How To Be Happy

Thinking for sharing

[grahamlandiwellbeing]

Trying To Finish

When I did the Belbin psychometric test to find out which team role I play most effectively, I remember less about my results and more of a jealous feeling related to people who were “Completer Finishers”.

Everything tidy and settled is beyond me and consequently annoying.

I think I was a “Plant” or a “Resource Investigator”, I can’t remember which. I did consider looking it up before writing this but I didn't get around to it.

When you have a low boredom threshold combined with a childlike fascination in what feels like everything it’s a perfect storm for inefficiency.

I Googled “focus is boring” but all it returned were suggestions for ways to stay focused when doing a boring task.

What if staying in one place, on one task, and being focused is what you find most boring of all?

I can’t read one book at a time. Currently, I have four on the go and then, because of a tweet by someone I don't follow and whose opinion ought not to matter at all,  I bought "This Is How You Win The Time War," and now I have five.

Waking from a disturbing dream at 4.38 am I am relieved to find that I have not murdered two people I didn't know and rather haphazardly attempted to bury their dismembered bodies in shallow graves, tiring towards the end of the task and failing to finish.

I lie awake trying to understand the meaning of my dream as the early light begins to seep in through the blinds.

Burying something is an indication of something repressed, an unwillingness to face it.

On the bedside table, next to my camera with film half-finished from a project I began in the spring, and a book about trees I've been reading for longer than I care to admit is my copy of "This Is How You Win The Time War."

I'm not enjoying it.

It's linguistically over-complicated for my tastes and I'm not sure I understand the characters let alone feel anything for them.

I keep trying to tell myself that it's OK not to finish it but I can't seem to let it go.

Not finishing something I find difficult feels like an intolerable failure.

I don’t finish things I enjoy because I don’t want them to end, and I often don’t finish what I have created because I'll have to let it out into the world, where it can be judged.

But finishing things that feel like a punishment while I'm in the midst of them appears to be no problem at all.

[grahamlandiwellbeing]

Why Screen Time Hurts Parents More Than Kids

I’m in the car on my way to a poetry gig with my friend Martin. He’s driving and I’m regretting agreeing to buy my son dinner from Nando’s and having to place the order online using my phone.

Switching back and forth between his texts and the Deliveroo app I screenshot the completed order having just received a photo from my son with the menu item I was missing circled in blue.

“How do you even add blue circles to photos?”

I wait for a message from him that I’ve got it right and maybe a “thank you”.

The message doesn’t come as quickly as I’d like.

While I’m beginning to feel disgruntled, I get a cheery “Perfect. Thank You! xx” smiley emoji.

Tech has created an invisible wall between me and my children. One that I don’t suppose they notice. I feel jealous of their screens because they spend more time with my kids than I do.

Among all the warnings of the dangers of too much adolescent screen time, there don’t seem to be any about how it has a negative impact on the wellbeing of parents.

Once, during a conversation with my daughter about the impact of too much screen time she said “Blaming everything on phones is just lazy parenting.”

As if being a parent isn’t hard enough the stakes are apparently high when it comes to knowing the difference between parenting properly and abdicating responsibility. I don’t want to be a lazy parent so now I never blame phones, even when phones are at fault.

I don’t want to be critical of something which makes my children happier than I can but it’s hard not to feel inadequate.

When my children used to play Minecraft together I encouraged the teamwork, the gentle and cohesive hum of their relationship. I told myself it was just Lego for the modern age and that felt justifiable. Even when we couldn’t prise them away for their tea it didn’t seem so bad. Then my son got into GTA and instead of mining for natural resources with his little sister, he was popping prostitutes on street corners and dragging respectable-looking women from their cars by their hair.

I tried to ignore it.

Worse still was that for a while I began to feel left out so I downloaded and installed Minecraft on my own laptop and would sit playing it instead of joining a teleconference on marketing budgets for the fourth quarter. I was worse than what I feared for my kids, isolating myself and not doing the work I was supposed to be doing. I imagined my boss firing me and, while ushering me off the premises, telling me “You’re always on that bloody phone”.

In the kitchen, I am making cookies. A place my children always helped me when they were younger. I have a photo of the two of them covered in flour one time before technology got a hold.

In another, taken one rainy afternoon, we’d made fresh pasta and meatballs. They look happy. They still do.

I call to my daughter, “Do you want to help me cut the cookies?”

“Nah”.

Putting my head around the door she has the TV on, is listening to music through her headphones and is glued to her phone chatting with friends.

I dig out the photo of the flour children and stare at it longingly.

Last week I was relegated to disciplining my daughter by phone. She wasn’t home when she’d said she would be. She read my messages but didn’t answer. I felt impotent.

Complaining to my wife I said, “She’s 18 next month so I don’t suppose there is much we can do”.

“Well she still lives under our roof”.

I’ve lost confidence in using 1970s discipline on children of the future.

Then there's the ignominy of having to go to them for help when something isn’t working.

Last week my wife was experiencing some trouble with the email on her phone.

Me: “I could try deleting it and reinstalling it?”

Her: “Whatever, but if I can’t find a way to sort it out this phone is going through the fucking window”

My son fixed it in an instant and harmony was restored while I ached for the days when he needed a puncture fixed on his bike.

Back at the car park after the gig, there is a massive line waiting to pay while people find they don't have the right app.

