There was once an autistic boy who regularly kicked one of the girls in his class on the shin, hard enough to make her scream.  Time after time, his teacher would explain to the boy that it was wrong to kick other children, but it made no difference.  Neither did any sanction that the school imposed.  One morning, as he came into school, the boy dropped his coat.  His teacher screamed, just like the girl did when she was kicked.  The boy never kicked the girl again (although he did drop his coat several times a day).

Autistic people think differently to neuro-typical people.  They often have difficulties with sensory processing:  sometimes under sensitivity, sometimes over sensitivity.  What the teacher realised was that the boy had an under sensitivity to sound and had a desperate need for the sensory stimulation of loud high-pitched sound.  Even though he had been taught that it was wrong, the boy could not resist kicking the girl because it was the only way he knew to get the sensory stimulation for which he was desperate.

Kicking people is wrong.  It is not acceptable for anyone to do this, whatever their needs or difficulties.  It is right and just that this moral rule be clearly stated and enforced.  In this case, however, doing so did not stop the kicking.  Some people might have written the boy off as being mad or bad.  His teacher tried to understand the underlying issue.  She was able to try and think like the child who, being autistic, thought in a very different way to the way in which she thought.  Thinking like people who think in a very different way to you is difficult, but doing so allowed the teacher to understand the underlying issue of why the kicking was happening.  Understanding the underlying issue allowed her to solve the problem.  And solving the problem was, in the end, what allowed everyone to be happier.

My hope (with the forthcoming Italian referendum in mind, as well as the French and German elections) is that mainstream politicians across Europe learn from what has happened in the UK and US and take genuine steps to understand and address the underlying issues.  This is going to be hard, because there aren’t any easy answers to those issues, but the only alternative is to leave it to the far right to argue that kicking people is acceptable after all.  If, however, politicans can find away to address these underlying issues, then it seems probable that the EU will also have to take notice and reform.  This might possibly provide a way for the UK to come back from the brink.  When I reflect on how I voted in the referendum I realise that, although nothing that has happened or that I have read or that I have heard since has made think I made the wrong choice (although much that has happened has been deplorable), my initial belief hasn’t fundamentally changed at all.  The solution I still want is the one that was not on the ballot paper:  for the UK to be part of a reformed EU.

When I talk about the EU reforming, I don’t mean that the EU should bend to the will of one grumpy member state.  “No more renegotiation” was a reasonable position for the EU to take.  I believe that reform would be in the interests of all member states, because it isn’t just in the UK that anti-EU sentiment is rising.  It peaked here first because our relationship with the EU has been distant and fractured for some considerable time.  If the EU doesn’t take notice of what is happening and address people’s concerns then I think it will end up falling apart in a very damaging way.  I am reminded of a couple of personal encounters with Germans that I have heard about.  One was before the referendum where the German person voiced the opinion that he hoped the UK voted Leave, not because he disliked the UK or really wanted them to leave, but because he desperately wanted the EU to reform and he felt it would take a shock of that magnitude to make this happen.  The other encounter, with a different person, was after the referendum but the view expressed was much the same.

Events in the UK & US have rightly posed lots of questions about what sort of community we are living in and what sort of community we want to be living in.  Whatever our goals are for our community, if we set off in pursuit of them without clearly explaining where we are going and at such a pace that sections of our community get left behind, then it doesn’t matter how noble the goals we had for our community were.  We no longer have a community.  With groups of people finding themselves lost, afraid and angry, we have already broken our community.  This will be as true in the future as it is in the present and it has been in the past.

One day at school, as part of a carnival themed day, my class was given a samba dancing lesson.  As this went on, one child started to get a bit tearful about not being able to do all the steps.  After various attempts from all of the adults present to encourage the child to keep going, the dance instructor suggested that the child sit out and watch our next run through the dance, to see if that helped.  Afterwards, I went over and asked the child:  “When you were watching us dance just now, what did you see?”  After pausing for a response that didn’t come, I then asked:  “Did you see everyone getting all the steps correct and dancing in perfect unison?”  The child thought for a moment and then looked me straight in the eyes and said:  “Yes.”  Now, if you can imagine a group of 9-year-old children (and, if you know me, me) being taught a samba routine in half an hour, you might guess that what the child thought that they’d seen wasn’t actually true.  I certainly made lots of mistakes.  Lots of children stopped dancing at times because they’d lost their place and waited to come back in again when we got to a familiar bit.  We were all just muddling through as best as we could.  This is one of the things that characterised depression for me.  I often looked at other people leading their lives and thought that they were getting it all right and I was doing everything wrong.  People would tell me that what I thought I was seeing wasn’t true and that everyone was just muddling along as best they could.  What they were telling me kind of made sense, but I couldn’t bring myself to believe it.  It wasn’t that I thought they were wrong or just saying it to try and be kind, but what was in my head was just too powerful.

