Lucky

tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26826292.post-89227746167533197702008-07-10T06:34:00.009+01:002008-07-10T08:28:27.814+01:00Lucky<div style="float: right; margin-left: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/malisia/2359937226/" title="photo sharing"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3255/2359937226_a93874371d_m.jpg" alt="" /></a> <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/malisia/2359937226/">Lucky clover by Crochettes</a> <a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/malisia/">Thanks Alícia on flickr</a></div>It rained continually yesterday, didn’t stop but went through varying intensities. It reached the point that everyone ignored the light drizzle. Before the day was over I was taking no notice of the moderate rain either. I was fixing the car standing in a puddle, using the bonnet (hood) as a shelter. There was nothing vital about the work, but I wanted to get it finished: to install the new gadget which would send the correct temperature reading to the gauge on the dashboard. The job was trivial, could have done it in a few minutes with the right socket spanners, but there’s the rub. The young man next door had lent me his set but the exact right size was missing and I may have crossed a thread in consequence. The sockets are expensive when you buy them individually, and I do my best to make the right decision overall and in each case. As in life. (Till a year ago, this blog was entitled, “As in Life . . .”) So how does one learn? I was talking yesterday about the impossibility of self-help books. They exist of course, but how can they work? A “Do-it-yourself Guide to Car Maintenance” would be quite handy in theory, but would it make you an expert? Would it give you help in every dilemma? No, we have to build up our own internal library of experience, made up of images and schemas, not words. In life, one learns best by working alongside someone wiser. There’s an expression “monkey see, monkey do”. We are indeed monkeys. When I worked in a bank on contract for a couple of years, I learned another apparently common expression for informal training: “sitting with Betty”. No matter who Betty was, it was bound to beat “sitting through PowerPoint”. Still, one learns something from books. From my teens onwards I haunted junk-shops which sold mainly old furniture but had a few books too. They were cheaper than the antiquarian bookshops. There I found In Tune with the Infinite by Ralph Waldo Trine, who seems to have been the Daddy of self-help; though I also obtained the Great-grandfather of the genre: Self Help by Samuel Smiles. This was more like a set of potted biographies, each demonstrating the magical power of hard work, honesty and single-mindedness in bringing a person from impoverished or unpromising roots to fame and fortune. The best “popular philosophy” guide I’ve ever come across is In Defence of Sensuality by John Cowper Powys, published 1930. It never seems to have been truly popular, being long out of print and having spawned no imitations. He advocates the cultivation of our “ichthyosaurus ego”, a way to rapture for the lonely self, but the very opposite of Buddhist detachment. He encourages his reader to curse at the source of all cruelty, the First Cause: but to give generously to beggars. Nowadays, there is little originality: people teach what they think they know, thinking they know how to teach. A bizarre memory from twelve years ago: the doorbell rings. It’s a man peddling his own book on how to get rich quick. It turns out that his personal get-rich-quick plan, after having been made redundant from some desk job, is to sell his book. It shocks me that he lives a few streets away, and that we resemble one another: similar age and social background. Did it really happen, or did I imagine it? Either way, he was an “angelic messenger”: a human being sent by the gods of chance to show me something, as in a mirror. As a warning. This blog is all “I”, “me” because it’s devoted to truth. Anything else but “I”, “me” is hearsay or guesswork. In any case, I have a theory that the personal is the universal. Adopt the ideas of the crowd, and you’ll dwell in a world which has never really existed except in the clichés of song lyrics and journalism. Go your own way, think your own thoughts; and when you express them you may touch another soul; because all our sensibilities are built on the same dark (unacknowledged) foundations. Suppose I ignored that messenger-angel and decided to write a self-help book myself? Well, perhaps not a book, but a blog post or two? Not “get rich quick” for that has hardly touched me even in fantasy, but “how to live”. In honesty, I would have to say “Be lucky”. That is lesson 1. All other lessons, if any, will be amplifications of lesson 1, which has to be thought about first. PS: looking for a suitable illustration for this piece, I googled “lucky”. <a href=" http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3335275.stm">This article came up first.</a> How lucky is that?Vincenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18297306807695767580noreply@blogger.com