“Why isn’t there some faster way of doing this?” I say to Martin looking at my phone with disdain.

"You mean, like cash?"

When we are eventually back on the road I get a message from my daughter. It’s a picture of her snuggled up with the dogs and a message.

“Hope you had a lovely evening. I’m off to bed. See you tomorrow xx”

[grahamlandiwellbeing]

An antidote to loneliness

It's Mental Health Awareness week and this year the theme is "loneliness"

Over dinner, my family is asking me if I am intending to write something on the subject this week.

I tell them that I can never think of anything to write other than pointing out that developing a feeling of love for oneself means you'll never feel as lonely again because you'll always have you.

They laugh and tell me that this is the "Holy Grail" of mental health, the art of loving oneself.

"That's like telling someone to cheer up without telling them how," my daughter says.

It feels harsh, but I take her point.

The runner beans are pressed against the window in the spare bedroom pleading to be put out into the garden.

Earlier in my life, I would just have planted everything outside and hoped for the best, a strategy that garnered great support from the slugs and snails.

Having lost all of my crops I would curse my impatience and tendency to cram too many things into a short space of time combined with an unwillingness to see any of them to fruition.

It created loneliness of sorts. One borne from a misunderstanding and intolerance of myself.

When, as an adult, I was diagnosed with ADHD, everything began to change in small almost imperceptible ways.

I still felt impatient and wanted to move on to the next task before finishing the one I was working on, but I found more compassion and kindness towards myself which helped me to moderate my destructive behaviour.

I'd have a similar experience when I tried to organise myself in other ways, making notes in a host of different places with no hope of collating them into anything coherent, forgetting to get rid of data I no longer needed, and falling all too easily down a rabbit hole in which buying some bootlaces for boots I hadn't worn in years became bewilderingly more important than finishing a piece of work I was already halfway through.

Understanding myself better was the route to mitigation, where the sort of highly regimented routine that I actually need and enjoy became a wonderful way of keeping my more skittish self in line, but with kindness and humour rather than anger and annoyance.

Over time, I developed other ways of balancing out the more inconvenient ways in which my brain wanted to direct me.

Impulsiveness was managed through talking to myself as a nurturing parent would a headstrong child, time management got better as I learned how to say "No" through gritted teeth, and coping with stress became easier as I started to actively get rid of as much of it as I could.

Similar strategies are as good a way of combating the loneliness which comes from poor self-awareness for the neurotypical as they are for the neurodiverse.

In an interview for a podcast this week I was asked if therapists are in therapy and, if so, what do I get from it?

I told her that many remain in therapy although I can't speak for all and that, personally, it has brought me to a place of peace with and appreciation of myself that I couldn't possibly have achieved without it and that, although I didn't realise it at the time, it was the path to self-love.

Taking the vegetables out to plant into the newly established raised bed I can feel the beans' excitement. Especially so as, these days, I have taken the time and trouble to dig right down and establish a barrier of cardboard that will stop the grass growing through, give the crops at least half a chance against the slugs and the dogs, and help me to remember how much nicer it is to feel that I've supported myself to do something properly rather than cutting adrift leaving myself alone.

[grahamlandiwellbeing]

Learning To Be An Imposter

In the newspaper last week I read a report about a study that found university students this term more likely to suffer from imposter syndrome because they had won their places without sitting exams.

It said that students from disadvantaged backgrounds are particularly susceptible.

Whilst all this might be true the foundations of imposter syndrome are often set much earlier.

Having risen up through the ranks of corporate life to a level I'd not imagined myself reaching I once confided in a colleague,

"I sometimes don't feel I'm worth the money I'm paid."

The transition from being a contributor, where one is able to measure oneself clearly, to a leader, where one succeeds through supporting the growth of others was quite tough.

In my case, feeling like an imposter had both good and bad sides.

On the one hand, it meant I could never really feel certain about whether I was doing the right things, but on the other, I grew so tired of trying to be "good enough" I stopped bothering and found I felt more confident than I had been when I second-guessed myself all the time.

Somewhere along the line, I learned that dealing effectively with imposter syndrome is counter-intuitive.

The more you let go of needing to hit an impossible standard the easier it becomes to feel that what you've done is enough.

For years I blamed my parents.

First, my mother for wanting me always to live life according to her expectations and therefore undermining my belief in my true self.

Then, my parent's relationship, so unpredictable that family life seemed mostly to involve wondering when the family would eventually break in two.

My anxious attachment could be attributed to early life but, as a therapist once said to me, "nobody has to have an unhappy childhood forever."

It's true, but the only person who can soothe our past is us.

Nobody else ever makes that child feel like he belongs, is good enough, or doesn't need to castigate himself forever for taking a few pounds out of his mother's purse to waste in the fruit machines.

In therapy, I once said, "I can do a lot of things but none of them particularly well."

The confirmation bias inherent in imposter syndrome meant it was easier to concentrate on the "none of them particularly well" part of the sentence rather than the "I can do a lot of things" part.

With age, it became a lot easier for me, but I still often feel that little boy tugging at my sleeve wondering if he's capable of whatever I've signed us up for.

In the past, I would have left him to it, but now I've learned to hold his hand while we tackle it together in a way my father never really did with me.

That wasn't his fault either. We'd have to go back further to understand why he felt like an imposter.

So the students starting university will have bigger problems with imposter syndrome if they already doubted their worth before the debacle of cancelled exams.

