The Secret of Happiness

For a while now I've resisted making reference to Facebook in my blog posts. Today however I need to succumb. You see during a dull moment I clicked on the little application that compares you to other people. 'Friends' basically answer questions about other 'friends'. All the answers then feed into a big league table. Curiosity got the better of me and I decided to take a look at the table. Sadly I discovered that people don't consider me to be particularly sexy. Neither do they think I’m the slightest bit funny. Bizarrely though people do seem to think I come across as someone who is happy. I sat back and began to take it in. The experience was like smelling salts waking me up from unconsciousness. I realised I'm probably a lot happier than I generally give myself credit for.
So why am I happy? Well there's lots of big stuff I’m really grateful for - my marriage, my little boy, my health and all that stuff. But there’s definitely something else too that I would say adds to my happiness and I think that I’d describe it as ‘enjoying the little things’. For me the potential for happiness exists in every moment. God has given us a range of senses that, if we are paying attention, can give us pleasure every minute of every day. So here’s my 10 ways to find happiness in the ordinary:
1. Look for visual treats - enjoy the twinkle in someone’s eye
2. Chuckle at things - a silly typo in a newspaper
3. Taste the tang of life – always keep a crunchy apple nearby
4. Release some emotion - pray for an impossible situation
5. Give something away - make someone a brew
6. Aural enjoyment - soften the din of the day with an ambient soundtrack
7. Breathe deeply - open your car window and enjoy the breeze
8. Create something special - craft that boring email reply with pointless panache
9. Live grace - so what if you're right, just because you are it doesn't make them wrong
10. Keep learning – even when it goes tits-up you can find out something new

Idealism

I promise that my next blog post will contain some original thought before I do that there's another book quotation I really want to put up here:
'Most leaders are to some extent idealists. They have a desire for things to be different, to be better. Thus, the leader lives all the time with a discrepancy between the world that she wants (and others want) to inhabit and the world she (and others) actually do inhabit. Psychologists call this condition 'cognitive dissonance' - there is a discord between the reality and the ideal. Now, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that this discord produces a certain mental and emotional strain in people. This can be constructive, generating passion, drive and energy; but it can also be destructive, producing frustration, disappointment and confusion. Accordingly, one of the mind's strategies to deal with it is denial and repression. Most people deal with cognitive dissonance fairly effectively simply by choosing to look away from the ideal. They come to tolerate the reality by avoiding the evidence, by filtering the data they receive. They fabricate a world in which the discrepancy is less.
The leader, however, is motivated by a desire to hold on to the ideal - indeed it is the ideal that drives her. Accordingly she commits herself to a journey that will inevitably lead her into a dissonance between the reality and the ideal, a tension that she refuses, until she gives up leading, to deny or suppress. Unfortunately, most other people don't want to know about this tension: they are in the business of denial and they don't want to be reminded of how bad the reality is or how much better the ideal is. They prefer blissful ignorance - and the leader, in all the evangelical fervour of her vision, is a fly in the ointment. And so the leader finds herself pursuing the lonely path that all prophets and visionaries down the ages have followed - of being isolated, being a voice crying in the wilderness, travelling alone, ahead of the crowd, on the margins, in a distant land - feeling a sense of belonging but also a sense of alienation.'
From Leading Out of Who You are: Discovering the Secret of Undefended Leadership
by Simon Walker

Anatomy of a Stronghold

It started with a thought.
'We can change it.'
It became an atmosphere of optimism.
'You know what, maybe it will happen soon?'
It took on a focus.
'If we can do it there it will prove it to everyone!'
It turned into action.
July 4th 1789, The Bastille, Paris. The epitome of absolute royal power.

2 Corinthians 10:4-5 "The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ."

We're often faced with full blown strongholds in life but how often do we pay attention to a stronghold under construction? If we look carefully at the words of the apostle Paul we can see that he gives us all the phases of the building process from start to finish. First there is the thought. The thought is processed into a pretension. The pretension is augmented into an argument. The argument solidifies into a stronghold. A stronghold is nothing more and nothing less than an entrenched belief that 'This is the way it is and it could never be different.' But like a mathematical equation that negative principle works out in its the positive too. All it takes to overthrow that stronghold is a thought. A thought that spreads an atmosphere. An atmosphere that finds a focus. A focus that inspires action. Action that proves, 'Oh yes it can!'

For more on this subject I recommend Paul Scanlon's Anatomy of a Stronghold audio series.

