Limbo or Purgatory? The only game in town...

Apparently after the last round of bizarre Gilbertian and Sullivanian debates in the Commons, the Speaker remarked that we were ‘in limbo’ regarding Brexit. Jacob Rees-Mugg, the class sneak of the Tory Party, corrected this, saying that limbo was abolished by the Pope some time ago, and he should know, after all? The Pope, I mean. So now all the repentant sinner has to look forward to is purgatory.

I thought I might look these terms up as a matter of attempting to cudgel some kind of brain activity after years of the dumbing down of following British politics. Like all the English language, those words that began as belonging to a given genre, like religion, soon become incorporated into daily speak and we use them regardless, as concepts that clearly exist for us, except we don’t feel obliged to attach them to any given hierarchy any more.

Hence we now think of ‘limbo as “an uncertain period of awaiting a decision or resolution; an intermediate state or condition”  Whereas purgatory is felt to “have the quality of cleansing or purifying”.

In other words, the Catholics did not want sinners to get the idea that they only had to endure a rather long, possibly boring, period of waiting, before a decision would be made to allow them into heaven. So, they changed the rules to include an idea of a pretty tough, painful period in which all your sins have to be purged before they let you in. Readers of this blog will however be delighted to know that, whichever turns out to be correct, they do let you in in the end! What I think the church missed in all this theologising is that it doesn’t happen after death! Oh no, no such luck! Both purgatory and limbo are here with us right now. For populists, it is simply a long and boring wait. A wait that they would prefer to usefully employ by watching back episodes of ‘Strictly’. While for the anti-populist crowd, it is more of a painful purging of whatever lingering hopes of governmental sanity they had left. Choose your position! Choose your weapons. The final dual is only just round the corner: pistols at dawn, and don’t forget to bring a second and a surgeon in case you need your brain lancing at the end!   

As G&S pointed out in ‘Iolanthe’

When in that House M.P.'s divide,

  If they've a brain and cerebellum, too,

They've got to leave that brain outside,

  And vote just as their leaders tell 'em to.

But then the prospect of a lot

  Of dull M. P.'s in close proximity,

  All thinking for themselves, is what

    No man can face with equanimity.

Let's rejoice with loud Fal la--Fal la la!

That Nature always does contrive--Fal lal la!

  That every boy and every gal

  That's born into the world alive

    Is either a little Liberal

    Or else a little Conservative!

      Fal lal la!

Believe it or not, Private Willis’s lament, above, was first performed in 1882. And nothing, it seems, has changed! We are still following the well-trodden ways of our ancestors, knowing which tribe we have been born into, and voting just as our leaders tell us to! G & S obviously had doubts about whether we could cope with a load of MPs thinking for themselves! It would, indeed, be extraordinary. The equivalent of having no more opiates for the people to amuse themselves with! And we can’t have that, can we? 

How do I find time to...?

In the writers' group I belong to, an excellent place to boost your creativity and separate yourself from all the surrounding angst in this difficult world, one of the big problems that comes up again and again is, "How do I find time to write?" Not that members don't want to write. They do. But they have busy lives in the main, working long hours to feed and clothe families, keep up their other family obligations, and see friends. So doesn't everybody suffer from a shortage of time? How do those brilliant elite athletes that I saw doing so well in the World Championships - congratulations to those who won, and especially to those who nearly won, which is far more difficult to motivate yourself about - manage with their massive training schedules? Yes, some of them get funding to take time from work, it's true, but not all. We also heard of cases of people getting special dispensations to take time off work to go to Doha. Imagine that level of dedication if you can.

Think, too, of those who find time in less spectacular ways. They collect for charity, pick up other people's rubbish in the park, run a weekend camper van and go places every weekend! If you really think about it honestly, the time available is not the problem. There are more difficult, underlying issues that MASQUERADE as lack of time. I gave up time management books years ago. They were often written by men, who live different lives from women by definition. And they took a pretty cerebral approach to living, famous for its failures. Then, too, there is a lot of spurious faith in something called 'will power' around. I have puzzled over this faculty for years. What the hell is will power?

There is no place in the brain where your will power is lodged. This we can attest after decades of neuroscientific study. It doesn't have its own little patch of neurocircuitry. It is clearly distributed in varying amounts, for no particular reason, both in terms of individuals and their capacities. Some people can will themselves to go swimming daily. Others cannot will themselves to pass up a cheese sandwich, no matter how hard they try. The fact that we believe it exists doesn't mean that it does! It's a belief, no more than that. A sort of religious faith, that if only we really try harder, we will succeed, no matter what the odds against us! Here's a useful life principle:  We cannot be anything we choose. The belief that we can is one of those madder ideas of our time and it's time we shot it down in flames. Different individuals have different capacities, but we're all good at something. Far better spend your time finding out what your own speciality is, than summoning up daily willpower (eke!) to be the ballet dancer you are determined to be!