It might be easier to point towards a moment in time when trying to work out why we struggle with our mental health, but it's rarely an accurate reflection of the truth.

[grahamlandiwellbeing]

Looking For A Deeper Meaning

“Remind me of your arguments in support of a boiled egg?” I ask my daughter.

She raises her eyebrows in exasperation rather than surprise.

I had suggested to her that poached eggs negate the need for a boiled egg because they taste pretty similar and you have no shell to deal with once you’ve cooked them.

“You still have to deal with the shell in a poached egg, at the start. If anything it’s more annoying because there’s the risk of breaking the yolk.”

“Right”

“And, peeling off the shell afterwards is part of the fun.”

What I’d imagined to be an observation about simplicity and added enjoyment turns out to be the reverse, according to my daughter, who is generally right.

I’d been pondering the egg conversation after reading an interesting article on the excellent blog of McKinley Valentine.

“The problem isn’t that we have desires, but that our desires are too small,” is a short piece on the deeper meaning we can’t see when we’re focused on something superficial that won’t provide the satisfaction we’re after.

For example, thinking you’re a genius for spotting an egg cooking hack when it probably isn’t about the egg at all.

As my daughter and I are walking back to the house a young boy speeds past us on his pushbike.

He has headphones on and he’s singing at the top of his voice.

He’s tuned out and out of tune but it doesn’t matter because you can see from his face that, in the moment, he doesn’t have a care in the world.

My daughter and I look at each other and laugh.

“He makes me think of those “X-Factor” vox pops where the contestants talk tearfully about how desperate they are to get through to the next round because “all I’ve ever wanted to do is sing,” I say.

She knows where I’m going.

“Right, you can be a singer in the shower if that’s all you want to do,”

“Yep, or riding your bike.”

The deeper meaning for the boy on the bike might simply be about feeling a sense of joy but for the talent show contestant, it’s something else. Fame maybe, leading towards affirmation almost certainly.

At home my daughter is making a “fajita pasta” dish and, although I’m suspicious of the whole premise, she’s making it without meat.

“I’m putting fried sweet potatoes on the top instead of the chicken,” she says.

It’s a creative touch I think as I’m rooting through the freezer and coming across various meat substitute products that I bought in order to try being a meat eater without eating meat.

Most of them are vile.

Aligning a desire for a plant-based diet with a desire to eat meat without killing animals proved tricky until I was able to work out what it was I really wanted.

Emerging with a homemade bean chilli for dinner I watch my daughter peeling vegetables and think about all the absurd conversations she’s willing to engage in with me and how connected it makes me feel when we do.

“You’re right about the eggs,” I tell her. “Bashing the shell in with the back of a spoon is part of the fun.”

[grahamlandiwellbeing]

Finding Comfort Where We Can

I’m looking at a Venn diagram entitled, “Am I Overthinking This?” drawn by artist Michelle Rial and it’s providing a welcome distraction from trying to work out if we need an extra bottle of milk in the shopping.

I’ve been saying for months that doing food shopping online is not only safer but also more cost-effective because it avoids the temptation of impulse buying.

Recently I have acknowledged that this claim is not strictly true because what it actually does is afford me the ability to impulse buy from the comfort of my chair, desk, or bed.

“Does anyone need anything in the shopping?”

Nobody can think of anything I haven’t already got.

“Falafels please,” my son calls out, smug in the certainty that I won’t have thought of that.

“I’m making some for lunch tomorrow,” I call back, having discovered three unopened bags of chickpeas at the back of the larder that I’ve bought intermittently through the year.

“There’ll be hummus too,” I add, and there will be. A lot of it.

It’s not just food either.

This year I have allowed myself to buy books with alarming abandon. I have justified this on the basis that I am not spending any money going out.

When I tell my daughter this she says,

“You never went out anyway.”

As Christmas approached I hid my guilty secret under the convenient guise of gifting.

I’d see a book that “so and so” would like, then I’d buy it until I had more books than friends or family members.

This strange year has been much kinder to me than many but something has been lurking underneath that has obviously required the comfort of hunkering down with a full larder and a stack of books.

I learned long ago that stress is often hard to identify in myself.

It is rare for me to feel wound like a spring but the impact of life’s twists and turns tends to take hold in other ways.

When corporate life wore me down, a fact my wife pointed out approximately a decade before I started listening, I would not have said that it was causing me stress, and yet it landed me, one way or another and via a number of destructive deviations of my own making, in a psychiatric hospital.

So maybe a few extra books and too much hummus are not an especially heavy price to pay for staying balanced and comforted through such an extraordinary time.

I finish up with the shopping by trying to decide if I should buy a box of shortbread, even though my sister often gets us a tin for Christmas. I buy one, just in case.

In bed, I return to Michelle Rial’s Venn diagram on her Instagram feed, and, flicking through some of her other beautiful illustrations, I check her profile to see if she has published a book.

[grahamlandiwellbeing]

Inadvertent Birthday Hustling

I’ve been researching and writing a piece on “Hustle Culture” this week which has taken a lot more time than I’d anticipated.

As a consequence, I have got behind with my other work.

One evening, after we’ve cleared the dinner plates I say,

“I’ve got to finish an “Ask A Therapist” question that was due in at 7.”

As I disappear upstairs to get my laptop my son laughs and calls after me,

“You’re hustling.”

