ‘single parent’ families where a marriage was never entered into in the first place but may have been a co-habitation or ‘break-up before marriage’ scenarios.

The politicians, particularly in the UK, would have us believe that this core family breakdown is the root cause of some of the worst social problems.  Those who spout ‘family values’ harp back to the good old days of life-long monogamous partnerships.  Why don’t they harp back to the life-long partnerships of polygamous marriages, both polygyny (man has more than one wife) or polyandry (a woman has more than one husband), which existed prior to, most probably religiously instigated, monogamy?

I am a believer in evolution not only in the biological sense but in the social context as well.  I am always pointing out to particularly my poor long suffering children, some reason why some ‘backward’ behaviour has roots in the distant past which improved the survival odds of the society that practised it.  For example, there was, at some point in history, a matriarchal kingdom on the English mainland where society was run by the females for the same reason that a tribe in Eastern Africa practised within strict behaviour guidelines what basically can be called group marriage – simply because the men were war-mongers and kept getting killed!

Marriage has evolved from the caveman kidnapping a mate with a club over the head, through various polygamous iterations in different parts of the world to the predominately monogamous relationships of the recent past.  Even today in societies where other forms of marriage are acceptable, the logistics and resource requirements of maintaining two or more families usually results in a fairly monogamous society.   

What  the ‘family values’ people forget that we are a society hell bent on being happy.   Whilst past generations held onto relationships that were basically dead, we have no such inclination.  After all, which one of us is entitled to be happy and which one of us is not?  Which one of us gets to ‘get ahead’ and which one of us has to remain in the shadows?  Which one of us gets to have the dream career and uproot the family to the other side of the world?  Which one of us must continue to take mental or physical abuse for the sake of the kids? 

Why is it that we expect someone we married 20, 10 or 5 years ago to be just as compatible with the changes that you have undergone in those years?  Why do we expect that what you want now is what your partner will want for the rest of their life?  We no longer regard acceptance of the status-quo as an acceptable compromise to achieve contentment. 

The ‘family values’ goody two shoes with their tax breaks for families and stories and statistics about the relatively longevity of married people and the happiness that children will bring hold us back.  They hold us back from working out an acceptable social framework so that those families facing break-up can look to their future knowing that all parties can find contentment if they so choose and avoid any further unhappiness.

This post in no way is intended to condone break-up but nor is it intended to discourage it.  If you happen to be in a relationship, it is you and you alone who can decide whether it is good for you, your spouse and any children involved. 

May you find the balance.

Here is one man’s view of how the simple, not necessarily the easy, can make you happy.   Though written from the sense of the simple home in the Brazilian favelas compared to the high life in the USA, it is the emphasis on simplicity, difficulty and community that the sense of wellbeing is being found – What is Home?

A Buckinghamshire man diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2006 who won £10,000 betting he would be alive years later, died at the age of 60 a few months short of collecting another £10,000 (BBC News – Buckinghamshire man who bet to beat cancer dies).  On the face of it, it would appear a classical example of the power of positive thinking.

However, when faced with a hungry lion advancing on you in an open savannah, it would be very stupid to think that positive thinking will assist in this matter, the use of ones’ legs and a dose of negative emotions might be the better solution.  Of course, most people would recognise that the lion situation calls for more than positive thinking.  But what about other situations, less straightforward, like when faced with cancer?  The author, Barbara Ehrenreich, in her personal story entitled “Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World” describes just such a situation.

Some attribute the popularisation of positive thinking to the book and DVD ‘The Secret’ but Ehrenreich’s book goes further back into American history of the phenomenon.  Slowly though, a healthy scepticism of the concept is growing for example The selfishness of the self-help industry and Christina Patterson: Heaven knows we’re miserable now.

Positive thinking is one of the tenants of the self help industry.  Numerous guides advise that not only must you continuously avoid negative thoughts but you must also surround yourself with only those who are constantly positive.  This you will be assured will help you be more successful and happier.  It is even attributed as a pre-requisite to achieving ‘whatever you want’. 

