What to do when you don’t know what to do

Something pretty sad happened about ten days ago. A man I cared about was killed by the state of Texas.

The following week, I received two letters from him. That was wierd. I was in a pretty wierd place about the whole thing anyway. It felt sort of like it had happened but more like it was a story I was telling people about an imaginary world. An imaginary world where we kill each other to teach others that they shouldn’t kill each other. We strap them down and give them an injection and watch for 22 long minutes while they gurgle and choke and die.

This world sounds too crazy to be true. So maybe it’s not true, I told myself. Maybe this whole episode is happening in my mind.

And so, as time went by, I went from being pretty gutted half of the time and disbelieving the other half, to now total disbelief. There are no more letters arriving in the mail from him.

He is fading from my mind. I don’t know how to make myself understand that it has happened. It feels that maybe the whole thing never existed, maybe he never existed?

Walking into the high security unit last month in Texas and talking on a telephone to a man behind a glass screen seems like it happened a million years ago. In my imagination.

The whole thing is getting harder and harder to comprehend. Occasionally, when I do sit and think about it and this suddenly awful feeling washes over me, I quickly move my thoughts onto something else before the sorrow overwhelms me.

I’ve been moving my thoughts on pretty efficiently for ten days now.

And I’m worried I won’t ever be able to understand what’s happened because I’m doing the moving-on thing automatically now.

So now I don’t know what to do. How to move on. At the moment, it seems I have relegated him to a compartment in my mind that I’m not sure I’ll open again.

But this man was important to me. He meant a lot. He was a real person and his life must not be allowed to mean nothing.

I guess I’m asking you all what I should do? How do I live with the awfulness of what has happened but not spend all day feeling miserable?

K is for…

KNOWLEDGE!

(I’m handing you over to our guest blogger again today, enjoy!)

This week’s ramble is about KNOWLEDGE. What is it? Where does it come from? How do we acquire it? And, more worryingly, can it be dangerous?

You’ve heard people say someone is “the fount of all knowledge” but I prefer the opposite view. Check out the last two lines of the Francis Duggan poem You Are Not A Fountain Of Knowledge (2008):

“We could live for a million years or longer instead of eight decades or so
And about the great World all around us we would still have much to learn and know.”

Is knowledge simply facts that are “out there” waiting to be discovered by you and me? For example if I wrote the word “quidnunc” would you say, “What’s he on about? What now?” (You certainly could because the word is made up from two Latin words quid & nunc, meaning – what & now!) In English, the word means a gossipmonger or busybody. It was “also used to describe a person who pretended to know everything” (A Dictionary of Trades, Titles & Occupations, Colin Waters, 2002). Is it in everyday use now? Definitely not. Are you going to remember it? Probably not. Has your knowledge, at least temporarily, been increased/improved by knowing this fact? Possibly.

Or is knowledge only what you, as an individual, retain in your memory? In other words it exists only while you remember it. Is there a “general knowledge” out there somewhere waiting for you to discover & learn it? Or is there really only “personal knowledge”? Do you see the problem? Knowledge, the dictionaries say, is “that which is known”. Note, NOT “that which can be known.” A fact can be “out there” waiting to be known, as many pioneering scientists & explorers will tell us. Once discovered, the fact can then become part of your/my “knowledge” but only if we take it in and remember it.

So, can knowledge really be dangerous? It certainly can if it’s about sensitive issues: political, personal, medical, relational etc.

However I’d like to suggest another area where it can be dangerous……. memory. How so? Well if you think about it, from a certain age all of our brains and memory banks stop growing and then begin to decay, to lose cells. We reach a finite maximum number of cells which then begins to decline. As time goes on this loss becomes more and more evident in a person’s ability to remember stuff and to function as they used to. It’s a process called “growing old” and something most of us, should we survive, will have to go through at some point.

What happens can be demonstrated by using the analogy of an empty glass being filled with water. Imagine your memory cells being represented by the water and it being poured into the glass until it reaches the rim of the glass (i.e. like the brain, up to the age at which it reaches its maximum number of cells). If you then need to remember something more what happens? You pour in some more water and, in a perfect experiment, there will be an overflow of exactly the amount you poured in. Which water overflows? The stuff right at the top! The water at the bottom (the older memories) stays where it is. (Incidentally that’s why, I believe, 80-90 year old people can remember their first day at school but not necessarily what they did last week or even yesterday. The new memories for today have displaced other recent memories which were at the top of the glass.)

Now can you see the danger? In order to increase your knowledge, in a particular area, you will have to lose some other knowledge. I don’t want to put you off “learning” but the difficulty, of course, is that you don’t have a choice which knowledge the brain ditches in order to make room for the new stuff. That’s why you need to think very carefully about what you remember! There is no deleted file or Recycle Bin, with your memories in, which you can choose to “Restore”. When they’re gone, they’re gone! Scary, eh!

So then, has your knowledge, actually about knowledge itself, been increased by reading this? And I wonder what knowledge you’ve lost in order to remember this. NOW, if you can, without looking back, tell me what “quidnunc” means!

F is for…

FILING!

If any of you work in an office, you probably don’t like filing. Most people I know don’t like it. It’s tedious, takes forever and it’s so easy to get to the end and realise you’ve done something wrong and everything’s in the wrong place.

And that’s why I can’t explain the fact that I love filing. I love it. I love it when there is a pile of paperwork chaos and you come along and impose order on it, give everything a home, in a nice neat way. I once did some work with a project which had only just been set up. There was a small office space, some empty filing cabinets, a computer and the biggest disorganised mess I’ve ever seen in an office. Did I think ‘O no! What a nightmare!’ No! I rubbed my hands with glee and thought ‘I can’t WAIT to file all this stuff!’

I made dividers for in the filing cabinet. I looked through every individual piece of paper and worked out which category it belonged in. I bought marker pens and highlighters and gave each piece of paper a brief description so I wouldn’t have to read everything again to work out what it was about. I worked late. I came early. I found muscles I never had, lifting stacks of paperwork. I shunned company or food or even drinks. I HAD A PROJECT! AND I WANTED TO COMPLETE IT!

It probably took about three weeks of half days here and there as I had a full time job somewhere else. After everything had gone into a place in the physical filing cabinets, I then got started on the electronic filing. I think I might love electronic filing even more. I have a certain way that I name files, which I wrote up on an instruction sheet, should someone else dare to step inside MY office to use the computer and try to save something which didn’t have the proper name format. God forbid!

My memory is quite good when I’m in project mode because I’m really into what I’m doing. So even after there was order imposed and it looked like a normal office, with paperwork all in a proper place, I would get calls on my mobile, while I was at my other job, asking me where the piece of paper for the business bank account, with details of the loan agreement was. And I knew. I just knew. “Second drawer down in the large blue cabinet next to the computer. It’s near the middle, and the tab says Business Banking Natwest.” It was just there, in my memory.

Omygoodness, I think I need to file something! Writing this post has really excited me!