“I’m not. I’m just clearing the backlog.”

On Tuesday, my son was one of the first people in the UK to celebrate two consecutive lockdown birthdays. Last year was his 21st.

Trying to soothe the bitter disappointment of having to spend a second year running having a birthday dinner with his family I decided to make something special.

Trying to fit the planning, preparation, and cooking of a three-course meal, and a cake, around my work is a challenge.

The night before I am up until the small hours trying to perfect a cream cheese Oreo icing that I first made to ice the cake on his 18th which has become the stuff of folklore in our family. Needless to say I didn’t write the recipe down and have yet to repeat it.

By Tuesday afternoon when my son asks if I want to go for a walk with him, his girlfriend, and the dog all I can muster is a thin laugh.

“No thanks, I think I’d better stay here.”

“Is there anything I can do?” My wife asks.

“No, I don’t think so. I’ve just got to finish making the garlic bread and then I’m on track.”

“You’re making garlic bread as well?”

As usual, I’ve underestimated the time everything will take and overestimated the speed at which I can get through it.

After dinner, we’re lighting candles to take outside for the 8 pm vigil in memory of Covid victims.

My son isn’t impressed at having to share his birthday each year with an ersatz memorial service.

When we move into the street with our flames there’s nobody else there. Not a soul.

I leave my tea light in its little jar on the wall and we go back inside.

“I think maybe people find it easier to join in with public shows of solidarity and strength than they do with communal vulnerability.”

In the spring and summer last year there was no shortage of rainbows and “Thank You NHS” signs across social media, in house windows, and chalked onto pavements.

Hustle culture is about curating an image of yourself that you think will impress, or make you more lovable, and it comes from a fear that we may not be enough as we are.

What’s harder to acknowledge is fragility, vulnerability, and an acceptance that we all have our limits.

[grahamlandiwellbeing]

How To Do Important Things Imperfectly

"I can't understand why anyone who has had their dog since it was a puppy would ever have another puppy," I say to my daughter while I try to get a piece of stair carpet from between the jaws of our second puppy.

"I suppose we forget what's it's like," she says with the air of freedom that comes from being on her way out and away from the chaos for a day.

I'm not sure I had forgotten what it was like but I am reminded of where it can lead.

I look at Daisy, four this week, such a picture of low maintenance and constant joyful companionship.

Having a puppy is pretty good preparation for parenting and comes at you like an intensive crash course where many of the same emotions are experienced. Frustration, exhaustion, rage, hopelessness, anxiety, exhilaration, and the feeling that if your heart got any bigger it would definitely burst.

Now that my children are grown up it might be that I miss the nurturing, and maybe even the sense of satisfaction brought by doing something that feels difficult to do properly but feels important nonetheless.

I've seen more of this past week than I'd have liked, sleeping on the sofa with the puppy next to me, reaching in when she wakes and needs comforting (hourly), and then failing to sleep myself in nervous anticipation of the next time I hear her crying and demand she can lie on my hand for a moment of reassurance.

Daisy has been predictably unfazed by the whole experience, although she appears thankful that I've reinstalled the stair gate so that she can get away from the annoying little sod.

I had been getting to the point where I wondered how long she would tolerate an obdurate puppy biting at her legs but the answer came last night when she tried to do so while Daisy was enjoying a biscuit.

Since then, a new and mutually understood pecking order seems to have been established.

In the park with my sister, one of her three rescues takes off across the grass and steals a pizza that someone is enjoying in the sunshine.

The man in the group is, understandably, incandescent with rage and concentrates his ire on me,

"Can you give me your name and number?" He shouts in my face.

Sleep deprivation renders me incapable of the reasonable action required to defuse the situation.

"It's not my dog!" I shout back. "That's my dog," I continue, pointing at the Labrador standing close by enjoying the drama and, presumably, wondering why no humans seem able to control any of their dogs.

We don't say much to one another, my sister and I, as we walk back to our cars.

I always feel angry that I'm implicated by association when these things occur, as they often do, and she knows that so the most we get from one another is,

Me: "I can understand why they were so upset."

Her: "Yes I know. You won't want to walk with us anymore."

I want to have the conversation about muzzling her dogs in the park again but I'm too exhausted.

Aside from the tiredness, I know how much stress it already causes her when these things happen and how hard she tries to rectify their delinquent behaviour.

Like parenting and owning a puppy, we mostly have no idea what we're doing but we know it's important, so we do the best that we can, and hope that one day our socks will no longer be stolen and buried underneath the honeysuckle.

[grahamlandiwellbeing]

It Might Happen

I can remember once having a conversation with a client who suffered from an array of terrible anxieties in which he told me how hard he found it to either walk or drive across a bridge.

One of the phrases I remember uttering to him in the course of the work we did together was something along the lines of,

“Bridges don’t just fall.”

Some years later in 2018 when the Viadotto Genova-San Giorgio collapsed I reflected on my misplaced chutzpah.

Of course, I didn’t mean that they literally never fall, just that it’s not very likely, but I still half expected a terse email from him which never came.

Most of the people I work with suffer from anxiety, and I’ve recently been thinking about how we try and deal with it.

One of my most trusted methods is journaling although even that isn’t bulletproof as I discovered recently when I had titled an entry “Avoiding the truth” and then wrote nothing in the space beneath it.