However, I put it to you that “to realise that you are crap at most measurable activities and that your talents are so small as to barely dignify the word, is one of the essential lessons in life.” (Three cheers for failure | MT Hughes | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk).  This will mean that you will not expect positive thinking to work for you in cases where it is unreasonable to expect it to.   I suspect that many of the ‘hopefuls’ that appear on “Xfactor”, “XXXX’s Got Talent” and “XXXX Idol” and even those on “The Apprentice” and in “Dragon’s Den” that many are gifted with massive doses of positive vibes but that does not pre-empt them from being rubbish.  Some even threaten us with their return!

If you think that positive thinking will make a super salesman out of you when you’re shy and honest or a film star if you can’t act to save your life then you are heading for a lesson in long term discontent.

May you find the balance.

“Allowing people to take time out to watch football during working hours is simply too costly, untimely, and unfair,” so says Willem Smit, a researcher at the Institute for Management Development (IMD) in Switzerland.

It is amazing just how much the pursuit of production and profit is held up as justification not to have fun.   We are not machines, we are people and we are entitled to enjoy a little bit of our lives….

If you walked into one of the most successful people in the world’s home or office, would you expect to find row after row of self help DVDs/CDs and books?  Have you seen any on MTV’s ‘Cribs’ and ‘Who lives in house like this?’ Thought not.

Americans spent $11 billion in 2008 on self-improvement books, CDs, seminars, coaching and stress-management programs.  I suspect that that this figure is much lower in other parts of the world but the Americans are doing their best to export their brand of motivation of “You can’t love someone until you learn to love yourself”, “Being healthy means being in touch with your feelings”, “Never lose hope” and  “Be Positive”.  We, at least in the UK, are a little bit more cynical about all this but this branded help is a growing market here too.  I’ll admit to having a few of those resources around the house. 

One of the most disturbing effects of this self help movement is the need to consistently ‘go back’ for more.  This article describes this situation better than I can.  Surely, success must come at some time.  Steve Salerno, in his book “SHAM: How the Gurus of the Self-help Movement Make Us Helpless ” explains just how this industry and its message is not really helping to make people happy but certainly make the ‘gurus’ richer. Psychologist Paul Pearsall in his provocative book ‘The Last Self-help Book You’ll Ever Need ’ uses scientific evidence to support the anti-motivation cause and I suspect there is a growing cynicism amongst many people.

One of the biggest dampeners of personal happiness is the ‘keeping up with the Jones’ pressures, the meeting of  others’ expectations, the constant comparing of yourself with your peers.   These books and CDs and DVDs and all the other stuff are designed to tell you, you are not good enough, you can be better if you really try.  Just buy this please!

Before going out and buying these resources, it is probably best to try and understand who you are and what you really want.  I believe that many people need the constant reinforcement because they are trying to be someone or something that they are not.  Can you be that master salesperson, can you think positively in the face of cancer, are you comfortable spending other people’s hard earned cash on real estate that, fingers crossed, will deliver a profit?  Will those riches and successes really, really make you happy?  If you really are a master salesperson or the insanely positive person, do you need a book to tell you so?  Most successful people seem to get by with reading ‘The Secret’.

Otherwise aim for a more rounded life, understand who you are and your limitations and embrace them in the search for your place in this world.  You might not get rich but you might just get happy.

May you find the balance.

In exactly one month’s time, I will change my status once again from employed to self employed.  Since it has been a long time since I have took stock of where I am, now would seem to be an appropriate time to do so.  This is where I think I am currently…..

Note, I said self employed as opposed to unemployed even though it is hard to claim self employment with the current income outside my salary in the 10s as opposed to in the 1000s.  This employment status change, and the other change charging towards me stemming from it, comes with some heavy emotional baggage and I will not be telling the truth if I were not to admit that I am somewhat apprehensive, maybe a bit more like frightened.  After all, the recent change of UK Government does not bode well for the under and unemployed.  When you make a commitment to change, a chain reaction is set in motion. This may be the reason that many people find change scary.

