Shouts From Down Under

Once upon a tram.

Today was Friday. August 7th 2015.



But I'm sitting here, at 11:57, attempting to write this entry on Tuesday, 11th August 2015 after our return to Tasmania from Melbourne, and in a rush before I'm called back to our house to help lift a freezer. And before I start work again (Oh where did our short holiday break go so quickly?!) at 1400 hours, today.

How do we motivate ourselves towards profitable thoughts? When we think, no matter how intellectual the lofty pondering, if nothing comes of it, no change or physical movement, no work done, then isn't that time wasted?

If you're like me, some days you feel like you could conquer a dragon.

The journey through other waking hours is more like hiding from contact, avoiding confrontation or the slightest hint of decision making. On these days the idea of any sort of work is out of the question, unless a tractor of self discipline is 3-point linked to a plough of absolute necessity. Only then can any sort of emotive force happen.

There was a time when I believed that depression / anxiety / bipolar / and the effects of trauma were lame excuses for laziness, lack of self discipline, an allergy to work, being unsociable and the personification of 100% lameness.



Now, although I feel for myself that these lacklustre conditions can be overcome by fierce determination, self discipline and ornery-ness, this method of moving forward is much less than ideal. Ignoring these illnesses and throwing them into the wheelie bin of cynical denial is a recipe for life catastrophe.

At best, the band-aid solution of "pressing on regardless" and the "stiff upper lip / harden up sunshine!" are temporary fixes. Time ticks away and just like Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, the healed over infected damage will eventually come back with a vengeance.

Left buried, the result will be a bitter, case hardened, unsympathetic person who blames everyone else, judges everyone else, and repels everyone else.
How many people have died so far, bitter, lonely and friendless because they didn't recognise their inner demon?

They (I,we) choose to paint over the multitude of sins and by rejecting their own pain, they reject any help, any meaningful interaction and any proper reparation.

There is laziness. There IS self pity. There is cowardice. There is hypochondria. There IS procrastination.

But are any of those our condition?

So, I feel the key to converting thoughts to real, live, profitable action, is honesty.

HONESTY.

We have to be honest in our thinking. Even total honesty may not be enough, if our action-dissolving condition is real. Sometimes we need information about an illness for treatment to be effective. But next to honesty is accepting whatever outcome is real.

Think. Be honest. Research. Decide. Choose. Get up. Walk outside. Look. Interact.

Then listen to your storytelling voice.

Sometimes getting yourself out of the doldrums begins with a list of chores. These tasks may not seem that important. They may be trivial. But they are a beginning. They are something to focus on, to do, and to find achievement and satisfaction from having done them.

If you are aware of how low you've felt, or still feel, then even a tiny positive outcome can be a huge victory. If you must, take your medication. But you know no tablet or quick fix pill on it's own can get anybody off their thought-backside and doing some work.



"My final effort reads like others' first draft."

Someone said this recently. They felt they must face the truth about their writing. They wondered if they should accept they will never be a fantastic writer.

But ultimately they decide to continue writing ,for their own enjoyment and fulfilment.

*Clapping, whistling, loud applause*

There we see someone plodding, having a stab at doing their best, persisting, and overcoming, climbing out of their pit of despair.

Some days we can all feel unloved. The darkest storm clouds hang over us, like gods frowning down at our feeble efforts, down at our pathetic mistakes and self satisfying surface success.

Sometimes there is a reason why we preserve a protective skin over the real truth of what's inside us. We despise it. We hate the ugliness that only we (and perhaps the gods / God) can see. We try to keep that covered up. We play the deception game so that nobody knows that desolation we feel.

We do that so that we don't have to face up to it. We do that because we don't know what else to do. We do that to make sense of the chaos. We do that and often the only person deceived is ourselves.

I believe that all the problems in the world stem mostly from a lack of personal nobleness. By that I mean every single person, if they / we held each other in high esteem, regardless of whether the person measures up or no, and if we held our own selves in high respect and to a high standard of conduct, even unseen zero-witness conduct, then most of the chaos experienced on a daily basis would disappear overnight.
This may seem to fly in the face of most people's opinion, yet look at how useless is current thinking; overflowing prisons of people whose only crime is being poor, mental condition or whatever. Yep, the current methods work oh-so-well, I'm sure. Not.

And I suppose there is a certain nobleness to self sacrifice. Those times when someone tolerates discomfort or even punishment without complaint so another won't cop the blame, or won't be burdened unnecessarily, and this is done out of love. The times this is done could be to encourage them to learn wisdom, to learn patience, to learn that the world isn't so black and white as they once believed. A period of grace.



But there is no nobleness to shutting people out and going it alone. All that's left is a human shell standing on an endless plain of lonely numbness. Numbness- an unspeakable torture that never ends.

I seem to have drifted away from talking about motivating ourselves to get off our butts and write. Start with turning those thoughts into a to-do list of one task. Do that task. Do it all again. One task at a time.

Above all, don't compare what you do to someone else. They are not you.
Because sometimes people are lucky to even be walking around.

I've finished this entry on Wednesday, and a rambling deranged entry it is. Well, you do a better job then. Go on. Get off your butt, stop analysing everything, especially yourself, and as Sir Richard Branson said and titled his book, Just Do It.

Sparky