Would You Just... Know What Is?

I'm at Jake and Missy's, squooshed on the mattress in the corner of the attic bedroom, writing on Jake's MacBook, while Dreads shows Jake his save on Final Fantasy and Missy and Charlotte lie prone on the bed checking Snapchat and making Boomerangs and farting surreptitiously. The light in the room is soft and low and we're doing what we've been doing all day: glorious expansive nothing.

I got a taxi up here after the close last night, Jakey was waiting up and we played Mario Kart, watched QI, hung out, then woke up this morning in time for Dreads ambling over with his XBox for breakfast and chills.

Its 23:05 now and the day has drifted in easy peace. Dreads wanting to download the new Worms game. Waiting for it to download. After an hour, three percent. OK, at this pace it'll be done in... a really long time. Leave XBox on, amble to the shops for lunch, eat French loaf and cheese, drink tea, make each other laugh, leave as long as we can, check the download.

Thirteen percent.

We listen to some insane Middle Earth meditation music on Missy's phone about being invited to Bilbo Baggins's birthday party and sitting by a crackling lambent fire as fiddle music plays feeling your whole body slowly relax. Don't even ask me, but we're all lying together in the beds innocent as newborn babes, me with my head on Jake's chest, then squidging with Missy, as wizards blow smoke rings and farmers clip the hedge and hobbit children play down the street. Like I said, don't ask me, but also don't knock till you've tried.

We fall asleep, Jake's customary day-off nap ("Well its just nice isn't it? You get up, eat, wash, go on a little expedition, then you get to go to bed and do it all again"). We wake up and check the progress on Worms -- 46 percent -- so play a board game to pass the time. Zombie 15 in extended campaign and gotta set up the tiles into a board, 1a connected to 3b and 4a and 5a and 7b, no the other way up so it makes a cul-de-sac, and shuffle all zombies of 1, 2, and 3 number into weapons cards, and add three zombies to the horde box, must do this for each scenario, groaning the whole way, then play for seven or nine high-octane minutes rushing punk kids through ruined suburbs checking police station and getting supplies from mall, then reach exit battered and shaking, our little plastic figures we picture, and then gotta set up whole nother board and cards for next scenario and after five it gets way too frustrating and we give up, in same place we always do with this damn game that we still full nerd love, and we cross fingers and check Worms.

87 percent.

So we roll around some more, Missy's friend Charlotte comes round - "Oh it's your friend, Missy, your one friend. We assumed you were making her up. Don't be weird around her and drive her away like everyone else." Missy Sassy Sarsaparilla puts hand on hip. "Excuuuse me?"

And we eat pizzas and crisps and salsa and then Dreads scrolls games on the Microsoft store and I write this and Jake goes out to smoke cigarettes and Charlotte goes home and Missy, friendless again not that we're bringing it up, lies on the bed watching us, and the night is quiet and the lamplight dim and I look at my friends and think about that Kurt Vonnegut line where he says:

"I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

Because that's how I feel right now. If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.

Now, if you'll excuse me, in a moment of serendipity that I know appears a little too much like narrative convenience but I promise you is not, Worms has just downloaded.

Until tomorrow. X

Would You Just... Drop In On Yourself?

Well I didn't write anything yesterday. It was the first day of Snooker -- world championships are held in the Crucible fifty yards from my pub, our busiest and horriblest two weeks of the year -- and wiped out at 6pm I went for a drink with Straw. I had two pints, then a Coke, I was good, and it was a warm friendship chat both of us making the other crack up, and it was no-brainer worth it, but when I got home I made tea, ate tea, opened my laptop, and fell straight asleep.

But, hey, there's no use crying over spilt milk, right? I'm refreshed now, awake, and I've got a few hours to write before my close shift tonight, so all is good.

I've been thinking about the subject of my previous post, being mindful in daily life. It's so interesting, pretty much the first thing you notice when trying to be more mindful is precisely how mindless you usually are.