Having said that, the anticipation of being able to pursue projects that have been on the back burner for some time now and the thrill of having the time to do so has my mind working overtime.  There is one thing that the unemployed and under employed are rich in, time.  I plan to make full use of my time to create an exciting new phase of my life.  Will to be successful?  Who knows?  I have I track record so far, after all, I’m still here am I not?

I do not forget that I can be thankful that I have this opportunity.  I truly appreciate the fact that many people, many, many people do not ever get the opportunity to try to achieve their plans and schemes.  I try to find the time early in the morning to contemplate both this fact and other things and to feel at one with the universe for a while.  This spiritual time has fallen victim to the racing mind lately though.

Physically, I have not been too brilliant.  Still too much drink, too much nasty fatty foods and too little exercise.  I know I need to do something to be healthier but currently I am not stressing too much about it.  Too much excitement and the knowledge that in just under a month, I will be able to set aside time for exercise.  Then I’ll have to work on the drink and food.  Like I said though I am not stressing too much which oddly enough has reduced the odd aches and pains that seem to plague me a few weeks ago.

Overall, I feel good and so I will enjoy for now.

May you find the balance.

“This notion — that material investment is somehow more important to life than personal investment — is exactly what leads so many of us to believe we could never afford to [insert whatever it is you personally want to do]” with apologies to Rolf Potts, author of Vagabonding,  for paraphrasing.

One of my regular readers has made the mistaken assumption that this blog is just an online log of my ramblings with no real sense and purpose.  I wonder how many others miss the thread of what I am trying to do here.  This blog is about living well as opposed to doing well.  I am trying to use my personal experiences and thoughts to determine what it is that we, humans, need to do to feel content.  I hesitate to use the word happiness has been hijacked by those who wish to jump on the merry go round that is doing well.

The 4 facets that I believe are important to getting a sense of balance in life are the subjects I wish to write about in this blog – the emotional, the mental, the spiritual and the physical aspects and that, fortunately/unfortunately, does cover a wide range of human activity from alcohol and nicotine dependence and addiction, through to diet and exercise and the environment in which one lives as I did in the last post.  I wish to avoid the ‘quote a minute’ do well focused self help hype and try to keep up to date with genetic and anthropological news to inform my knowledge of what makes us human.  I hope as I develop the site to encourage feedback from my readers so we can in a way, grow together.

The quote from the first paragraph of this post is from this article ‘The Difference: Living Well vs. Doing Well’  and relates to vagabonding but you could replace vagabonding with your own personal objective and it will make just as much sense.  Read it, please.

May you find the balance.

Dr Martin Luther King once said “The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilisation, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilise ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.  Man was born into barbarism when killing his fellow man was a normal condition of existence. He became endowed with a conscience. And he has now reached the day when violence toward another human being must become as abhorrent as eating another’s flesh.”

Over lunch recently here in the UK, my colleagues and I were discussing the ‘lazy’ unemployed  that were scrounging off the state and how our new coalition government was going to put an end to that.   The lazy scroungers must be left to fend for themselves.  I, surprisingly, found myself in a minority of one in that discussion.  What people don’t seem to realise is that it is the system of handling and managing the lazy free loaders that is flawed and not the system of helping those who through no fault of their own find themselves less fortunate that the rest of us.

My point that even counties like Brazil and Zambia (allAfrica.com: Zambia: Cash Transfers Transforming Lives of the Poor) have introduced financial help for the poorest of their citizens for a reason and I hypothesis that it will lead to a more comfortable standard of living for everyone.  After all, stepping over starving children and dodging hungry beggars does not make for a contented lifestyle does it?  Unless we commit ourselves to a minimum standard of living for all, peace and prosperity is but an illusion that can be shattered by the anger of people who have nothing to lose.  Don’t believe me, look around the world and ask yourself where there is happy poverty?