Me and my shadow

I don't know if it's just part of being human, or of being thirtysomething, or simply being me, but introspection seems to take up a lot of emotional energy. I seem to be forever self-examining and self-critiqueing. If this sounds a bit familiar to you too then you'll know that the tendency is not to dwell on your good points but your bad points. Why is that the default setting? I was just considering this and began thinking of it as a fascination, or even an obsession, with my own shadow. How weird would that be? But then I thought - shadows get bigger the further you are from the source of light. Maybe if I could concentrate on getting myself closer to that light I wouldn't have as much shadow to explore.

The power of strawberries

Last night, at the end of a long and extraordinary week of running an event in the city centre, something happened to me that hasn't happened for quite a while. I had a panic attack. If you've ever been victim of a panic attack I won't try to remind you how awful they are. And if you're lucky enough not to be bothered by these waking nightmares but are a bit intrigued you can get the vibe by reading one of my previous posts on fear. I'm prone to a particular variety of attack known as an existential crisis - or more simply put - going eyeball to eyeball with death. Sounds like fun eh!
Anyway, the fact that the crisis happened (strangely triggered by a scene at the end of Doctor Who!) is not the point here. I'm writing because of the unique way I got out of it. After an attack I tend to be left with a residual creepy feeling for several hours or even longer. However, about twenty minutes after last night's judder I quite innocently opened the door to the fridge sniffing around for some comfort food. I took out a punnet of strawberries and took a bite. Wow! Total unexpected ecstasy! The intense freshness and flavour provoked not only a physical but also a psychological response. I suddenly found myself absolutely convinced that if I was really standing in my kitchen with my tongue drooling over the cool sweetness of a fresh fruit then that in itself is evidence enough that anything is possible... God, eternal life, strawberry fields forever, why not?

The Doubt Catcher

I went for a coffee and a chat yesterday with a new buddy, a tutor at one of Manchester's theological colleges. Calling him a buddy might be stretching the truth a bit as this was only the third time we'd met - but the aim of the chat was to get to know each other better, so buddy will do I think. Right off the bat it was clear that we had a fair bit in common and seemed to share similar perspectives on faith, church, leadership, mission and stuff like that. But the revelation that ultimately made me feel a real connection with this guy was when he described a period during his own undergraduate studies in theology when his faith underwent real trial. He described the experience by conjuring an image which I've done my best to capture for you above - let me explain...
There are questions and issues that are strictly out of bounds in most self-respecting evangelical churches. Major themes deftly avoided or cleverly camouflaged range from the Genesis account of creation through to the unlikely dates and authors of various books of the bible, internal scriptural conflicts, dubious Old Testament morality and a whole lot in between! Put simply, if you are curious child, and naughty enough to sneak open that dusty old door with the 'Keep Out' sign, you may be in for the fright of your life. Like me, my buddy had been cocky enough to open that door and step inside. Also like me he'd found that once inside the creeping darkness and loneliness can quickly chill the soul. The language he used was of doubt-laden questions multiplying at an alarming rate until their presence became completely overwhelming. At this point I could really empathise as I recalled my own feelings of claustrophobia when unable to cope with a headful of questions far too big for me. He went on to describe how, in a very pragmatic sort of way, he'd slowly but surely begun to capture these questions one by one in jars, rather like the BFG catches dreams. Eventually, over the course of more than a year, he had them safely shelved. With the air fresh to breathe again he could now examine the infinate varieties one by one, at his own pace. There's always the danger of course that when he reopens a jar the specimen may have died, which is always a terrible shame, because doubts can be really fun as pets - it's only when they're wild they're a nightmare.

Fighting the Fear

...continued from 'Flickering Faith'.

In my last post I drew a comparison between the flickering lighbulb in my kitchen and the flickering of my faith, which started quite unexpectedly about 8 years ago. I use the flickering light image because at an emotional level I've found that my faith doesn't seem to work like a dimmer switch, it doesn't just fade away and then fade back again. It's either there or it isn't - and frustratingly, like the lightbulb in my ceiling, I have no control over it and can't seem to fix it. Or so it seemed in the early stages of this difficult season of my life. Looking back I can see that it wasn't actually that I couldn't have control, I'd just never developed the 'psychological muscles' required to control the primal fear that accompanied the doubts in my mind. Perhaps I need to employ a metaphor here to explain myself more clearly...
Imagine you're travelling in a plane - a private jet! There's just you on board, and the pilot of course. You're enjoying the view, the sunshine, the curve of the earth, generally chilling and taking it easy. Then it starts to get dark. And then it gets turbulent. And the turbulence throws open the cabin door. From your seat you can see inside and to your horror you discover that there's no pilot after all, the plane has been on autopilot. In that split second lighting flashes, there's a deafening sound and the plane plunges into darkness. You panic. You're paralysed as utter terror overwhelms you. The plane starts to lurch and lunge wildly. After what feels like a lifetime you find yourself stumbling around, reaching towards the cabin door. Somehow you manage to find the pilot's seat and you haul yourself in. As your hands grab the controls your arms are almost wrenched out of their sockets - the strength required to gain any sense of stability is more than you've ever needed to call on. Is total oblivion the only certain scenario? How soon will it come? How long can you fight it?
And that, in a nutshell, is what I had to learn to do with my fears of God's non-existence (and the related and more pointed fear - my own eventual non-existence). I needed to learn to fight it, even though at the start I was totally unequal to the task.
...to be continued.

