Bring on the Walls

I was having a bit of a chat with my new ministry colleague about what we do when we hit a wall. I'm not really sure that an ample theology of wall exists within the church. The problem is, I reckon, that most people choose the metaphor of hitting it. Which is not the way I deal with walls, by and large. The couple of times I tried, it left scars.

Marathon runners speak of 'the wall'. For them it is a description of something psychological. Your mind tells you to stop but your body isn't finished with it yet. I know a bit about this. Some years ago I was told by a neurosurgeon that my chronic back pain would decrease if I exercised. Trouble was, exercise really hurt. I was slowly and gently introduced to the psychological idea that pain, real as it was, had ceased to be an indication of something wrong. I was causing myself no further damage when I exercised and the pain was unnecessary. I had to retrain my body to keep going even though it hurt. Took about 18 months but it worked. Hardest thing I ever did. No question.

Real walls, without doors, have to be climbed or circumnavigated but remember, you should be able to see them coming. Prepare yourself for any walls with appropriate equipment.

Metaphorical and psychological walls require a whole different set of techniques. You can seek a hidden door. Jump them. Blow them up. Walk though them. Dig under them. Leave them for another day. Give them to somebody else. Attach them to a balloon and float them away. Attach yourself to a balloon and float over. Get a really big ladder out of your shoe. Join with the Roadrunner (beep beep) and draw a hole in it. Jump through and erase the hole as Wily Coyote leaps. Fun, isn't it? As the great Dan Reed said, 'To daydream properly takes immeasurable amounts of imaginary time.' The decision is yours.

The problem with walls is that they aren't walls. They are obstacles which you have deemed insurmountable. It isn't the worst advice to ignore them.

Got too many things in your head? Put some down for a bit. Diary them for next week and forget about them.

Got a thing coming up you don't know how to deal with. Get input. Talk it over. Break it down into smaller bits. If you gotta eat a slug you want that critter thin-sliced.

Got too many actual jobs? Renegotiate some deadlines.

Wondering about your entire sense of self-worth and ability? That kid needs therapy. And probably not from the person who gave you the deadlines or relies on you hitting them.

What sort of mental ability does it take to willingly go to your death by crucifixion? I'm not going to get into theories of atonement or a quest for the historical Jesus - I want this to be useful to more than the faith community. I simply ask if you could go that way knowing you could avoid it and knowing that no-one would ever know that you did, or criticise you for it. From where does that sort of inner strength come?

Walls. Time to come tumblin' down.

Quote Book Index 531-540

Nearly finished Coupland (for now):

532. Option paralysis: The tendency, when given unlimited choices, to make none.

Mind the Drop

In the 1985 Steve Davies v Dennis Taylor snooker final Davies missed an easy black. Thing is, it was an easy black to win the World Championship after scores were tied at 17 frames all. Taylor sunk it to win, next shot.

The day after, in The Times, was a quote I can't get exactly right, or attribute, but it was along the lines of:

Anyone can walk along the edge of the kerb without falling in the road; but few can do it when there is a 500 foot drop next to it.

Psychological pressure is huge.

In 1991 Bernhard Langer missed a short, but tricky putt to save the Ryder Cup. Someone wrote that the pressure on that putt was impossible.

Yesterday Tiger Woods was the victim. He missed a putt he would have sunk 9 times out of 10; maybe 99 out of 100. It meant Europe not only retained the Ryder Cup but actually won it again 14.5 to 13.5.

One of the reasons we love penalty shoot-outs, last ball test matches, black-ball games and final-green putts for victory is watching great sports people hold it together in extreme circumstances. If you can keep your head when all around you are losing theirs...

Quite.

Well done European golfers. Spring in my step today despite not really liking golf and having stayed up too late watching it.

Disappointment

I haven't had huge amounts of disappointment in my life. If I told you some of them you'd laugh at how trivial they were. They might have been life-changing - failing a football trial for instance - but terribly unimportant in the scheme of things.

Now here's a ridiculous one. In about 1982, in the days when video recording was out of my price range and the internet wasn't a word, I had two small children and a busy college life training for the ministry. One Saturday evening Mrs T and the small children had gone off to visit grand-parents and I had finished my work. I was preparing to watch a TV programme of a gig by my favourite band of the seventies, Genesis.

Being somewhat guilty about this space I decided to hoover the house before settling down. I ran the hoover into the tele and one of the two items broke. Sadly not the hoover. No catch up TV or iplayer. No-one else had recorded it.

My disappointment lasted, on and off, nearly thirty years until just now when I realised that I could probably find that programme on YouTube. I could. I did. It was good.

Who knew thirty years of hurt was so easy to fix? It's not quite meeting with triumph and disaster and treating those two the same, but if something has gone wrong maybe in time we'll figure out a way to fix it that you couldn't possibly imagine. Cryogenics anyone?

The other lesson of course is that if you have something good coming up don't do anything to jeopardise it. Wait with a beer, not a hoover.

Psychology News

Fascinating article in the Observer on Sunday in which Daniel Kahneman argues, in an extract from his  book Thinking, Fast and Slow, that the evidence clearly shows that successful traders in the money market cannot demonstrate that their success is down to anything but luck. In other words the luckiest ones are seen as the best and faith continues to be put in them on that basis.

He established his theories by trying to assess how well soldiers would do in leadership based on observing their performances in a series of tests. It turned out that there was virtually no correlation between someone taking charge of a log-dragging contest and actual leadership skills in the theatres of war or management. But no-one believed him and continued to run the sort of obstacle courses admired by management consultants the world over.

He explains how, once we see an illusion of skill - a cognitive illusion - we find it very hard to respond in any other way than as if it really is skill. Many of those we revere as successful have simply thrown several sixes in a row. Whilst there may be some advantage in being friends with someone who has just done that we need to be aware that runs of luck are runs of luck and no more.

So, who do you think is good at their job? And are they, or are they just lucky?

ENTP

Famous people with your same ENTP personality include: Alexander the Great, Thomas Edison, Weird Al Yankovic, Tom Hanks, Alfred Hitchcock and Celine Dion.

This from the analysis of my Facebook test - a short version of the real thing. Now excuse me a moment but does anyone know? I mean really know, how many of the above actually did a Myers Briggs personality-type indicator test?

Maybe the lack of interest in completing and finishing, moving from one interest to another explains a lot - Edison's 100 plus patents, Hanks' various roles all being a bit the same, weird Al ripping off hundreds of different artists, the lovely Celine's list of rubbish songs going on and on like her heart. But Alexander the Great. Did he wish to conquer at first but then got bored and simply globe-trotted as an aggressor?

I think we should be told. Meanwhile I'm bored and will post on something else in a bit. This could have been funny. I'm not easily bored - just drawn that way.