From August to Auguste

The Thinker by Auguste Rodin

When I left the house this morning everything was covered in a thick blanket of fog. It looked like Silent Hill but without the horrific undertones. Trees have been losing their leaves here for a couple of weeks now and the sides of the roads near the palace are covered in a carpet of brown leaves that are still crunchy and haven't quite begun to mulch just yet. Autumn is well and truly under way and I feel a sense of comfort, as an albino I don't do well in heat and the change of season offers me a chance to relax.

The start of September also means that the last of the schools to return for the new term have opened up again. Despite the added traffic in the morning time this causes, it also offers a further sense of relief, because around half 9 in the morning when the school day is under way practically every shop in town is dead. I've made a few changes in my personal life, some of which have already paid off, and a few more I'll have to wait a few weeks to see the outcome of, but I have a tentative sense of hope. I managed to negotiate a settlement of an old debt and saved myself £1,500 in the process which give me a sense of relief I haven't felt in quite some time.

I don't want to tempt fate, especially with October on the horizon, a month that historically has been quite shitty for me, although last year it was okay-ish, it's hard to tell at times whether you really are a victim of disproportionate negative experiences or if you're just focusing on them too much.

There's a video on Youtube on the Mythical Kitchen channel of Brittany Broski eating her last meal where naturally the topic of conversation is quite macabre, if you were going to die what would your last meal be, so death inevitably features in that conversation. One of the little nuggets of wisdom that Brittany drops in the video though is her outlook on life where she sees life simply as a journey to giggle more than you suffer, or to put it another way, accept that there will be shitty times and bad things you have to deal with but you can't eliminate that entirely, so to maintain a positive outlook on life you have to find more happiness to outweigh the sadness.

I gotta be honest this is something I am struggling with at the moment, which has been the case for a while. There's no end of negativity in the world and if you care about the world and anything in it then you open up a mainline into your heart with everything you care for. Empathy can be debilitating. When you're powerless to stop something though, getting upset that it's happening is a downward spiral you can't stop until you hit rock bottom. You can't simply switch off your feelings but the amount of conscious thought you dedicate to the things you can't control amplifies and intensifies those feelings.

In Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, there is a question that is asked which has no definitive answer: Which comes first, the thought or the feeling?

There are two schools of thought on this matter - no pun intended. One posits that thoughts precede feelings, that we think first, and then feel. This school of thought holds that we can control our feelings if we control our thoughts, this leads into a lot of different techniques, coping mechanisms, and some pseudo-scientific approaches such as Neurolinguistic Programming which I remember being en vogue in the mid 2000s when I was a student.

The second school of thought holds that feelings precede thoughts, that we feel first and then think. This school of thought holds that we don't often understand why we feel a certain way and that these emotions persist until we consciously acknowledge whatever it is that is causing us anxiety in order to process it and let it go.

The problem is there exists evidence for both being true and evidence that contradicts the other, in the end the answer remains inconclusive, or perhaps it's safer simply to say that some thoughts may be preceded by feelings and that some feelings may be preceded by thoughts.

Whatever the case may be, the way you think about the world shapes the way you experience it, anticipating pain makes you experience it twice, once in anticipation and once when it actually occurs. That can create a cycle of anticipation, experience, and subsequent replacement of whatever you were anticipating with the next thing you are going to fixate on, never giving yourself a moment to exist without looking forward, or backward, just to be.

I'm trying not to fixate on the things that I'm waiting for the outcome of but that's proving difficult. The mental block is all-encompassing, distraction tactics as a means to focus on something else certainly help, but there is no rest to be found when you swap one fixation for another. Yes, playing games occupies the mind and lets you forget about the things that were consuming your thoughts, but the mind is still occupied, it doesn't actually get time to rest, and that's a problem, and unfortunately right now it's a problem I don't know how to solve.