I tried to create a flow diagram to help people understand how to deal with their anxiety having been unable to find an existing example that was neither too complex nor too simplistic.

My version hung on the ability to distinguish between anxiety over which you might have some influence versus that which comes from out of nowhere and is beyond control.

I hypothesize that pushing ourselves to act when we can do something about how we feel will reduce the overall burden, but sketching it out on a piece of paper I found that it required too many different boxes and variables for the space available on the page which made me anxious, so I gave up and put some washing on.

Anxiety came front and centre again later when we were trying to fit a bike into a car and I was reminded of the time we went on holiday with three bikes fitted to the roof rack.

I tried to stifle the terrible anxiety I felt about hitting something and damaging the car, the bikes, and the family, although not necessarily in that order.

Arriving back in Calais I relaxed having managed to get us there and back without disaster but my overconfidence caused me to drive into a car park at the hypermarket forgetting about the height barrier and smashing all of the bikes off the top of the car no more than 30 miles from home.

To really cope with anxiety it is not enough to comfort ourselves with the dubious certainty that the worst won’t actually happen because sometimes it does.

There is a step beyond trying to convince ourselves that bridges don’t fall, planes won’t tumble from the sky, and that we can’t possibly be that sick. It’s the acceptance that they do, they might, and that we could be.

If emotional tranquility exists anywhere it does so in the certain knowledge that literally anything can smash it in an instant. If we can come to terms with that and realise that we’ll survive most things, even when they’re really bad, life becomes a lot more manageable.

I hope that’s calmed you down.

[grahamlandiwellbeing]

How To Be Good Enough At Perfection

While reading an article about a 30% rise in perfectionism I think about the number of times I’ve told my teenage daughter to be less demanding of herself, and then I realise I have rewritten this paragraph at least six times.

Once, in a woodwork class at school, I was asked to plane a piece of wood until it was flat. Striving for perfection, I planed it away completely until there was nothing left but wood shavings piled high on the floor.

For a while, I mistook perfection for a growth mindset but they are not the same. When I allowed myself to grow I tried, often failed, but learned something. Perfection has only ever stopped me pushing forward and ensured I couldn’t succeed.

I need to make a birthday cake for my son. For inspiration, I scroll through Instagram looking at the pictures of perfectly laminated croissant and professionally decorated three-tiered masterpieces, and I think about the cake I made once for my daughter with a handcrafted ballet dancer on top which was meant to be her but looked more like an otter having a stroke.

Perfectionism has given me the opportunity for self-criticism so often because of my almost inevitable inability to achieve it. I’ve tried many times to overpower it but I’m just not good enough.

Perfectionism is not something we learn or develop. It does not emerge because we work so hard that we must constantly increase our standards to meet our own and others expectations. Perfectionism is a personality thing, and it originates from a belief that we are not good enough, to begin with.

My daughter’s drive for perfection in herself has recently been mitigated by a new boyfriend. Now she spends time hanging out with him instead of studying, she naps in front of the TV and stays out late making me worry that she’s not getting enough sleep.

Struggling with the change I try to work out what I should do for the best. Rejoice in the fact that she is developing some work-life balance or try to instil some urgency by reminding her that there are only eight weeks until her exams? I don’t want to get it wrong.

After my carefully crafted speech, she pauses for a moment and I wonder if it is for effect, to make me think she’s taken it in. She has. “I’m still working hard dad. I just think it’s best I don’t put too much pressure on myself. It doesn’t seem to help”

I think about how it’s impossible to fix perfectionism completely, and that the best we can hope for is a little more self-acceptance. Then I get out the cake tins and acknowledge that whatever I create will probably not be photogenic but it will almost certainly taste good.

[grahamlandiwellbeing]

The Orange

I’m making Cornetti, grating orange zest, and adding it to the dough.

While I do so the children are arguing about which way up the forks and knives have to go in the dishwasher cutlery basket.

My daughter says that the only reason she doesn’t load the dishwasher is that my son complains that she doesn’t do it properly.

“If I put the plates in you just rearrange them until you have them the way you want them,” she tells him.

“If you don’t put them in properly they won’t clean,” he says, containing his annoyance quite well.

It’s a familiar conversation and one in which I am caught in the middle because I agree with my daughter but also understand my son’s frustration.

The fragrance of zest takes me back to a time when I was a child and my father used to peel me an orange every evening. I don’t recall how the ritual began.

He would sit on the stairs or sometimes at the top of the cellar steps where he had been polishing the shoes, and he would shave the peel off with his knife in one long piece. Then he would segment the fruit and put the pieces in a dish.

When I got older I didn’t want an orange anymore but my father still peeled one, sometimes eating it himself but mostly leaving it segmented in a dish where I’d find it in the morning, its skin hardened and dry.

My mother would not contain her exasperation,

“Why do you keep peeling him an orange? He doesn’t eat it.”

“Because I want to,” he’d say, stomping off up the stairs, often slamming the kitchen door behind him.

After my son has packed the dishwasher and I’ve asked my daughter to wipe the table, a task where the method is unimportant to anyone, she shows me a post on her Insta feed.

It’s from a woman who had found herself stuck in a rut unable to do anything to help herself until her therapist, trying to get her wheels turning, asked her,

“What problem will you think about when you get home?”

“The dirty dishes,” she said.

“They’ll be in the sink piling high, with food dried on so hard that the dishwasher won’t clean them unless I run it twice, and I can’t run the dishwasher twice.”

