The quotes post

So if you hadn’t guessed, in these last few days I’m aiming for a blog post every day! I’ve been thinking about the things I want to cover and for today’s post there were two different topics I couldn’t decide between writing about. The first is how I’m feeling about being back and the return to London, work and the life I lived before my career break and the second is the quotes I’ve heard throughout the year that have resonated with me. However, when I reviewed the latter, I realised that actually many of them are relevant to the former and so I decided to do a weird amalgam of the two.

Whilst I was away I listened to a lot of podcasts, for which a favourite of mine has always been Desert Island Discs, if only to listen to Kirsty Young’s dulcet tones. One of the things I’ve decided to do more of is listening to the radio rather than automatically putting the TV on. I must admit that I’m not doing so very well at this one but I will persist (although I won’t stop my TV viewing entirely given how expensive television licenses are!). One that I listened to was the DID podcast of Kelsey Grammar. He made the following statement: ‘Judgement without knowledge is the greatest of all crimes.’ This is something that I’ve really taken to heart. One thing I have never been very good at is not jumping to conclusions about people. Another thing I’m terrible at is being a good judge of character. Fortunately, because of that, I rarely act on my initial assessments of people but my concern over how I was thinking led me to do a training session whilst I was at Royal Holloway called ‘Think about what you think’ and it helped me to understand why I think the way I do. It’s also meant that I try to understand why people are the way they are and why they do the things they do. That’s not to say that I don’t judge them, but I do try to think of the possible reasons why they could be acting a certain way or saying what they are and try to find something positive, even if my initial reaction is to turn away from them. This is something I’ve really tried to nurture this last year and has led to some amazing and unexpected encounters. As I head back to UCL and start on a new project and meet the new people I’ll be working with and return to a project that I’ve worked on before and encounter both new and familiar faces I’m hoping that my empathy is something I can develop and try not to be derogatory in any way to others who could just be really struggling with their own lives. It’s something I’m concerned that I won’t be able to do though. My biggest fear with my return is that I will go back to being the person I was before I went away. Not that I was a terrible person but there were definitely things about myself that I didn’t like and being someone who could jump to conclusions or judgements about people without knowing all (or even any) of the facts is one of them. I just really hope I’ve developed this enough over the year that I won’t revert back.

Eat Pray Love by Liz Gilbert was made into a movie with Julia Roberts in the leading role (and Javier Bardem  as Felipe). I’ve been a fan of this movie for a long time but when I was in Puerto Varas, Becky, a girl in my dorm recommended that I read the book that it was based on. Turns out it was a not so accurate adaptation (which I was expecting) but what I wasn’t expecting was how drawn into the book would get. Now pretty much the entire book is filled with quotes that have personal meaning in one way or another but there are two that stand out in particular. The first one, funnily enough, links to what I wrote above:

‘You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select your clothes every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That’s the only thing you should be trying to control.’

The second is:

‘Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. Once achieved, you must never become lax about maintaining it.’

Through my cognitive behavioural therapy, I had to teach myself to stop doing two things: mind reading and making anxious predictions. I was sure I knew what others were thinking about me (mind reading) and that it wasn’t good and that terrible things would result from it (anxious predictions). Over time I came to learn that I don’t know what people think unless I ask them. It might be bad, but I can’t know that for sure in advance of them telling me. It really helped to calm me down about many things and is something I try to now bring into my life at all times. When I moved my stuff into storage just over a year ago, the movers were late and I was on the phone to the world and his wife, panicked about whether or not they would turn up and the disaster that would beset me if they didn’t. Of course, they had just been stuck in traffic and delayed (and get this, they had texted me to tell me this), there was no disaster. My life was filled with the awful feeling you get when you think something terrible is going to happen, classic fight or flight response. Getting my things out of storage a couple of weeks ago, I got a call from the movers the night before to let me know that the driver was sick so they’d had to reshuffle the jobs the next day and my new driver wouldn’t be there until an hour after I’d originally booked the van for. No panic this time. No fight or flight. This was not a disaster; I just had some time to kill and it would all be fine. It wasn’t necessarily the first thought that I had, but fear of something going wrong wasn’t a thought I was going to let take hold. Throughout this whole flat rental process there have been a range of things that haven’t gone as smoothly as I would have wanted but I purposely made myself not nurture the feelings of concern to make sure I didn’t get stressed about things. And you know what, it’s all turned out fine. I’m finding the headspace app really helps me to maintain control of my thoughts and the balance that I now have is something that I really hope I can continue with.

Happiness is something that I do strive for and I genuinely believe that it’s something I have to achieve myself and not look to others to attain. I’m lucky because it’s something I’ve found multiple times this year and in many different places, be it up a mountain or playing bowls (badly) with my Dad, Mum and nephew or niece. I think I’ve found it more this year than I have in a while and this is one of my big concerns for my return to London. I had it so little in the year before my career break that I really fear for my happiness being back. I have put in place strategies to help me try to keep it, I’m not going to be acting up in my boss’s job (she’s on maternity leave when I return to work) so I’m sure I can work regular hours, I have my 9-day fortnight so have a day to do things to help maintain my mental health, I’m living near one of my closest friends so I’ll get to see her often, I already have plans to see other friends and I’m going to make more regular visits back to my family than I’ve taken in previous years. And so I’m hoping that now I’ve found happiness again and can remember what it feels like, I will be able to maintain it.

‘Comparison is the thief of happiness.’ Now ain’t that the truth! When I did the acting up job at work, I was convinced that everyone was comparing me to Becky and I was coming out all the poorer in the comparison. I told one of my colleagues this once and she was gobsmacked that I had these sorts of thoughts and told me the person she worked with and with whom I was working closely at the time had never commented that he was finding me lacking in a comparison, or even making a comparison in the first place! Then a few weeks before my career break started, someone else at UCL went a career break and did the most incredible things and I was sure that people would find my career break dull in comparison. And whilst I was away, I thought about what I was doing and the way I was travelling slowly to really take in places and how much less I saw than others who were moving more quickly and wondered if my trip was lacking in some way. And then I heard this phrase and I stopped. Comparison is the thief of happiness. I didn’t need to do the same trip that others were doing, I was doing the right trip for me. I guess it ties in to the quote that ‘it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of someone else’s life with perfection.’ My life and my way of doing things is right for me, it may be different to others and have different ups and downs, but comparing it to others, well down that path there be dragons.

The final quote was some graffiti I saw on a wall as my bus was leaving the station in Mar del Plata: ‘El mundo sin amor es solo tierra’ or ‘The world without love is only earth’. I have been so self-sufficient and insular with my emotions for a long time and on this trip through the people that I met and by sharing how I feel in this blog I’ve both allowed myself to be vulnerable and to accept kindness from people who were effectively strangers. It’s been both scary and a revelation and I don’t want to go back to being that closed off person. In Bulkington, the village where my parents live, people say hello to each when they pass in the street, at the least, you usually get a smile from them. I know people think I’m a nutter down here when I do it, but so far I haven’t let this stop me. To be fair, it’s amazing how many people smile back and say hello. It’s nice, it’s friendly and so I’m going to continue (although rest assured, it’s not something I would do on the tube, I’m not that crazy!) And so I think that of all the quotes this one is my favourite. El mundo sin amor es solo tierra.