I'm what you'd class the neurotic type, lost in thoughts ever poking at the world, trying to make sense of it, what it's for, what we're doing, why this, how come that -- the kind of spiral thinking that can peel back the surface of reality and lead to spectacular discoveries, but just as easily descends into negativity and depression. But I think whatever your mental type, whether an obsessive planner, a hedonistic party-goer, whether chasing personal success, following a cause or a dream, whether you live for your career, your family, your weekend, your travels, the truth is that most of us spend the vast majority of our lives halfway asleep.

We race along with our heads down -- towards what? -- as the scenery flits by out of the windows, and the days come and go.

Routines, habitual behaviours, are vitally important. It would be exhausting to have to bring conscious attention to every action, every moment -- if every time you brushed your teeth felt like the first time, having to think about how to pick up the toothbrush, apply the paste, scrub each tooth. Turning behaviours into habits takes the pressure off our mental load. Conscious attention might provide the impetus, the initial push -- OK man, time to brush those damn teeth, turn off Netflix, close laptop, into the bathroom -- but as soon as the routine is taken up you're off down the neurological waterslide and the rest just happens. You don't have to be there for it.

This is good. This is necessary. But the drawback is that if you're not careful all the moments of your life can slip by on this autopilot setting, and then you look up and wonder where it all went.

Every now and again something snaps us out of the routine. A first kiss. The death of a loved one. A promotion. A sacking. Skydiving in New Zealand. Hearing music transcendent in its beauty. I think our society has a sort of tacitly agreed upon idea that the purpose of life is to seize the day by creating as many of the more positive (again defined by society) of these moments as possible, leading what would be called a "full life".

Which is fine. But let's say these moments when we're truly awake come about every, what, hundred-thousand moments? Every million moments? Every billion? And if we try really hard and spend lots of money and take all opportunities perhaps we can cut the ratio down to one in every ten thousand? One in every five-thousand?

But meanwhile all the other moments are slipping by unnoticed, too boring, too quotidian, to be worth being present for.

Yet surely it is these quotidian moments that truly make up our lives? If most of our time is spent not winning races and securing deals and jetskiing in Jamaica and buying yachts in Monte Carlo, but instead spent scratching our legs, trying to fix the glove compartment latch in traffic jams, counting our change, clearing our phlegmy throats, then isn't it worth being present for these moments?

The mindfulness practitioner Jon Kabat-Zinn has a wonderful phrase for attempting to do this. He talks about "dropping in on yourself." When you're in the shower or brushing your teeth or on the way to work, try just dropping in on yourself, asking yourself what's going on. Are you really in that shower cubicle, in that car, or are you off worrying about next week's meeting, replaying last week's embarrassing event, picturing the precise revolting sneer that you know your mouth must have contorted into yesterday as you awkwardly tried to flirt with that person you always see on your coffee run?

And if you're happy to be in this imagined past or future, then go for it. But more likely it's happening without even your knowledge, bypassing conscious choice, your brain chuntering on on its default setting.

So do me a favour over the next few days and drop in on yourself from time to time. Check the contents of your thoughts. Your emotional state. What sensations you can feel. What you can see around you. Smell. Hear. What is it like in this moment of your life, in this part of the world, right this second?

Wake up to your life, as you live it, as often as you can. You might be surprised what you find.

Would You Just... Chunder On?

One of those days today, not bad, not good, just another day on Earth. It was steady on the bar, and I spent the morning feeling stupid, awkward; Liam Straw would say a cool thing and I'd say a version of it but worse -- Oh, Robert, with your hands like nervous spaghetti -- and I'd go, Oh, Liam, with your... ears... like... a wooden spoon, but a lumpy one I don't know leave me alone man I'm tired. Or Mark singing along to the playlist and me singing along as well to fit in, please like me, everyone please like me -- but then I don't know the words and I get them wrong and Mark has walked off and I'm just humming out of key to myself wondering if I even like the song wondering who I even am.