“Why not?” her therapist asked.

At that moment she realised that she didn’t know whose rules she was living by and, once that was clear, she was liberated to stop living by them.

My mother didn’t understand why my father wanted to keep peeling the oranges

My daughter doesn’t understand why my son needs the forks to be the right way up.

My son doesn’t understand that my daughter couldn’t give a stuff about the forks.

None of us know anything about the rules other people live by or why.

Recording the podcast with my friend Martin I add a reading of one of my favourite poems, “The Orange” by Wendy Cope.

In it, she describes the beauty of trivial pleasures, like peeling an orange.

Years after his death it became plain that my father had been largely unhappy and that maybe that single thin curl of peel gave him something that the rest of us couldn’t see.

As Cheryl Strayed once wrote in “Tiny Beautiful Things” to a man wondering about how to live by rules he couldn’t understand and didn’t need to observe anyway,

“We’re all going to die, Johnny. Hit the bell like it’s dinnertime.”

[grahamlandiwellbeing]

Why Perseverance Is Worth It

I think I always knew that I don’t like goat’s cheese but it’s only relatively recently that I came to realise I don’t need to.

Some years ago, before that epiphany, I was on holiday and a persuasive man in a French market told me that he had a hard goat’s cheese which would convert me.

I was taken in, but after a second or so the familiar taste came through and I knew I’d been duped.

My daughter, now pretty much a full-time vegetarian, doesn’t eat mushrooms.

“It would be helpful if you liked mushrooms,” I tell her, very proud of my vegan ragu.

She looks at me, witheringly as I continue.

“But don’t bother with avocados because I already have to make too much guacamole for everyone else.”

“I’m not going to bother with avocados. Not having them in my life isn’t making a material difference,” she tells me.

Her razor logic makes me think about a question I had from a client this week struggling with a fear of the future and pursuing a way of feeling safer.

I wished I had said to them, “Treat certainty like my daughter treats avocados. Let go of the need for it,” which I suppose I did, in a “therapisty” sort of way.

It got me thinking about how we decide that it’s better to give up.

If whatever you’re chasing is all-consuming and having a negative impact on the other hitherto healthy parts of your life, you might be chasing rainbows.

Talking of chasing rainbows, if you’re avoiding being honest with yourself about the likely eventual outcome you’re probably wasting precious emotional energy and living in denial.

My client who is looking for certainty where none exists fits the profile.

I told them that instead of asking “how can I be sure things will work out?” it was worth acknowledging that even when they don’t it might not be the end, and then I thought about aubergines.

I used to have an aversion to them similar to the one I felt towards goat’s cheese but I did manage to overturn that through perseverance and a particularly good aubergine curry in the little cafe at The Gulbenkian Theatre.

But a piece of perseverance I’m especially proud of involves my son.

He has never been a reader which pains me.

I got into the habit of buying him a book for every birthday and every Christmas in the hope that one day he would discover the joy of reading.

I’ve bought him stories, factual books, funny books, interesting books, short books, and vast heavy tomes that he can use to wedge open a door.

In past years I have continued the routine more in hope than expectation.

Then, last weekend I took a photo of him and his girlfriend sitting on the sofa together reading.

When your perseverance makes a difference to your life through seeing the positive impact on someone else’s you really know it was worth the effort.

[grahamlandiwellbeing]

The stoppable rise of technology

I have an app on my phone that identifies birdsong so that when I am walking through the woods I can tell a woodpecker from a robin.

Every so often it insists on playing an advert that ironically makes me much less likely to buy whatever it is selling and makes me too bitter and resentful to buy the full version and get rid of the ads.

The app, while sometimes very pleasing, seems to think that a lot of birds are wood-pigeons but I don’t know enough about birdsong to know that it’s wrong.

At home, my daughter is complaining that group presentation work for her child development module is shoddy.

“The girl in my group who did the introduction didn’t even state the name of the research paper,” she says

“Why don’t you just record it again?”

“It was hard enough to get the group together to do it once”

“I would have thought doing it remotely was easier for everyone”

“Not really because one of the girls just sits in her room smoking weed, falls asleep, and forgets about the Zoom call.”

My son is frantically searching for new TV’s in the Black Friday sale even though it is now Black Saturday preceding what is presumably, still quite dark Sunday before Cyber Monday.

“Aren’t most of these deals the same as deals available at other times?” I ask him

“Probably, but we need a new TV.”

The last time I looked the TV was working perfectly well.

As I am in the kitchen trying to prise open the iced-up lower drawer of the freezer he explains he is using the voucher sent by the insurance company when the garage was broken into and the old TV was stolen from there.

I wonder how much new technology one can have without needing to store some of it in the garage.

As I’m going at the bottom of the freezer with a fish slice he calls,

“Why don’t you get a new fridge freezer in the sales?”

“Because there’s nothing wrong with this one,” I call back realising that the middle drawer is also stuck to the rear of the unit by a huge block of ice.

I fall into the vortex and start looking at fridge freezers on my laptop.

“Get one with an ice maker,” my daughter says

“Those are huge double door monstrosities and they wouldn’t fit,” I say whilst thinking about how I could actually climb into one when everything gets too much.

Talking myself down from a new frost-free fridge freezer I read a news article about Black Friday and how Nintendo Switch consoles have sold out everywhere but Aldi.