We all have responsibilities, and I tell my children this all the time, as members of a family, as members of the village, as members of our various communities and as members of our society.  The minute we believe we are above meeting any of our obligations, the standard and the level of happiness in our life decreases along with it.   Maybe, we in the Western World have forgotten what real poverty and misery is, but paying less tax, refusing to help our worse off will mean 6 foot walls and armed guards around our houses and little islands of comfort in city centres surrounded by a sea of discontentment, an environment unlikely to make anyone happy.

The always some good in remembering that ‘there but for the Grace of God, go I’.

May you find the balance.

Feel so bad that I have not blogged for over a week now,  have plenty to write about just not got the time…..

Unstoppable

Apparently Naomi Campbell goes on the maple syrup diet – syrup mixed with cayenne pepper, lemon juice and water – three times a year.  Beyoncé is said to have done that one as well adding laxative tea every night and a sea-salt water in the morning.  Jennifer Aniston is, allegedly, on a new baby food diet and Liz Hurley once  lived on a bowl of cabbage soup a day.  These tit-bits cam to me courtesy of Naomi Campbells maple madness and my favourite quote in the article is “The awful thing about these diets is the joylessness of them. The sheer, sapping unhappiness they must involve.”

Another ‘thing’ about these diets is that they tend to be short term, a quick bout of sacrifice a couple of times a year to keep the flab at bay.  Healthy? Many nutritionists will tell you certainly not. 

Whilst we cannot deny the growing rate of our overweight, all the attention to obesity has lead to a social stigma being attached to being overweight with regular insults of ‘fat sl*g’, ‘fat f**t’ etc becoming a sort of national insult.   Throw in the health issues the scientists and the press love to trumpet on a weekly basis and your well being is threatened by the fact that you’ve failed to lose any noticeable weight.

Chocolate Cereals

One thing that being on an Atkins like diet (low carbohydrate that is), is how there is an emphasis on a life style change.  It has to be because as soon as you finish your diet and revert back to ‘chocolate cereals’ (when did this happen?), your body will revert back to type and pile the pounds back and usually quicker than you lost it.  Trust me, I’ve been and still am there!

To stay the long term requires that the diet is sustainable.  Any diet that leaves you hungry, tired or irritable is not going to last. I enjoyed my diet but I think I lost my battle because I have a family who did not feel the need to join me in my low carb world and I could not keep up the hassle of trying to avoid foods that are so prevalent in our society from buying lunch to preparing separate dishes at home.  I admire those families where one or the other is a vegetarian and accommodate those different diets.  In most case I know of, anyway, the meat eater gets to eat meat outside the home.

I can’t say honestly that I am desperately unhappy with my weight but there are times when I worry that whenever I feel unwell, it may be because of the weight.  Also I avoid looking too long in the mirror without clothes on J.

I have slowly being pressuring myself to lose some weight and get some exercise because I know it will make me feel better, more content.  I will get round to it and you will have the fun of reading about it here.

In the meantime, avoid the hype.  If you want to diet, find the long term solution for you and recognise it may take time for the weight to go.  Most of all use common sense and maintain some sort of balance.

Related Post : Experts and Vested Interests

“This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and powerful, and to despise, or, at least neglect persons of poor and mean conditions, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.” (Theory of Moral Sentiments 1759)

Our society’s glorification of money and hatred of the poor was identified as far back as 1759 by the economist Adam Smith.  With more and more research pointing to the fact that ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ is detrimental to your happiness and even your life; it is amazing why we continue to seek to catch a little Affluenza.  Commentary like ‘Don’t celebrate these billionaires, be horrified by their existence’ fails to dampen our appetite for worldly richness.

Maybe we need to take a little more interest in statistics.  One commenter in his article Forbes rich list is Slim pickings came up, based on his analysis of the Forbes rich list, a ‘recipe for billionaire success: get born into a rich family, invent something and sell it to Americans. Win.’   Based on evidence such as this if your dependence on being happy is the achievement of richness, you are probably on a hiding to nothing.

I am always struck by the fact that many people are surprised when they visit ‘poor’ countries at how happy the people living there are.  The lesson seems to be that as long as you do not perceive yourself to be poor, as long as you have met your basic needs, then you need not look any further to feel good about your life.

May you find the balance.