Trudging along like this, feeling gumpy, until twenty-minute break with a sandwich all of my own sat by glorious self on city centre park bench, just me and my sandwich -- and but then here comes the local drunk, always sleeping in pub booths pissing himself, waking up and yelling at customers, threatening bar staff, sobbing that alcoholism is a terrible disease, he's lost his brother his wife why he even alive why even live? -- and it's sad, I know, but for literally seven years it's just been this, without change, and compassion has limits, and it's my break, and he's leering over me, over my sandwich, saying something incomprehensible about Ronnie O'Sullivan, and I stare out and think, well, that's that ruined.

And back on the bar it's busy, the wave is breaking, and we bop around grooving to the rhythm, helping each other, owning our sections, staying focused. We're a team. We're together.

But in the fortress of my self I'm chundering on with the same old mindlessness, same boring thoughts, blabalabalaba, what if he and does she think and I never will but even if though when wasn't how come if they but could... And on and on.

Except there is one single moment when I wake up. What happens is I realise I'm chundering, and this makes me really glum and frustrated, man I'm so mindless, always in my head chundering on I don't know anything it's so stupid what's even... And I realise I'm frustrated about my frustration, and I get frustrated about that, and I get really angry -- And then I think, Ohhh, OK, but... yeah. OK. Let the chunder chunder. Grumble grumble. Just watch the chatter. Watch the frustration. Ohhh...

And I look around me brightly, and would you just look at this world? All of it ending. All patterns of light. Is that right? Well, it's structures made of more structures down into infinity, and it's shapes of starlight crush-forged in suns and sailing here to play for a time at being tonic bottle, bar blade, dumb old Robbie-Bear, silly leaking sink. And look at these humans crowding around, look how they crave. What do they crave? No one knows. Can I help them. Mate, can I help you? Wow. Your eyes are it all, past guarded shame of iris down into empty forever...

And three or four I serve with love in my heart, awake to the sublime tragedy, and then someone orders drinks separately so I have to make three trips to the same place, like I can't remember three drinks, and he rudely demands lager in "normal" glass -- All right, mate, I'll put back this cubist hologram of a glass that you have to drink from upside down hanging from the ceiling that I was going to use, shall I? -- And look how he's talking to his wife? But look how she's talking to their kid, Jesus, and how long is left on this shift? And who is coming in? And why doesn't I wish that wouldn't it whether if but chunder chunder chunder.

And I'm unconscious again until I remember on the bus home and get frustrated and then try to be more mindful, but then I forget again, then I remember once at tea, then forget.

And I don't think there's a special trick, any shortcut. I don't think it leads to anything particularly. I just think that we can plod in routine and autopilot through the moments of our lives, or we can wake up and catch them. And if we do... well, we don't get anything really.

We just get those moments.

The moments of our lives. Here. Now. Passing.

Would You Just... Talk About It? Part Three

My uncle is visiting. He is downstairs with my mum right now preparing tea. Clattering of cutlery, knives on chopping boards, familiar voices rising through the floor. Very old sounds. I am up here staring out at a striated sky going watercolour pink, trying to write this quickly so we will have the evening to watch a film.

We wandered today, through woods with bluebells rising out of the grass, along Abbeydale Road looking at the street art, up and around Nether Edge, my uncle pointing out the crooked corner houses, the tumbling lean-tos, the ragged interstitial spaces of shrub-land where rusting rakes and Calor gas bottles were being gradually reclaimed by the twisting vines. We tramped to Hagglers Corner to see Jakey, past Bramall Lane into town, bought craft beer bottles from the Market, stopped in work for drinks before a bus home.

All of which sounds nice and mostly was, but I felt a low-level depression through much of the day, a kind of underlying psychic malaise. I remember looking at those bluebells early on, Mum I think had said how pretty they were, and I remember looking down at them and feeling the familiar hollowness. The bluebells were just there, no more than themselves, inadequate and uninspired and drained of vibrancy.

Depression saps spiritual colour from life. Nothing is unified with anything else, reverberating with the music of the cosmos, a window on the divine, but simply itself, cold, unimportant, grey.

I am used to this feeling, and it no longer holds much fear. I have plenty of tricks for dealing with it. I try to put effort into noticing the good moments when they occur, into clinging to them, reminding myself that, yes, this is nice. I work at laying down positive tracks of thought, try to return myself to the station when I catch myself on a train into darkness.