I don’t even know what a Nintendo Switch is but I navigate to the Aldi website to see what the fuss is about and find I am number 274000 in a queue for something I don’t want.

I feel a headache coming on.

“I’m off out for a walk” I call as I scoop up the dog’s lead and prise her off a chair she leaves extremely reluctantly.

In the valley, it is blessedly quiet and the crisp autumn air is a mix of leaf mold and wood fire.

Rounding the corner there is a heron sitting on a small island in the pond.

I watch for a minute or so before it flaps its huge wings and rises up, disappearing through the valley and over the trees.

As it flies I hear its call, a sound like a small dog with a sharp bark. I look at the app on my phone.

“Wood-pigeon”.

[grahamlandiwellbeing]

A Matter Of Nature

It's mental health awareness week and another opportunity for me to grumble to anyone who will listen about why on earth we think there is still a problem with "awareness" and why we can't just do something about it instead.

Anyway, the theme this year is nature which is precipitating a deluge of articles about the benefits of walking through the woods and listening to the sea on your headphones when you go to bed inevitably making you want to get up for a wee.

But another momentous thing happened this week too when my daughter turned twenty and left me with no children in their teens.

"You'll be old in another twenty years," she tells me while polishing off a pain au chocolat.

"I already feel old," I tell her.

She piles up three blueberries on top of one another like the pictures of smooth stones you might see on the pages of a therapist's website.

I find the childishness of it a comfort.

Later we are out for a walk in "Happy Valley" a name that sounds cheaper than it is and always seems to belie the beauty of views across the Sussex fields.

We were out in nature but it was the nature of the people I was with that made it a joy.

For all that will be written this week about connecting with nature, walking through woodland, dipping toes in streams, and listening to birdsong it will be in the work of connection and self-acceptance that feelings of durable peace and harmony take hold.

The loving of one's own nature, darkness and light, is the portal through which it becomes easier to love the nature of the people who surround us and the physical nature of the world that we share.

My children have been instrumental in moving me towards greater self-acceptance than I once had.

When I look at them it is hard to feel anything too bad about myself if I could have had a hand in creating and raising two individuals I love with such intensity for their beautiful nature.

The view from the valley reminds me of one from a mental hospital I once knew.

Set in such beautiful grounds with sprawling verdant hills in all directions it seemed like a waste.

In those days everything looked grey no matter how colourful it really was. Connection with nature limited by an inability to accept the nature of myself.

Back in the valley, I'm watching my daughter pick all the filling out of her sushi and eating the rice while the dog dribbles on my feet waiting for a piece of pastry from a cheese and onion roll.

There's a gentle argument going on between my son and daughter about attaching parking mirrors to the car so that she can practice her parking.

They chip at each other back and forth in a familiar way from which there will be no resolution just a gentle petering out.

In the evening my daughter sits with her friends in the garden after the rain has passed.

It's May but they have blankets and hot water bottles as they clutch their Prosecco glasses and as I walk back towards the house a mixture of laughter and the song of a goldfinch fills the air.

The blooms on the cherry tree are as fulsome as I've seen and time passes so fast that it won't be long until the birds are swooping down to pick off the reddest fruits before I can get to them.

It is the order of things. Nature.

[grahamlandiwellbeing]

Everything You Believe Is Probably Wrong

I'm telling a client that trying to breathe deeply while he's having a panic attack is a bad idea because one of panicking's best features is the ability to convince you that you cannot breathe.

I tell him,

"Just try reminding yourself that even though you're sure you're about to have a heart attack and die, you're not, you're actually going to be OK."

He looks at me the way that everyone I ever gave this advice looks at me, with a, "remind me why I'm paying you?" face.

Later, I'm writing to someone who is feeling so beaten down by the relentless nothingness of lockdown that they have lost all motivation and purpose.

"I'm trying to push myself to get things done but I find that I can't even do the things I enjoy."

The frustration and dismay are palpable.

In my reply, I write,

"Just let yourself be sad and stop trying to feel better all the time."

One advantage of written work is that I don't have to see a clients bewildered face when I tell them to do precisely the opposite from what their instinct is insisting.

Reading through my email, I notice that Oliver Burkeman is dishing out pretty much the same advice to his readers.

He is describing how anything we do to make things better or to change our behaviour that feels good as we're doing it is probably the opposite of what we actually need.

Sitting with anxiety and panic until it passes makes you feel like you're dying, and dealing with procrastination by doing the work despite the awful pull in the opposite direction seems like an impossibility.

The entire self-help industry is built on the desires of people to find simple answers to things that are mostly hard and require us to be uncomfortable for sometimes extended periods of time.

I consider writing to Oliver Burkeman to thank him for his insight but I have written to him after receiving his newsletter on the last two occasions, essentially to thank him for his insight.

I decide that the warm feeling I get at writing an email to someone I admire is probably an indication that it's the opposite of what I should actually do.

I too am no stranger to the compulsive draw towards ill-fated solutions.

Over the years I have bought countless books in a fruitless effort to help me solve numerous problems.

I have downloaded apps to help me procrastinate less, work more effectively and organise my time better.

I bought a book before Christmas which is essentially thousands of guitar chords for alternative tunings which, as I write, I have not yet opened.

Wondering why this might be I realise that trying to find them myself without the book is hard, but at least I did it. Now I have something to help me and make it easier, I appear to have lost my enthusiasm.