My own experience has been that few problems boil down to will power. When my mind and attitude are working sanely and normally together, I don't seem to need willpower. Recently, in one of those flashes of insight that hit you in the middle of the night, I realised that the notion of willpower is a leftover from the heroic age: when Hercules laboured mightily to clean out the Augean stables, when Achilles fought and killed Hector, the son of King Priam of Troy. Or - move it a little closer - when men gave their lives in the trenches during the First World War for the doubtful conviction that national glory was worth dying for. The idea of the hero has not died out at all, in my opinion. Cultural and social standards change, but 'the heroic will' remains as a fragment of what was once the only acceptable behaviour for us to take. (I hate to say it, but it was a popular idea with the Nazis!)

In Jungian terms, the hero is archetypal. Don't be confused by the language. He just means it is an inherent part of human nature. I believe male psychotherapists have tried to argue that the power of the idea of heroism is no more, because, understandably, they are fed up, as males, with being asked to be the hero every time. But as Jung himself asserted, archetypes do not change that easily. I believe that they adapt, rather than change. And 'the heroic will' is only the latest manifestation of the ancient hero archetype. It takes the modern form of a persistent conviction that if only we had enough willpower, we could do anything we wanted.

So how do we work with archetypes in ourselves? If they don't change, how do we help them adapt?

Here are a few suggestions.

1.   The archetype that gives us trouble is damaged in some way. It has been reduced in scope to something more limited than that intended by the people of the heroic ages of Greece and Rome. Being a hero was more than being a great, brave warrior. It was also about daily character - being a good father, a conscientious ruler, carrying out your duties faithfully even when you were bored, and viewing your behaviour from a moral standpoint as well as in terms of whether it pleased your boss or indeed your wife. And that age expected women to be heroic too, even though they were often portrayed as long suffering and faithful unto death - which are forms of heroism, after all. There have been many examples through the ages of women of great physical as well as moral courage. So our modern 'willpower' is a very limited idea of this type of heroism. It is the hero stripped of everything but his or her determination 'to get this done'. Whether 'getting this done' matters a lot, or not a jot!

So get back your sense of a being a broader human being than that! You are not defined by whether you always carry out your New Year's resolutions. They may be daft resolutions. Or whether you can stick to a diet! It may be a daft or unnecessary diet. Think about all the truly heroic things you do daily and give yourself no credit for: put up with the children when they are howling and driving you nuts, keep up with the washing when you feel like sleeping for a week. Let the archetype of the hero flourish in new cultural surroundings, like ours, where we are often called on to do and be things we don't particularly like, but we don't simply give up, lie down and die. Amid this plethora of 'things we have to do', a few missed goals is neither here nor there. And the modern assertion of the importance of what we 'want to do' is a useful balance to that type of thinking. Both matter and have their place.

2.   Armed with more self-esteem, think about what really matters to you. If you want to write, does it really matter to you, or not very much? If a) it matters, and b) you still don't find time to do it, you have a problem with your priorities. You are choosing to let other things drive you that matter less. This is a recipe for unhappiness. Let me suggest some things we do that matter less.

i)     use spare time watching boring TV or on Facebook - you do it because your friends do it, be honest!

ii)    spend most evenings seeing friends you don't really love or find enhancing for your life, because you don't want people to think you are lonely (hint: everyone I've ever met is lonely! Why? Because it is human nature that we live greatly inside our own heads. You can be in the middle of a hundred people at a party and still feel lonely, if there is no one there you feel you can communicate with. You would have been better off at home writing your first great novel. For every person who has a perfectly attuned companion in their life, I could give you ten who don't. But even if you have it, you still have time to write! We need more than the companionship of one.

iii)   take on things you don't enjoy or have time for because you hate to say no.

iv)    refuse to sit down and think it through. Keep it instead like a wailing banshee at the back of your head that goes, "O, woe is me, I'm not doing any writing! Again!" (Hint: worrying and whingeing and feeling guilty are not the same as thinking! Not at all.) When thinking, you say to yourself: what exactly is the problem? Why is it happening? Is there anything I can do - any small steps I can take - to improve this situation? It is seldom there is nothing you can do, when you really think about it.  Usually there are quite a few things you can do, but they clash with items i), ii) and iii)! Now here's a moment where your newly adapted heroism can take centre stage. Saying no requires heroism, be sure. For some people it is the hardest challenge they have ever faced. For most of us, it is not something we look forward to. Similarly, anything that has become a habit, to say nothing of an outright addiction, is going to take all the heroism we have to break it. (Hint: in this case, and I am not talking about serious addictions like alcohol and drugs, cold turkey is the best. It is far the most painful, but the pain is a learning experience. Going without your mobile even for an hour could make your fingers twitch and your head ache. Good! It reminds you how far you have been in the thrall of the little beast! Do you want to spend the rest of your life obeying that thing? Do you know how short human life actually is? Life is not a rehearsal. This is the only chance we get. 

v)   when you can feel the pain and do it anyway, it is not because you have exerted your willpower. It is because you have allowed sane thinking to assert itself. Hear yourself talking sanity to the rest of you and follow its measured advice.