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  • Maybe youve crashed again - and youre in the dark familiar place. As ever, one mess-up

  • reminds you of all the fiascos youve generated in the past and, more broadly, of your fundamental

  • idiocy and - beyond that - the doubtful nature of your entire existence.

  • The next steps from here are well known: retreat, despair, flagellation, feeling yet smaller,

  • ever greater doubt and deeper self-loathing. You have mined this cavern expertly over the

  • years. Maybe - before this latest mini catastrophe - you’d been feeling a bit stronger, you’d

  • come to expect a little more of life. As if! This is a return to reality; you are back

  • now where you assume you belong, the sad subterranean place from which you should have never have

  • sought to escape.

  • But what about if, this time, just for once, as a mad experiment in living (and with little

  • left to lose), you tried a different route, you chose a fresh approach to despair, you

  • chose to argue with it using a strange weapon moulded out of an attitude of radical melancholy

  • and defiant vulnerability.

  • What if you told yourself a few sharply different things. For a start, how on earth were you

  • to know? How are any of us meant to lead the unblemished lives we cruelly assume it’s

  • our responsibility to lead when we possess so little of the information, about ourselves

  • and the conditions of life, that are required? Why do we keep feeling surprised and angry

  • that we fail around love and work, friendship and family given that we have so few of the

  • tools necessary to live with any semblance of wisdom? The schools don’t work, the books

  • don’t know and our minds are desperately intermittent ambiguous and misfiring organs.

  • The point is not whether or not we will mess up but just how badly and in what area. Failure

  • is the ineluctable norm.

  • But there are options to how we tell the story of each new reversal. We might thread these

  • into a narrative of continuous gloom, or we might assemble them into a more compassionate

  • and imaginative (and sometimes warmly funny) tale. Sometimes failure might just be a mishap

  • rather than a sign that we don’t deserve to live. A rejection might not have to be

  • a harbinger of unlimited doom. It is open to us to arrange the very same facts into

  • another kind story.

  • Nor should we torture ourselves thinking that others wouldn’t have made our mistakes.

  • They didn’t come from the same place as we did. We had our own distinctive histories

  • that made us particularly predisposed to blindness and weakness in specific areas.

  • What is sure is that none of us is ever beyond regular encounters with total stupidity. We

  • should accept our idiocy with grace. We need only think ahead to old age to lose any remaining

  • brittle attachment to dignity. In a little while, sure enough, well once again be

  • as helpless as an infant but a good deal less sympathetic, with prostate issues and an adult

  • bib. The best wisdom were capable of involves never losing sight of our own ridiculousness

  • - in a kind way.

  • Naturally, the reality of our inner lives can feel unusually desperate to us. But that’s

  • only because we don’t know the lives of others in sufficient detail. If we did, we’d

  • find all the same longing, compromise, misery and awkwardness. We aren’t uniquely awful;

  • we just know ourselves unusually well.

  • What we need is the darkest kind of celebration, a politely giant fuck you to the universe

  • for the way we have wound up as bits of semicoherent, semi-conscious suffering biological matter

  • pinned to a spinning rock near a fading star without a clue of how to conduct ourselves

  • meaningfully. All who can recognise the miserable facts with dark humour are our natural friends,

  • to whom we should turn and share bleakly funny jokes as we head to the gallows and the ultimate

  • catastrophe that awaits us all.

  • We may be experts at beating ourselves up, but this is a banal sport weve triumphed

  • at for too long. Let’s try explore the forgotten glamour of giving ourselves a break and, once

  • in a while, of turning towards light, reassurance, and a bit of compassionate cosiness.

  • Follow the link on your screen now to explore our range of books, games and gifts all designed to help you better understand yourself.

Maybe youve crashed again - and youre in the dark familiar place. As ever, one mess-up

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