Another illustration of my depression is something that I wrote in response to my Jam for Tea post, so it may help to have a quick look at that.  A quick summary would be that I couldn’t find the jam in the fridge where it was supposed to be, but after looking patiently in several different places found that it was exactly where it was supposed to be, where I had first looked.  In discussion that followed on Facebook I wrote the following, “Alternatively, I could have looked in the fridge, not seen the jam, decided that it was my fault that it hadn’t been put back, thought about all the other things I hadn’t done, reached the conclusion that I’m a terrible human being and gone on to have not a single positive thought for at least a fortnight. When there wasn’t anything wrong in the first place.”  Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?  Except that I wrote it because it is true, or I might venture to say now:  “it was true”.  Well, maybe “fortnight” was something of an understatement!  Little things going wrong, coupled with an instinct to blame myself, led to a seemingly endless progression of things that had gone wrong being brought to mind, the blame for each of which my mind delighted in laying on my shoulders.  People would tell me that this was silly, that it wasn’t my fault that I couldn’t find the jam.  What they were telling me kind of made sense, but I couldn’t bring myself to believe it.  It wasn’t that I thought they were wrong or just saying it to try and be kind, but what was in my head was just too powerful.

What do I mean by “what was in my head was just too powerful”?  Well, my mind was very good at turning against me those things that would actually have helped me.  It would often persuade me that whatever was being suggested was probably a good idea in general and would probably help most people but that either it wouldn’t work for me or that there was no point trying it because I’d never manage to do it properly or keep it up.  The final weapon in my mind’s armoury though was to turn the remedy into a stick with which to beat myself.  If I did manage to try something and it did seem to help then before long my mind was asking me, “Why haven’t you done that before?”  The answer, of course, was that I was a terrible person for not having done it before and so the cycle of negative thinking started again.

For me, depression was a slow, creeping, insidious shadow.  It wasn’t triggered suddenly by some trauma or other, but gradually the ways of thinking I’ve tried to describe gained in power and frequency.  When change happens slowly like this you can end up thinking things that you would not have entertained at the start.  This can, of course, be a good thing.  In this case it wasn’t.  With my mind frequently telling me that I was useless and doing everything wrong, it seemed to be a logical conclusion that I was making life harder for the people around me (family, friends, colleagues).  When I had spent a long time thinking that I was making life harder for the people around me it seemed to be a logical conclusion that they would be better off without me.  When I had spent a long time thinking that the people around me would be better off without me it seemed logical to think that if I was killed in an accident then that would be for the best, even though people would be upset in the short term.

I’m going to stop here in my progression of thought because I want to reflect on being in this state.  It was a state I was in for a long time – for several years.  It felt normal to walk along a street, even on an otherwise good day, see a bus or lorry coming towards me and think that if it accidentally mounted the pavement and killed me then that would be for the best.  Because of the insidious progression of the depression I didn’t particularly stop to think that this wasn’t a normal state of mind.  And if anyone had asked me whether I was suicidal I would have said “No.”  Because I wasn’t.  I didn’t once think at this stage of actively doing anything to kill myself.

I wasn’t going to return to describing the destructive progression of thought on the pretexts of not needing to spell it out and of not wanting to upset anyone who loves me who is reading this.  However, I’m going to make myself carry on.  I’ll discuss my reasons for writing this whole post later on, but it is important that I be as honest as I can be with myself.  So, when I had spent a long time thinking that if I was killed in an accident then that would be for the best then, on a particularly bad day, it seemed logical to think that I should kill myself.  I was well aware that many people would be hurt, but was convinced that in the long run they would be better off without me.  I made a hurried plan, the details of which I don’t think are important here, beyond the facts that I was alone at home and the plan involved driving somewhere else.  However, when I went to get in the car I was stopped by a simple thought that I couldn’t not be at home when my wife and children got back.  The thought wasn’t that I couldn’t possibly kill myself but, as I said, I couldn’t not be at home.  Rather unsurprisingly, my mind was in quite a state at this point and in order to calm it down I drank most of a bottle of whisky.  Not a pleasant thing for my wife to come home to, but at least I was still alive.