Flickering Faith

We moved out of our flat last weekend and so we're currently shacked up with Grace's mum and dad. Living in the city centre was great but one of the things I won't miss is the flickering spotlight in the ceiling of our old kitchen. After a few years of happily providing light it developed a will of it's own. Sometimes I'd click the switch and it would come on obediently in perfect syncronisation with it's three other siblings. But more often than not it would decide to stay unlit, or it would briefly say hello then turn itself off again. Then back on. For a minute or two. Then off again. I took the thing apart several times but couldn't seem to do anything to fix it.
When I was blogging recently about Britney I divulged some personal details about struggles I've had in my faith journey over the last few years. One of my mystery guests asked to know more about this aspect of my life. The flickering light image came to mind as I considered how I might respond. I'll probably need to post on this theme quite a few times from different perspectives to fully describe what's been going on over the last few years but flickering lights seems like a good place to start.
Some people talk about having a childlike faith (not childish faith) and I really envy that. I've even aspired to it, tried to possess it, but it's proven too illusive. My faith is complicated, it's a compound of ideas, experiences and longings. About eight years ago it switched itself off for the first time, very briefly, for about ten minutes, right in the middle of a time of worship. I remember it vividly - I fell to my knees like someone had punched me in the stomach. Fortunatley it was a fairly expressive worship time and the people around me must've just thought I was enjoying a Holy Spirit moment. I wasn't. I was experiencing a waking nightmare. My head was spinning through space and my heart felt overwhelmed with the nothingness of everything. From deep inside my psyche I remembered and relived the fear I felt one night as a child when the hallucinations of a really high fever had washed over me. That fear is familiar to me now. It walks proudly like a truth as it proclaims with empirical efficiency: There is no God.
...to be continued.

The 'Jade Complex'

Ok, I admit it. The last few nights I've been tuning in to watch the lastest installments in the Celebrity Big Brother saga. Last night was eviction time and as many predicted Jade Goody got her comeuppance. For me the post-eviction interview with Davina McCall was the really intriguing bit. Jade, who'd clearly had some kind of tip-off from the producers took an unusual stance in her own defence, it went a bit like this: "I'm disgusted with what I've just seen... [ref. clip of herself bitching about Shilpa] but that wasn't me... that person talking wasn't the real me." What exactly does she mean? Is she claiming to suffer from some kind of Jekyll and Hyde complex? Will we discover later that Jermaine Jackson craftily hypotised her? I'd like to suggest that she's demonstrating a personality trait that's becoming quite common in our post-modern society - stick with me now, this is going to get deep...

The 'Jade Complex' (!) is a subconscious psychological filter, a type of denial deeply rooted in the individual's drive to survive. The mirror of self-reflection is fogged to the extent that an individual is rendered blind to their own actions and deaf to their own words. It's a dualistic twist in which the self-concept ceases to rely on external information and refers only to an internal construct formed of complex emotional coalescence. Taking all this into consideration it makes perfect sense that a 'sufferer' of the 'Jade Complex', when presented with video evidence of a misdemeanour, would claim "That's not the real me." Subjective reality has begun to overrule objective reality.

Yes, I know, I'm just flexing, but I don't think my proposition is entirely fatuous. This is basically about that thing we call 'character'. Someone once said to me, "Character is what you are in secret." I quoted that for years. Then more recently I realised, of course it isn't true, unless you're a victim of the 'Jade Complex'. Yes of course character (or lack of it) will be a determining factor in the integrity of our private pursuits, but character can't be confined to the closet. Character is the activator of our potential, the force at work directing our words and actions at all times, in public and in private. Character is the executive officer of the will taking responsibility for all our behaviour, both noble and base. This week Jade has shown the nation how much she needs to develop her character, and I'd be a fool to say I don't need to do that too. What about you?