This week was interesting, it was filled with such a range of emotions, I can only describe it by saying it felt like I was eating both sugar and salt at the same time. The fact is that may have been slightly easier at some point to swallow that very concoction. My mind has been revolving lately on the mind of journalism, because that is what is listed as 'my job', however that's not what I do, I am a commentator, that's all I do. I am discoursing my thoughts for you to read and enjoy or loathe and so on. The problem I have found this week, which has added to my rather bitter summary of the week, is that I have realised that writing, and so commentating, is possibly one of the most selfish professions one can enter. You start to believe that your emotional responses to the annoyances of life are of value and you start to get very lazy. You stop genuinely inspecting your own heart, and stop making rational, considered points. This is detrimental to only one person. The writer, me.
The case in point, thus the first cloud that loomed over me this week, regarded the soon to become vacant chair in the Diocese of Westminster, the saga which has been reduced to nothing more then a cheap (very cheap) soap opera here in the U.K. It has been reported that the most likely candidate for Westminster is somebody who I cannot stand, correction, despise. So this week on several news forums remarking on his possible election, I have been livid and thrown venomous tirades and tantrums, not thinking about what is typed on my beautiful white and translucent keys, but writing black and horror and pathetic words which are strung together with no more objection of purpose other then to blacken the forums of the blogs I have darkened. That sounds sinister, doesn’t it? Well it is, and it was. O.K I have a particular loathsome attitude against the candidate because he offended me nearly a year ago, and I have neither forgiven nor forgotten, but it brings me to the point which I am trying to make. In the end, it truly is our emotions that dominate us.
How many of you readers keep a diary? Do you ever read it back to yourself? I read mine once ever six months or so, and it amazes me, the style in which I write down my thoughts. My diary is either a place where argument and example and experience are reduced to considered points that is quite rational, and there is the subjective journey, where memory and experience of a different kind is used to forge a point I am trying make. The problem I find is, emotion is so much more easily accessed then reason.
After various decisions made positively last year, I decided that I would work on my emotions (sounds terribly American doesn’t it?). Still music fills me with so much emotion, that makes me happy, sad, sadder, there isn’t a song that hasn’t been written that fails to enhance or change my mood. Yet at the same time since the decline of the milkman’s whistle melody has It seems that young people attach themselves to their Ipods and listen to their rapular music whilst they smack themselves with heroin and knife each other in the gut. Yes, the milkman’s whistle which created routine and brought with it a sense of honour and comfort as well as community and cohesion, has faded, and so now if you want all of that back, you can go whistle for it.
There you have it you see? The article has written itself, I have gone off down sentimental alley and tied it together with a catchy nostalgic saying by writing ‘you can go whistle for it.’ This is what most diaries novels and weekly columns like the one I write, are full of. Nostalgic crap.
Yet my problem is anger. Writing with anger is possibly the easiest trap to fall into. It doesn’t even matter what it is, but a bit of fury can take you a long way. I have so much of it, against people who deserve it, possibly people who don’t, but it is destroying everyone around me. I have a friend who phoned me the other evening whose ear was practically bleeding down the phone as he spoke about the very topic I mentioned at the beginning of this article. I fear this person will only now ever mention safe topics in anxiety of having their remaining ear chewed of, or head removed. But it is so difficult isn’t it?
Yes, this week was difficult. So much erupted around me, and much like the volcano around Tonga, a lot of wildlife was destroyed in the process, but what good is writing about it, what good at all? The point is I can learn from it, as can you. What is so intriguing about this process of anger we build inside ourselves is that there seems to be a way for me to tell you how to sort it out, but not a way for me to tell me to sort it out! I wish I could give you an emotional Heimlich so you could cough up that fear and anxiety, but I can't. I wish I could forget all the pettiness and patheticness gone before and just get on with my life, yet somehow I can't. I wish things had have gone one way, I wish things could have gone the other, I wish I could know if some things would have made me different, but what’s the point of all this wishing?
We wake up everyday with a list of wishes a mile long and maybe we spend our lives trying to make those wishes come true, but just because we want them doesn't mean in the end, we need them to be happy.
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