That was my lowest point.  I would probably have had to stay in this state for quite a while before actually going through with trying to take my own life.  Fortunately, I have not had to discover that for myself.  You may have noticed that I have spoken of my depression in the past tense.  What has brought me to the point of being able to do this?  In the same way that it is difficult to describe my depression and difficult to give reasons for it, it is difficult to describe my recovery.  I am very fortunate to have been surrounded by people who wanted to me to get better and were prepared to do what they could to help.  In particular, I have a wife who has lived out her vow to have me in sickness as well as in health with amazing patience, love and fortitude.  Quite apart from anything she did or said directly, it is all down to her that I have had the time, space and help I needed to recover.  I feel like this is the point at which I should say that she is my rock, but I don’t like that phrase much.  If she’s a rock and I’m not then that sounds rather one sided and I certainly hope that I’m also there for her when she needs me.  If we are both rocks then that sounds like a rather inflexible relationship.  The only way that our marriage has lasted so far and through my depression has been by both of us being flexible and prepared to change.

Having people around me prepared to take the time to talk to me when, perhaps, they didn’t know what to say was very important.  This must have been a thankless task because it must have seemed like it was making no difference.  As I said above, what they were telling me kind of made sense, but I couldn’t bring myself to believe it.  It wasn’t that I thought they were wrong or just saying it to try and be kind, but what was in my head was just too powerful.  With the benefit of hindsight, however, I can see that it did make a difference in the following two ways.  Firstly, although I doubt it was perceptible, being told in my low moments that other people saw me differently and more positively than I saw yourself did take the sting out of those lows and help me keep going a bit longer.  Don’t underestimate the importance of being reminded that, as someone once sang, “Happiness is an option,” even if it is not an option you can actually take at the time.  Secondly, all the advice that, as I have said, kind of made sense did go in and get stored away.  Now, all those things that I kind of understood but couldn’t quite believe have joined together and now I can say “I get it.”  It isn’t that one person, or one book, or one technique provided all the answers, but the solutions that I now find work for me are an amalgam of things that all sorts of people suggested at all sorts of different times.

People giving me the space to talk was also very important.  This was where speaking to a professional was very useful.  As you might expect, we spent time looking back at how I got into this state.  Doing this gave me a much better understanding of myself, which is of course very useful, however in the end I realised that it wasn’t a process that would offer a definitive cause and therefore provide an obvious solution.  Another useful aspect of therapy was that voicing what is going on in my head gave me a chance to process it and understand it better.  In addition, sometimes, when I managed to be really honest about it, when I heard myself say it out loud then at some level I realised that it didn’t make all that much sense.  That actually, I wasn’t really as bad a person as my mind was telling me I was.

Many things were suggested to me that might help.  I was on medication for a while and, whilst I’m not convinced that it helped all that much, it may have made things a little better than they would otherwise have been.  If I was to pick one technique than I would have to say that I have found mindfulness meditation really helpful.  Like many things, I had several false starts where I tried it for a bit, didn’t manage to keep it up and consequently felt bad about it.  Then, one day whilst trying it out I really felt the maelstrom of thoughts in my head slow down and I felt able to notice negative thoughts come and, most importantly, then go away again.  Whilst not always easy to do, from then on at least I knew that it was something that could help and could leave me feeling much calmer.

My recovery was a gradual process for a long time.  At the right time, after a good deal of persuasion, getting back to work helped, especially doing something that, whilst not without its stresses, required me to be very much in the moment whilst at work and that I could leave behind when I left work.  Then, rather unexpectedly, the EU referendum resulted in a dramatic jump in this recovery process.  Suddenly I felt that I could look back at all things my loved ones and been saying to me for years and say, “Back then it kind of made sense, but now I really get it.”  As a Christian, I see God’s healing power in this sudden change.  For the first time in years, possibly even since adolescence, I was completely at peace with myself and with the world around me.  As someone once sang:

“I’m completely at peace with the world,
And the dark clouds around me,
That often surround me,
Just fall away into the night.
I’m not scared anymore.”