Instead of focusing on the behaviours we need to make ourselves feel better maybe we're better off building up our tolerance for the uncomfortable emotions associated with where we are now because, when they pass, change may feel more achievable.

[grahamlandiwellbeing]

How To Be A Failure

I’m playing “Grand Theft Auto” because my son wants to relive a little of his past.

His girlfriend, who is isolating in the house too, is less keen so I decide to take it for a test drive but find myself hopelessly ill equipped.

“It’s much harder than ‘Red Dead Redemption'” I complain.

“I don’t like cars. It’s much easier to get around on horses, and you can stop and pick a few wild herbs.” I add.

He rolls his eyes.

I cannot resist learning something new, even if it’s how to pull a fictitious unsuspecting stranger out of their virtual car and drive off into the fake LA sunset.

I think I largely approach something at which I am useless (video games) the same way as I do something I am supposed to know about.

In Buddhist teachings, there is a concept known as “beginners mind” which describes the value in approaching subjects in which you are a relative expert with the openness and eagerness of someone with no knowledge at all.

I don’t know if everyone finds this easy but it has made lockdown a lot less onerous than it might have been.

I was over forty when I first learned that water weighs the same in grams as its measurement in litres. It changed my life.

“Beginner’s mind” is also about a willingness to fail.

Talking with my friend Martin recently we were discussing our respective attitudes to failure.

Martin is a perfectionist who will not pursue anything in which he can’t develop some level of expertise.

I once told my therapist that I could do a lot of things reasonably but that I am not brilliant at anything.

Perhaps inherent in the difference is preparedness to fail which, on reflection, I am extremely good at.

When we were teenagers Martin, a very accomplished artist, used to paint album covers onto the backs of jackets to earn a bit of money. They were faultless, of course.

A few years ago I got him to paint a cake I’d made for our friend’s 40th birthday and, although everyone said how amazing it was, Martin could see all of the perceived flaws.

When we talk together about the paths our lives have taken I can’t help wondering what part his anxiety over getting everything right all the time had on his slide into addiction. I know it is far from the whole story but the pressure can’t have helped.

Back in the game my son has disappeared to do something grown-up leaving me driving around the streets of LA alone.

I text him,

“Someone has stolen my boat and I can’t get it back because I can’t work out how to aim my gun and steer the car at the same time. It’s driving me mad.”

He replies,

“I remember that mission. You just have to practice.”

I switch off the game and go weigh some water to make bread.

[grahamlandiwellbeing]

Why We Can’t Let Love Go

Walking down past the primary school with Daisy a young man, face red and tearful trudges on slowly talking on his phone. I feel a sudden and profound pang of sympathy, then the moment is gone.

An hour later, when I’m walking home with a wet, happy and exhausted dog, he’s still there, pacing the same fifteen yards, still on the phone, his face now streaked with old tears. I pick up snippets of his conversation, his questioning and pleading, and his desperate attempts to avoid a painful breakup.

When someone falls out of love with us why is it we can’t see the futility of putting up a fight?

I could never accept a breakup. Instead, I would later look back with pity at myself, ashamed of my embarrassing attempts to make everything alright when all I actually managed to do was make it worse, pulling myself further down in the process.

Only relatively recently did I come to realise that I never much cared for endings of any sort. A fear of change is a powerful and dangerous beast. Not only does it prevent us from leaving behind what is best left, but it fools us into thinking that what we desperately hold onto is something we really want rather than an avoidance of an unknown which is just too scary to contemplate.

Breakups come hardest to those of us who doubted our value in the first place. Although painful they are no surprise because, most of the time, we find it hard to imagine that anyone would want to be with us anyway.

Rejected and dumped we set about the tricky business of working out where we went wrong. What makes this task even harder is that most of the time, our worst mistake was assuming we would be rejected and dumped.

If we were able to accept ourselves in our entirety more readily we would waste much less time trying to make apples into oranges and, instead, accept nothing less than the fruit we desire.

“I love you so much. You complete me”

This is dangerous garbage.

Our lovers do not “fill in” the parts of us we are missing. Nothing is missing. What they do is mirror back to us parts that have become obscured or pieces which we need to develop within ourselves in order to move steadily towards our unending potential.

Love comes easiest to us when we stop believing that we need it.

One of the hardest and, in some ways, most abstract conversations I tend to have with my client's centres around the need to show love for themselves above and beyond the love they show to and expect to feel from anyone else.

Only when you can treat yourself the way you expect to be treated will you refuse to settle for anything less.

Hauling Daisy into the car and thinking about the sad boy I realise why I felt such a depth of feeling for him. I’ve been that boy countless times. Feeling as if my own emotion would crush me, my sadness weighing so uncomfortably heavy.

I wanted to walk back and tell him to let go. I wanted to assure him that as hard as he pulled his lover back towards him their decisiveness in pulling firmly away would strengthen, first through guilt, then pity and finally irritation. I wanted to say that all he’d have left was dust, the ashes not only of the relationship but of himself. Most of all I wanted to tell him to stop looking imploringly in the direction of the people who don’t want him and instead turn his gaze on himself and to start there.

But he’s young and he has time to learn what took me decades to understand. The reason why we can’t let love go is that, sometimes, in the reckless absence of sufficient love for ourselves, it’s the only love we can feel.