And antidepressants help a lot. Cognitive therapy helps. Mindfulness, meditation, writing morning pages, writing this blog, exercise, socialising, eating well, all are ways to keep myself buoyed, to keep from slipping too far down into bottomless waters.

I am doing well, the best in at least a decade, and I have no intention of stopping. But I don't want to give the impression that I am fixed, that these posts are about happy endings. I still struggle constantly. There are times every day that I want to give up.

But this really is OK. The point is not a happy ending, but a continuing life, one in which I wake up day after day and do the work to live in this moment, to really know this moment, whatever it contains. This is just as true for the difficult experiences as the easy ones.

This is what it feels like to be low. This is what it feels like to be in pain. I am not turning away from this. It is my life, and I will be here to live it.

Night night x

Would You Just... Eat That Cake?

Self worth is something I've struggled with for most of my life. As far back as I remember I always felt that I needed to be a certain way to feel worthy, that I needed to win something, achieve something, change something. If I could make people laugh then I'd be liked at school. If I could prove my intelligence then I'd be accepted at family gatherings. If I could say the right things about football then I could make my dad happy again.

As I grew up I think this mutated, whether because of bullying, acne, or any number of other things, into the feeling that I had no worth. That I never said the right thing. Never did the right thing. Never looked the right way.

Part of me knew that this feeling was stupid, and I didn't share it with anyone else, kept it hidden away, pretended it wasn't there. But deep inside, I felt it.

That monkey mind that chatters away every instant, measuring and labelling the universe, trying to make sense of it, had a million solutions over the years to this feeling of inadequacy. All involved changing some fundamental thing about myself, if I could just figure out what it was. If I could just get rid of the acne... If I could just learn to stop making dumb jokes all the time... If I could just be more fashionable... Just be more mindful...

But here's a truth I think I'm only recently beginning to understand. People with a healthy sense of self worth simply feel that they are already good enough.

They don't feel good about themselves because they look beautiful, because they say wise things, win competitions, because everyone loves and worships them. They just feel content in being the people they can't help but be.

There's a Zen saying that goes something like: "In the realm of spring nothing is better and nothing worse. Some branches grow long, other grow short. All are perfect."

Each of us has a role to play. Who knows what is ultimately right and wrong, what is good or bad? Where's the use in fretting trying to second-guess a universe that provides us no answers?

Who you are right now, clumsy, wide-thighed, with weird elbows, greasy hair, getting sweaty when you start telling a joke and forget the punchline, never coming top of the class, not quite understanding the definition of capitalism -- that person that you never asked to be, can do nothing to change -- that person is as beautiful and deserving of love as anyone alive. Love is not something to be earned. Like existence itself, it is something there under everything. You just have to pay attention to it.

There's nothing passive, nothing namby-pamby, about this mindset. Winning is still nice, success is still nice. But it's icing on a cake. Great when it's there, not the end of the world when it's not.

If you are reading this then you have your existence, you get to be here, for however long, on a planet in space with trees and books and oceans and the swaying music of nature wish-washing out of your window every night. Who cares if the icing is lumpy or even not present? There's so much cake. Go out and stuff your face.

Would You Just... Talk About It? Part Two

A quality to the light this evening like soft music playing far away. Wittle-woo-cha-woo, chirrup birdies. Choo-cha-woo. A father striding home, bouncing briefcase off one thigh. Blossom fresh and damp upon the tree. Cars in silent repose. And purple clouds spread gently across the sky, their edges glimmering pink and gold, the light being drawn from the land through cracks between cloud and sky, flashing lips with lambent flames before they too close shut and the world falls finally dark.

I don't feel depressed today. I feel exhausted, but I feel nice. Although it must be said, when you have fallen into deep places inside yourself many times, those places become hollowed out, their widths and depths become known, and even when you are walking happily above through sighing grass you never completely forget what lies below, all the emptiness that is there waiting.