As I’ve touched on faith, I’ll have a look at something that we discussed in therapy:  Did the guilt associated with some Christian teaching on sin from childhood or adolescence play a part in my depression?  Possibly it did a bit.  And yet the answers that now seem obvious to me were there in my faith all along as well.  I remember on my confirmation course, at the age of 14 or 15, when being taught Jesus’ summary of the law (“You must love the Lord your God with all your life, and with all your mind.  You must love your neighbour as yourself.”) one boy asking, possibly somewhat facetiously, “What if you don’t love yourself?”  I think the discussion that followed was along the lines of that not being an excuse for not acting kindly to others.  The question, however, has always stayed with me, perhaps because Christian teaching sometimes seems at odds with Jesus’ implication here that we should love ourselves.  It isn’t, of course, just Christianity that has a problem with this.  The phrase “he loves himself” is rarely said as a positive comment on a person’s virtues.  What does love here mean?  Well, in a famous passage, which has been familiar to me from a similar age, Paul helpfully tells us:

“Love’s great-hearted; love is kind,
knows no jealousy, makes no fuss,
is not puffed up, knows no shameless ways,
doesn’t force its rightful claim;
doesn’t rage or bear a grudge,
doesn’t cheer at others’ harm,
rejoices, rather, in the truth.
Love bears all things, believes all things,
Love hopes all things, endures all things.”

This is often read at weddings, my own included, but I understood from when I was a teenager that it wasn’t just about married love.  I got that it was about the way Christians should behave towards other people.  I didn’t get that it was also how I should behave towards myself.  In my depression I was not kind to myself.  I raged against myself, bore a grudge against myself (or, to use a different translation, I kept a catalogue of wrongs against myself).  I cheered at harming myself and in expecting perfection from myself I was puffed up.  It seems obvious to me now, but, like my jar of jam, although the answers were where I expected to find them and although I had looked right at them, I hadn’t really seen them.

I titled this post “My Depression”.  I can’t write about other people’s depressions, or depression in general, because I have only experienced my own.  It is something that is really hard to describe.  Hard because it is difficult thinking about it, but also hard to find the words that will help someone else understand what it is really like.  In the past, depression is something I found really difficult to understand in other people.  Although I tried to understand, the commonly held opinion that life is hard for everyone and you just need to get on with it kept nagging away.  Now I know that you can “just get on with it” for quite a long time, but there can come a point when what is in your head is too powerful and then you can no longer “just get on with it”.  So, I’m writing this in the hope that it helps some people to understand more about depression.  I hope also that it might give hope to anyone reading who is depressed, or living with someone who is depressed.  But also, I’m doing this for me.  At the moment I can look at myself and see the difference between the depressed me and the not-depressed me.  I hope that, by writing it down, if those dark clouds roll back in and surround me again then those around me can point me to this to remind myself of the difference.  And because this is something that I have written of my own free will then I hope that it will be much harder for my mind to argue against it.

For now, though, I’m enjoying the freedom of living without my mind trying to take me down all the time.  I’m enjoying feeling really present in the world.  I’m enjoying the things, such as reading scripture, which will rebuild and nurture me, without my mind turning them against me.  It is a truly liberating experience for me.  As someone else once sang:

“I can see clearly, now the pain has gone.”

I’ve just watched ‘The Grand Design’, the first episode of ‘Yes, Prime Minister’, in honour of the dual topical subjects of a new prime minister and trident.  In the best traditions of the series it is both thought provoking and very funny.  Although times have changed since 1986, many of the issues have not.  It must be really strange to suddenly finding yourself running a country and writing sealed instructions to the military indicating whether they should retaliate in the event of the whole government being taken out in a nuclear strike.

I’m always reluctant when it comes to pride, especially when applied to national identity.  Saying “I’m proud to be British” has always felt like saying “It is intrinsically better to be British than non-British”, which sounds racist.  In that sense, saying “I’m proud to be European” is no better, as it still implies that being non-European makes you somehow of less value.  However, I do tell my children that I am proud of them.  Although I love them because they are mine, I know they are not intrinsically better than other children just because they are mine.  I can’t help feeling proud of them though, when they do something which I think is a good example to other children.  It doesn’t have to be something perfect, just something that helps, in a small way, to make the world a better place.

