Wholeness / happiness

and thanks

Thank you so much to everyone for your caring, supportive and practical comments to my last post. I have written a post responding to them… but I wanted to post this one before that.

It’s Friday 5th January and so we’re a few days into the New Year. In the UK a lot of people seem to be sick. We are not so much launching into the new year as coughing into it, swapping tips for raw honey concoctions and audiobooks. One good friend was ill over Christmas but kept going because she has kids and a business and is not able to take to her bed the way I can. Yesterday the doctor told her she has pneumonia. Pneumonia. Very Les Mis, she texted. She is now starting her new year in bed listening to Barbara Streisand’s autobiography. There are worse ways.

But illness is serious, I’m realising - which might be a bit of an obvious thing to say post covid, but it’s taken a while for that penny to drop. Every time I get ill (often) I am annoyed with my body, irritated that it’s letting me down. Never do I think, oh you poor thing, you really need to be cared for and listen to. Instead I stuff it with painkillers and coffee and try to keep going…. until I can’t.

My body has been begging to be listened to for years. It kept sending me little emails (colds) and texts (aches) and Instagram messages (weird sore mouth) - but I kept ignoring them - until now. Now I’m going through all the messages trying to figure out what my body is trying to say and what it needs.

In one of my bedtime sweats I found myself getting angry with adverts I grew up with for things like Beechams Cold and Flu remedy or Lemsip max. These ads featured an ill man, leaning over a bathroom sink, hand in head presumably with a headache. Or sometime he’d be blowing his nose and looking sad. But then! Woohoo! He takes two Lemsip MAX (or whatever it was) and gets on a plane and is able to nail that morning meeting in New York where he shakes hands with other men and is a success!

This is what we were sold as a response to illness. Take a pill. Get on a plane. Be a success.

Our bodies don’t matter as much as the morning meeting.

What fucking bullshit.

Bullshit. Dangerous, life-ruining, capitalist bullshit.

Is this what being a woke middle aged woman is? Suddenly you look around at things and go, but this is stupid and wrong… but then fall in love with the glow of a chip shop or the sound of rain?

Middle age: seeing the beauty and bullshit in everything!

Yesterday I found myself writing on Facebook yesterday that I felt like a bully every time I wished someone a Happy New Year, which was a really odd thing to write and an odd thing to feel. What if they don’t want a Happy New Year? I wrote. What if they want to be miserable? I thought of a friend who was dreading going to a Christmas party. ‘I’ll have to be drunk and happy,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to be drunk and happy. I want to be sober and miserable!’ It made me laugh - but also think.

I’m beginning to think that this insistence that we should all be - or at least try to be - happy is a bit like Lemsip Max and morning meetings in New York: dangerous bullshit. It’s an idea we’ve been sold and one which can only make our lives - with all its colds and flus and losses and struggles - feel like failures when in fact they are exactly as they should be.

As I wrote in the last post, life is all of it - happiness, sadness, illness, health, love, hate, excitement, boredom, dreams and reality.

Illness might suck when you are in it but what if it brings you huge learnings and is actually the thing that saves you from yourself? Grief is hard but can also open up a whole new demension of life. When we wish someone happiness, are we robbing them of the stuff that might actually make life rich?

Then someone posted something perfect on Facebook that put into words the thing I was grasping at. Karis Mae shared a quote from a book I hadn’t heard of. It’s called The Good Life by Hugh Mackay. It goes:

“I actually attack the concept of happiness. I don’t mind people being happy—but the idea that everything we do is part of the pursuit of happiness seems to me a really dangerous idea and has led to a contemporary disease in Western society, which is fear of sadness.

It’s a really odd thing that we’re now seeing people saying “write down three things that made you happy today before you go to sleep” and “cheer up” and “happiness is our birthright” and so on. We’re kind of teaching our kids that happiness is the default position. It’s rubbish.

Wholeness is what we ought to be striving for and part of that is sadness, disappointment, frustration, failure; all of those things which make us who we are.

Happiness and victory and fulfilment are nice little things that also happen to us, but they don’t teach us much.

Everyone says we grow through pain and then as soon as they experience pain they say, “Quick! Move on! Cheer up!”

I’d like just for a year to have a moratorium on the word “happiness” and to replace it with the word “wholeness.” Ask yourself, “Is this contributing to my wholeness?” and if you’re having a bad day, it is.”

I really really liked that.

I wish us wholeness this New Year.

xx