I want to discuss what I said yesterday about being someone who "suffers from depression". I think that the actual symptoms of depression are universally felt. Sadness, isolation, lethargy, feeling like nothing is worth doing, like nothing will make you happy, that love itself has come apart at the seams -- these are feelings we have all experienced. There is nothing unique about depression; it is regular pain, yet felt at an irregular concentration.

I can't remember where it comes from, but there's a good analogy about this regarding thunderstorms. You can get a thunderstorm anywhere where the right conditions are met. The sun warms the surface of the Earth, heat is transferred to the air, which rises, cools, and falls, forming a convection current. Patches of moist air blowing through are caught in the current and swept upwards, where the vapour condenses and becomes rain. When a cloud grows large enough the top freezes, and particles of ice knocking into one another create an electrical charge which attracts a build-up of positive charge in the ground, connecting as lightning.

Anywhere the surface of the Earth is heated, a thunderstorm can form. And so it is with mental health. The climate of any mind will, under the right (or wrong) circumstances, brew up a depression.

But just as some parts of the world are prone to constant thunderstorms, so some minds are more at risk of depression. With a lot of effort I believe these mind climates can be stabilised to decrease the frequency of attacks, and where they cannot be stabilised, mindfulness and acceptance can go a long way to helping you weather what storms remain.

But the first step is simply acknowledging that there is nothing shameful or wrong about any of this, about how you are feeling. Black skies and crashing lightning may appear otherworldly, vengeful, monstrously terrifying, yet every facet of them obeys natural laws.

I'm way too tired to do more tonight, but if you ever struggle with low mood then do me a favour right now and remind yourself that what is happening to you is normal, that it makes sense, that as with the darkest storms, it too shall pass.

And know that, even if you do not feel it, you are loved.

Would You Just... Talk About It?

I'm in low spirits today. Faint hangover when I awoke like windswept moors, levelling out as the day progressed to empty steppes of lethargy and anhedonia. Not done much with my day, and back at work again tomorrow.

But that's all OK. Being mindful is about paying attention to what is actually happening. It's not about turning everything into bright roses and tranquillity every day, which let's be honest would get pretty dull after a while. Mindfulness is simply about being awake right now, bringing awareness to your life in this moment, whatever this moment contains.

The last of the sun is fading from the sky and I'm sitting nursing an Earl Grey. Outside I can hear distant cars travelling to unknown places, driven by people I will never meet. I feel sad today, and small and confused. Can this be all we get? Surely not? Surely not?

And yet there is a sort of power there, too, accepting this sadness. It stops the feeling from overwhelming me; I smile at it, simply let it be. It's all right to be sad sometimes, especially after two really tough shifts at work, after tiring myself out writing these things, and then of course drinking last night. The blues after taking alcohol always undermine my antidepressants for a day or two.

I suffer from depression. It is worth saying that. Much of what I write is informed by my depression, deals implicitly with its effects -- and yet I generally pull up just short of explicitly stating the fact.

Well, as my main man Dumbledore once said, "Always use the proper name for things. Fear of a name only increases fear of the thing itself."

So let's have it on record: I get depressed. I don't want this thing talked about only in whispers and nudges any more, while it sits in the darkness back there cackling at me. And I don't want to feel that I had a voice that could have been used to help others who are similarly suffering, that I could have brought even some passing comfort, and that I did nothing.

And anyway, out in the light of awareness it's not so bad. Yes, depression wears on my nerves, fatigues me, makes complicated thoughts harder, makes what should be pleasant experiences less joyful, feels like I'm always carrying a few kilograms more than I'd desire on my muscles.

But at the risk of sounding like a broken record, that is OK. People find worth in life under all sorts of conditions, dealing with terminal illnesses, surviving in war zones, in prisons, in neighbourhoods destroyed by poverty. Depression isn't an easy thing to live with, but if it is the hand I've been dealt then so be it. Many have pulled off great wins with less.

Or maybe I'll just fold the cards into paper aeroplanes and launch them into the sea. We all get to invent the rules of our own game, after all. The only thing that really matters is that we are here and awake for the playing.

Hugs.