If I think about pride in that way, then when my country does something which I think is a good example to other countries I do feel a sense of pride.  London 2012 did give me a sense of pride, as despite all the prior cynicism, I think we did put on a good show for the world.  Our government’s commitment to maintaining our level of overseas aid at a time of austerity at home also gives me a little sense of pride.  It may not be perfect, but it sets an example to others and helps, in a small way, to make the world a better place.

One thing that I noticed was common to the EU referendum campaign and the debate on trident was reflection on the UK’s standing in the world / place in the world order / seat at the top table, however the question of status relative to other countries was being phrased at the time.  My Christian identity makes me uncomfortable thinking about worldly status as an end worthy in itself.  My depression counselling taught me the importance of being comfortable with who I am and of not constantly comparing myself to others.  (My Christian identity would translate this as “the importance of being the person that God has called me to be”.)  I would love my country to be able to find a way to be comfortable with who we all are, and let the rest take care of itself.

As a child growing up under the shadow of the nuclear arms race, I was comforted by the thought in Sting’s 1985 song ‘Russians’ that these obscene weapons wouldn’t be used “If the Russians love their children too.”  Now I look forward to a time when we can look our enemies (by which I mean those that wish to cause us harm) in the face and say “Even if you don’t love your own children enough to keep the peace, we love your children enough to never contemplate the use of such obscene weapons.”  I might not be rivalling Sting as a lyricist, but what if we, as a country, did something really big like being the first country to voluntarily move from possessing some nuclear weapons to possessing none?  Wouldn’t that set an example to the rest of the world and help make the world a better place?  Whilst it wouldn’t immediately result in other nuclear countries rushing to join us, it would show that it is possible to take such a leap of faith.  In an uncertain world, it would be a leap of faith.  For a prime minister and government charged with the responsibility of maintaining our security it would be, as Sir Humphrey would no doubt say, a courageous decision.  But it would give the UK a standing in the world of which I could be truly proud.

Is now the time?  Although I realise that Monday’s vote in the House of Commons was more about political theatre than real decision making, now (in a broader sense of the next few years) is certainly an opportunity.  Once trident is renewed there won’t be a better opportunity until it starts nearing the end of its life again.  I’d like to say “Yes, now is the time”.  But perhaps this is an occasion where my ideals need to be tempered with a bit more realism?

In discussion on Facebook of my last post “Leadsom & Motherhood” a friend pointed me to the following quotes from the same Times interview that gave us the motherhood quotes, but this time on nannies:

“As an employer we’re not, let’s face it, most of us don’t employ men as nannies, most of us don’t.  Now you can call that sexist, I call that cautious and very sensible when you look at the stats.  Your odds are stacked against you if you employ a man.  We know paedophiles are attracted to working with children.  I’m sorry, but those are the facts.”

These quotes appear in several places online, for example the Evening Standard.  Now, I’m not obsessed with Andrea Leadsom and not about to rename this blog “Analysing Andrea”, but I did find it interesting thinking through these comments, especially after another friend pointed out to me that the same misconception had also driven an airline seating policy at one time.  Here’s a report from the BBC about that incident.

Behind these rather unflattering conclusions about the male of the species, lies a pretty common misconception of risk.  On the face of it, Andrea Leadsom’s “facts” appear not unreasonable.  Most people would probably say that a majority of child abusers are male and that child abusers do seek positions of trust with children.  If we accept those two assumptions (I will come back to them later) then it would follow that employing a male nanny would increase your risk of employing a child abuser.  However, given that the probability of employing a child abuser as a nanny is, thankfully, very low, then even if there is a significant increase in risk then your probability of employing a male child abuser as a nanny is still going to be very low.  The same situation often crops up in health related headlines, for example: “Eating mushrooms twice a week doubles your risk of early onset of baldness”.  (I made that up.  Just in case anyone is wondering.)  It may be true, and may be of scientific interest, but if the underlying risk is tiny then the effect is also tiny and of little practical public health interest.

If you think that employing a female nanny is going to keep your children safe, then you are giving yourself a false sense of security.  There are also female child abusers out there.  There is some discussion of figures in this 2009 Guardian article.  The uncertainty surrounding the numbers of potential child abusers (as opposed to convictions) casts some doubt on the assumptions made above.  Furthermore, this 2009 BBC article claims that “Stranger attacks by women hardly exist, so most female paedophiles are winning the trust of children first and either have a position of care working with children like a babysitter or they are a relative.”  If this is true then it means that the gender split between child abusers seeking employment as a nanny might be much closer than that of child abusers as a whole, again casting doubt on the assumptions made above.

