This blog is for my reflections on life, happiness, counselling and therapy. It is also about events in my life that have deeply affected me and my reflections on them.
It is a space where I intend to work with words to try to articulate what I think on these matters.
Words are magical. With words we make sense of ourselves and the world.
Finding the right words enables us to work with our lives, to grasp where we stand and where we are going. In these blog entries I hope that in my struggle to find the right words I might help other people to do the same.
This blog will be boring [What does 'boring' mean?] for most people. But I'm not after great numbers of followers, just the odd individual who might want to find out what I really think about some serious* matters that have continually bothered or intrigued me since childhood. I also want to record some experiences that have deeply affected me such as those that I had when I lived in Hull and Manchester. I met some remarkable people in those places.
I was tempted to call this blog 'Meetings with Remarkable Persons' after George Ivanovich Gurdjieff's fascinating book 'Meetings with Remarkable Men', the mystic from Armenia, but thought better of it. It might be too ironic. I do too much irony, for reasons of amusement and self protection, and want to keep that tendency under control in this blog. I will however, for mental health reasons, allow my self a little indulgence now and then: my irony rations, if you will pardon the pun.
I am afflicted or blessed -it feels to be one or the other according to what is happening in my life at any particular time- from an early age by a compulsion to dwell on existential matters: life, death, identity, meaning and such like. This has not always won me popularity [What is 'popularity'?] with friends. Likewise with my compulsion to examine the meaning of certain words in common use on the basis that they conceal more than they reveal.
I actually find this examination exciting which shows what kind of person I am. But, I've found from experience that this feeling is not shared by all. In fact many people experience outrage or anxiety instead. This puzzled me when I was younger: surely exploring our world with words is what everyone wants to do? I still want to get on with the exploration. The world is still a mysterious place for me.
* 'Serious' a word that has come to suggest pretension in our culture which, like me, is deeply imbued with irony for reasons of amusement and self protection.
