Let it go...

Forgiveness is an attempt to solve the problem of feeling injured, slighted or maligned at the conscious level at which the problem is created. In other words, it’s personal. I rather think I'm in agreement with Einstein when he suggested that one has to arrive at a different 'level' to heal emotional injuries.

Truth is, we can cut a tidal wave of resentments off at the ankles just by deciding to be hurt only by people we know intentionally and maliciously tried to screw us over. This, as opposed to getting ruffled and feathery over incidents of thoughtlessness, miscommunication and insensitivity where no real malice was involved.

By way of example, a friend knocks our bowl of cereal on to the floor, making a mess and in addition breaking a bowl we quite liked. We might choose to take this personally, inventing a variety of interpretations around how we’re not valued by this despicable, thoughtless, clumsy and quite careless individual; how we deserve better, and so forth. On the other hand, we might consider whether we positively know that our friend intended to harm us. If they didn’t, we can, indeed should let it pass. There’s nothing to forgive. All of us injure and are injured with frightening regularity when there’s no ill-will involved whatever. Wouldn’t it be nice to cut others some slack, and in kind, have others assume the best about our intentions?

It is here that we move on from our first piece of Einstein’s wisdom: “No problem can be solved from the same consciousness (i.e. the same level) that created it,” to this:

"The most important
question you'll ever ask
is whether the Universe
is a friendly place."


Albert Einstein

 “What a curious segue,” I hear you say.

It is here that we shift towards the level of the impersonal. The first step is to crystallise our own beliefs about the relative friendliness of the universe. To help get started, here's a couple of checklists. Tick the ones that resonate.

The Universe is a friendly place if…

1. Your best friend stands you up and you assume he must be saving a hapless kitten from a neighbour’s tree, or some such heroic and time-consuming activity.

2. Your acquaintance doesn’t show for a lunch engagement and you assume he must been run over by a bus and begin to pray for him.

3. When a motorist cuts you up in traffic, you think, “his wife must be in labour and he’s off to help bring a new baby into the world — how glorious!” This does not apply in Kuwait. If you live here, delete this one.

4. When friends fall silent as you approach — you don’t think, “they were talking behind my back,” but instead see yourself rather like Jesus on the Mount of the Beatitudes - they stand in awe of your presence. I have to admit this might involve somewhat more than thinking the Universe is friendly and be a precursor to a descent into delusion.

The Universe is an unfriendly place if…

1. When someone knocks your elbow whilst passing by you in the produce aisle, you grind your teeth as you run your grocery cart full-on into them, determined that no one’s gonna take a swipe at you without consequence.

2. When the waitress charges you for two coffees when you only had one, you demand to see the manager and try to have her fired for cheating you.

3. The teller at the bank is slow to process your transaction and you think this is a mendacious ploy to convey to you that you are worthless and undeserving.

4. You genuinely believe road menders are going out of their way to personally make you late for work.

Based on our responses, a pattern may emerge.  For those who, as of this very moment, are thinking that all the latter examples are justified, and furthermore, that to refrain from acting vigorously and swiftly to avenge such slights would surely lead to their increasing in your life with ever greater and more malevolent frequency , I have some news. It’s not true.

Wet Hats

I have had occasion in recent times to sit by a riverbank, sparsely populated by ducks and rowers which has led me, via a series of curious and unrelated leaps, to notions about making decisions - a course which I used to teach in a previous and less congenial lifetime. Any problem - in other words a series of events involving decisions - necessitates making a choice from the set of available alternatives at each stage. Therefore, our decisions will only be as good as the alternatives we have to select from. So much for the obvious. Being aware of the alternatives available to us has two immediate benefits : First, if we know all possibilities, we are in the best position to choose the most suitable for our purposes. Second, we may sometimes find ourselves in a situation where there is no rational way to decide between them so the best we can do is to make a blind or intuitive choice. Should our chosen course of action lead us to a dead end, we would at least be aware that we made a choice earlier in the design and another course is still available to us. A failure to investigate the existence of valid alternatives might be the difference between a messy or elegant outcome.  Sometimes, I tell my students to walk round a problem and a small door to the solution may present itself which might look very different to the more obvious main entrance.

This simple problem illustrates the idea that if we start from the most useful place, matters can be simplified greatly.

A man has a boat that moves at constant speed in still water. He starts on a boat trip, moving upstream at 4 km/h. After 15 minutes, he realises he dropped his hat the instant he started the trip, so he turns around to get it. When he finally catches up with his hat, he is 2 km downstream from where he began the trip. Assuming the turnaround time is negligible, how fast is the stream moving relative to an observer on the bank?

This problem was found in the question paper of a competitive exam where the examinee is required to solve it within forty-five seconds. Most people implicitly choose to attack the problem as if they were a watcher from the riverbank, hence getting tied up in algebraic knots. Instead, try forgetting about the speed of the boat; instead try sitting on the hat as the end point and working it from there.