You also need to think about what you are saying in cases like this.  It is the same as the trouble caused by racially profiled stop and search policing.  Whatever logic has led to the proposal you have to be able to take a step back and recognise that if you treat everyone from a certain sector of the population as a potential criminal just for being a part of that sector then you are going to cause a lot of hurt and anger.

The final thing to say about Andrea Leadsom’s nanny argument is that it ignores the obvious explanation and invents a complicated spurious one instead.  That is something else which is not uncommon.  The obvious explanation in this case being that most people employ female nannies because most nannies are female.  It also ignores the fact that a large proportion of abuse is carried out by family and friends.

None of this, however, has altered my view expressed in my previous post.  I like to listen to what people have to say and then make my own mind up about them, but it is really difficult to do this if you can’t trust media reports, because they are usually all that you have to go on.  If someone has views that I disagree with that will become apparent from listening to them.  I don’t need a journalist to distort what they are saying to “help” me reach that conclusion.

I know very little about Andrea Leadsom, but my immediate thought when I heard the headlines about her motherhood comments was, as it very often is in situations where someone is reported to have said something outrageous, “I wonder what she really said?”  Generally speaking, I never get around to going back to source, but in this instance it doesn’t take more than a second on an internet search engine to find audio extracts and transcripts.  If you want to take a look or a listen then two options are The Independent or The Huffington Post.

What I saw and heard immediately confirmed my usual suspicion that it wasn’t as black and white as the headlines would suggest.  It sounds to me like someone who, when asked repeatedly about family and politics, is trying to explain what they mean to her.  If you have children then of course you are likely to look at the future from that perspective.  She acknowledges that what she is saying could be misinterpreted and be hurtful.  She was probably naïve to go on and say it to a journalist and does sound rather clumsy in trying to explain what she means.  So I do understand that people can find what she said insensitive and hurtful and that the resulting headlines caused outrage. I also understand that some people may read and listen and come to a different view to mine.  That’s life, in all its shades of grey.

However, I don’t believe that the headlines “Being a mother gives me edge on May – Leadsom.  Tory minister says she will be better leader because childless home secretary lacks ‘stake in future.’” are a fair reflection of a part of an interview in which the interviewee says “I don’t want this to be ‘Andrea has children, Theresa hasn’t’, because I think that would be really horrible…”  Given that some people have questioned the legitimacy of our new Prime Minister because the Conservative party members did not get a vote and that the furore over these comments contributed to Andrea Leadsom’s withdrawal, I would say that this careless journalism has damaged the legitimacy of our government at a time when we really don’t need it to be so harmed.

During the referendum campaign some research showed that whilst younger people were more likely to vote Remain, older people were more likely to vote Leave.  This led to the suggestion that older Leave voters should alter their vote to Remain because that was what younger people wanted and the younger people were the ones who would have to live with the decision.  (I know of one voter who did alter their vote in this way.)  This suggestion troubled me for two reasons.  Firstly, in a democracy people should be able to vote as they choose (according to their own conscience) and not be pressured into altering their vote because of what other people want.  I don’t believe that you have to be young to care about the future of the country, any more than you have to have children to do so.  Secondly, thinking through the suggestion quickly led me to the question:  “At what age should we deny citizens their right and responsibility to vote?”  That didn’t feel like a very comfortable question to be asking.

The research findings that started this off did not surprise me.  If I had been 20 years younger I would certainly have approached voting in a different way and may well have reached a different conclusion.  When I was younger I saw things more in black and white, but as I get older and learn more about what can be achieved within the confines of how the world works I see things in increasingly varied shades of grey.  I have not surrendered my ideals, but my choices, which were once directly driven by ideals, are now tempered with a degree of realism.  In addition, experience has taught me that sometimes things that appear on the surface to be aligned with my ideals are actually, when I dig through the shades of grey, running counter to them.

So, young and old do not necessarily hold different ideals, but younger people tend to be driven more directly by those ideals, whereas older people tend to have their ideals tempered by realism.  Not right or wrong, just different.  There is a reason why the term “elder” is still used in certain situations to signify a position of leadership.  It doesn’t mean that older people have all the answers or are right all the time, but it does mean that they might have some useful insights into what may or may not work in pursuit of common ideals.  On the other hand, older people can sometimes be so focused on the details of realistic solutions that they can lose sight of their ideals.  That’s when it is really useful to have younger people around to remind all of us about our ideals.  It’s about balance.  So the old are not better than the young.  Neither are the young necessarily better than the old.  We are all just people.  The young do however have the opportunity to make things better if they are prepared to listen respectfully to the old in order to understand what they learned in living their lives.  The old, of course, also need to be prepared to explain their views patiently and carefully to the young.

It is the same reason as why we need historians to patiently explain the past to us.  The past is not better than the present. Neither is the present necessarily better than the past. Whenever or wherever we are born we are all just people. We do however have the opportunity to make things now a little bit better than they were in the past. But we can only do this if we listen really carefully to those that went before us to understand what they learned in living their lives.  If we can do this then they can give us a bit of a head start.  If we then work hard we can give a head start to the next generation, if they choose to listen to us. It’s called progress.  It happens slowly.

In my last post I mentioned Social Stories.  These were developed as a tool to help explain life to Autistic children.  Writers of Social Stories as advised to try and be positive, clear and truthful.  In the pursuit of truth I have found that when writing about people and life I use absolutes less and less, because they are hardly ever truthful.  I now find that when thinking about people and life I use absolutes less and less, because they are hardly ever truthful.

“There’s no point listening to Ms Bloggs.”

“Why not?”

“I’m never going to learn anything from her.”

“How do you know that?”

“She’s a total monster.”

“Why?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“No, not to me.”

“Well, how can any sane person think like that?”

“How do you know what she thinks?”

“Just listen to what she says.”

“And…”

“Well, I just disagree with everything that Ms Bloggs has ever said.”

“Have you heard everything that Ms Bloggs has ever said?”

“OK then, I disagree with everything that I have ever heard Ms Bloggs say.”

“Absolutely everything?”

“I suppose that what I really mean is that I disagree with most things that I have heard Ms Bloggs say.”

 “Can you say that in a more positive way?”

“I agree with a few things that I have heard Ms Bloggs say.”

In a campaign dominated by discussion of the financial implications of the options before us, I found it refreshing when I heard someone say:  “At the end of the day, it isn’t all about money.  There is such a thing as quality of life.”  This was said by a person about whom I had been able to persuade myself that I could say:  “I agree with a few things that I have heard him say.”

I was making the kids tea just now (at about tea-time, as it happens) and I wanted the raspberry jam.  I keep opened jars of jam in the fridge.  I therefore looked in the fridge for it, but couldn’t see it.  I thought that maybe it hadn’t been put away after it was last used.  I looked on the kitchen surfaces, but I still couldn’t see it.  I thought that maybe it had been put away in the cupboard where I keep the unopened jars of jam.  I looked in that cupboard, but I still couldn’t see it.  I looked again in the fridge, studying every jar I could see really carefully, but I still couldn’t see it.  I looked again on the kitchen surfaces, studying every jar I could see really carefully, but I still couldn’t see it.  I looked again in the cupboard, studying every jar I could see really carefully, but I still couldn’t see it.  I looked in some random cupboards; cupboards that I never put jars of jam in.  I still couldn’t see it.  Finally I went back to the fridge and opened the door.  Standing in the middle of the top shelf, right at the front, at roughly head height, was the jar of raspberry jam.

I knew it was there somewhere.  I looked in the place I expected to find it.  I looked in some places where I thought I might find it.  I looked in some places where I didn’t expect to find it.  And when I finally found it, it was, literally, right in front of my eyes where I had expected to find it all along.

Last week, in my role as Teaching Assistant, I wrote what we call a Social Story to try and help a 9 year old boy who is having some difficulty with strong emotions.  The following paragraph is an extract from this which somehow seems appropriate in a wider context at the moment.

Calm is a nice feeling.  When someone is calm their body feels relaxed and they find it easier to think clearly and make sensible choices.  If someone feels angry or sad then they might find it difficult to be calm.  This means that they might find it harder to think clearly and make sensible choices.  If they are not calm then there are things that they can do that can help them to be calm again.  One thing that they could do is to take a deep breath in, count to 5 and then breath out again really slowly.  Another thing that they could do is to think about something nice.

The enforced pause in triggering Article 50 is giving us the time in which to take a deep breath in , count to 5 and then breath out again really slowly and in which to think about something nice.  Then we might find it easier to think clearly and make sensible choices.