Quatorze Juillet

Today is a public holiday commemorating the Storming of the Bastille, which occurred in Paris on the 14th July, 1789 in the wake of considerable civil disobedience and public unrest which is, I suppose, a polite way of saying that the people were starving, homicidal and outraged. The medieval fortress and prison represented royal authority in central Paris and was stormed by the mob in search of weapons and ammunition on the morning of July 14th 1789. While the prison only contained seven prisoners at the time of its storming - the Marquis de Sade had been moved out ten days earlier- there was allegedly a shedload of explosives to plunder (there wasn't as it turned out) and its fall was the flashpoint of the Revolution.  It rather seems as if so many constitutions have thrown out the baby with the bathwater – Russian Communists were replaced by despotic oligarchs, the Chinese imperial dynasty with Mao, and the foppish and extravagant French court of the incompetent Louis XVI (who, it would seem, was asleep during sex-ed and didn’t quite get the idea at first of what was expected of him with Marie Antoinette), with the bloodiest revolution in recorded history. Marie Antoinette was certainly enough of a bubblehead to have uttered the “let them eat cake” remark widely ascribed to her but there is no evidence that she actually did so - another urban myth. The peasants-have-no-bread story was in common currency at least since the 1760s as an illustration of the decadence of the aristocracy.  But, enough history. Each year there is a firework display in every centre of population across France and in many places where the French reside in any significant numbers. The last time I was in France in July was in 1976 – fireworks cancelled in Lyon because of a drought, but this time, the clouds rolled away and a dazzling display lit the heavens for the hour preceding July 14^th. The largest and most extravagant is on the Champ de Mars – most recently the venue for a gigantic screening of a rather bad-tempered World Cup Final, but traffic is gridlocked across the 7^th arrondissement, so it seemed a sound move to stay away. As an historical footnote, the Constitution allows for a presidential pardon on July 14 and since 1991 the President has pardoned many petty offenders (mainly traffic offences) on 14 July. In 2007, President Sarkozy declined to continue the practice, so nobody is going to get away with running a red light on the Place de la Concorde any more, where Louis and Marie lost their heads, and, ironically, people still do in the manic traffic. Boo.

Anyway, here’s a really bad video taken with my pitiful little phone camera of the festivities in Poissy. It’s traditional to dance with the firemen afterwards, I am told. Whatever…

Sunday Brunch

Various persons known to me have been taking an interest in my diet, thus I have pleasure in introducing you to Eggs Florentine, which is a variant on the staple New York brunch of Eggs Benedict. it's not easy to get right, despite looking remarkably simple. Everyone has a Benedict recipe - this one is from Delia Smith, and some use Montreal bagels instead of English muffins, but getting it all together at the right time isn't easy. Cooks reckon on a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being 'difficult' this dish rates between a 3 and a 4, depending on whether you cheat on the Hollandaise or not. The wilted spinach is underneath and also forms part of the salad - the little Sicilian tomatoes are cut in half and melt in the mouth. This has a slice of cooked ham underneath, the eggs must have perfectly fluffed whites and be runny in the middle - they were -  and a decoration of fried and spiced onion. Perfect? Oh, yeah. Egg McMuffin it ain't.

Hazelnuts and Parables

 A mashal in Hebrew literature is a short, pithily aphoristic saying - loosely translated as a parable. I was in idle conversation with a lapsed-or at least very repressed-Catholic today about the existence of God - as if he had little better to do than simply exist-and if he did, what was he like? I felt like a conjurer pulling theological rabbits out of non-existent hats and realising uncomfortably that this kind of dialectic was circular at best and incomprehensible at worst. In other words, I wasn't really secure in my powers of intellectual persuasion. The person I was talking to looked up at a hazelnut tree and pulled a branch containing three fruits from it. They took one of the fruits, removed the leaves then smashed the pithy outer shell with a brick. Careful peeling revealed a smooth, white core, falling neatly into two halves, one of which was popped into my mouth. The taste was strange, fresh, exotic and luxurious. "This", the individual said, "is what God is like." Deconstructing the sequence was an exercise in humility.

Almost a Tourist

 

As tourists do, I went to the Louvre today. Americans think it's the size of their mother's garage in Des Moines, so it comes as something of a shock to them when they realise that it is somewhat larger. Considerably, mind-bogglingly larger, as it happens. Someone said that if you looked at every exhibit for a little under three seconds, it would take decades to see everything. They seem to like you to walk everywhere also. No convenient elevators, except in the entrance pyramid which Parisians are still polarised about. I'm not quite sure how an image of the Arch in La Defense found its way into the collage, but, never mind..

The photographs are from the Etruscan section and the seventeenth century French paintings which for no discernible reason appear to share gallery space, only because I was so ticked at having to queue for nearly an hour to get in, I walked along the most convenient and nearest corridor. And no, I didn't go and see the Mona Lisa because it would have taken me two and a half hours to get there and Japanese tourists en masse bring me out in hives.

Scary Movies

“The Disappearance of Alice Creed”, directed by  first-timer J Blakeson is a thriller about a meticulously planned kidnapping,  and is the type of constricted genre piece Brits are traditionally good at. Throw three actors on a single set, in this case a bolt-fitted, soundproofed apartment, and watch the lightning. The tension is crackling and nobody can get away with a flawed performance since Philipp Blaubach’s cinematography relies heavily on a powerful command of space, gloom and close-ups. Tension is visually sustained so well one can almost sweat with both the victim and the perpetrators. In a taut power-play of greed, ruthless efficiency, duplicity and survival we discover that sometimes even disappearances can be deceptive. Snarling and heavy, with dark sadomasochistic innuendo, it sits uncomfortably enough before bedtime. Yes, it is Gemma Arterton (Quantum of Solace, Prince of Persia:The Sands of Time). Rated sixth at Toronto last year. Eight out of ten.