Why is it so much harder to forgive ourselves than other people? Too much emphasis is placed on the negative feelings we project outwards to others rather than inwards to ourselves. Surely if we didn’t allow ourselves to get angry about hitting the snooze button for three hours then we wouldn’t infect other people with our negativity when we finally get out of bed. Yes! Another psuedo-justification for sleeping in tomorrow.


Wow. I just stumbled upon forgive-yourself.com. This cardboard man to our right, the ‘Emotional Healing Wizard’, can help you become an ‘Appreciator of the Magic and the Power of Forgiveness’ for a mere $27. On second thoughts, maybe I’d be happier wallowing in self-loathing.

It’s Saturday. Earlier today I had a sudden urge to tidy and reorganise a friend’s apartment. In retrospect that first struck me as more than a little odd, but then it made me think: Why is it that often we find it easier and even enjoyable to organise and improve someone else’s life rather than our own?

I’m pretty sure it’s a widespread phenomenon (I hope so – otherwise it looks like I’ve got the dictator gene). At the risk of sounding like I’m preaching or coming from a specific religious viewpoint, I suppose that bible verse they rammed down our throats at school applies here: ‘Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?‘ Perhaps we get so used to our own faults that we turn a blind eye (no pun intended) and begin to view them as the norm from which everyone else deviates, making it challenging to identify our own gaping ‘room for improvement’ (another well-known and ultimately obvious, vague and unhelpful phrase from school). Dangerous. Perhaps sometimes we do partially recognise our own faults, which is why fully focusing on someone else’s needs not only helps that someone else but also acts as a necessary and refreshing mini-break for ourselves, allowing us the opportunity to return to our own lives with a little more of that abstract gold dust known as perspective.

And now back to sandpapering down that rather large piece of wood in my own eye; perhaps tidying my own apartment might be a practical, productive and relatively pain-free start. And in true Sesame Street style, that’s all from the letter P today folks (purely unintentional, I promise).

…Living life is also like playing solo Bach. You have to find your own comfortable balance between consistency and change.

Such a shame Forrest never made a recording.

When does an appealing personality quirk become an undesirable mental condition?

The answer surely rests on tolerance. For example, it’s lucky our predecessors have been open-minded enough to grant freedom to some of humankind’s most brilliant bipolar minds. There’s a whole lot of music spanning the alphabet and centuries, from Arensky to Zimmerman, Dowland to Ives, which never would have been born had we always mistaken artistic creativity for mental instability.

If anything, reading the seemingly neverending list of bipolar-affected greats makes us feel better about ourselves, and perhaps even innovative, for putting the dog in the fridge and the milk in the kennel.

Since returning to facebook after my one-month sabbatical I’ve felt almost no inspiration to let loose on the Rabbit. This does not bode well for both me or, by contrived extension, the future of the world! I would elaborate but I’m being compelled to stare inanely at the holiday snaps of my friend’s friend’s cousin’s dog who I’ve never met.

One thing I can think of which is vaguely related… My dad, whilst having a blood transfusion over 3000 miles away, said on the phone to me yesterday, “it’s no good being well if you’re dead” and “well, it’s your life”. How many people genuinely live their average day based on the knowledge (or at least idealistic belief) that they themselves are fully in control of their very limited time on this earth? Very few. We could begin by blaming facebook for robbing us of our real (as opposed to virtual) life time. Perhaps something resembling a conclusion when I’ve logged out of the ‘book and into my fully functioning brain.

45 days ago was the birth of a new decade and, through no coincidence, it was also the birth of this blog. Three days ago marked 22 years since my own birth and, also through no coincidence, I’ve just given birth to a(nother) plan for life-detoxification. No more 4am bedtimes and cappuccino lunches. Like I said on Jan 2 (‘Ockham’s Razor: Shaver of Choice for 2010?‘) though, I shouldn’t focus on hundreds of specific goals or I’ll only build myself up for failure, guilt and a 14-year-old-style rebellion against myself, so all these individual aspirations are being directed underneath the oversized ‘be healthy and in control’ umbrella in the interests of staying dry and misery-free. To repeat what I said on Jan 26 (‘The Problems of an Ideal Rabbit‘), we can’t have ‘life’ getting in the way of life.

All these significant dates and new beginnings led me to think… If humans had never created such a thing as a Monday, birthday or January 1st, where would we be? On an eternal downward spiral? Dead? Thank god (or rather thank long-decomposed mortals) for an imposed, universally familiar and reassuringly repetitive temporal structure which allows us the opportunities to hit our own ‘stop’ and ‘refresh’ buttons. [Relevant quotation from belated birthday lunch today: 'Even genius needs structure'.] Obviously nothing external significantly and suddenly changes when we reach a new week/month/year, but I form a mental image of standing on top of a new mountain (or something more abstract but equally uplifting… or perhaps a rabbit?) with renewed energy and optimism, and this is why I often think ‘TGIM’ as often, if not more frequently, than ‘TGIF‘; I’d rather celebrate the start of something than the beginning of its end.

Perhaps my best friend and I were onto more than we thought when, at the age of nine, we began to celebrate Franmas, a second Christmas-inspired holiday in June…! Not only do we now, 13 years down the line, have one extra event to get excited about every year, but we have another opportunity to try to achieve that mysterious thing called perspective. If only we could treat every new day with the same vigour as we do every big turning-point occasion and, to take it one step further, if only we could truly ‘carpe diem‘. Happy Franmas one and all (we’re exactly 4 months away!… oh, and happy Valentine’s Day) and, more appropriately for now and indeed forever, happy new moment.

To continue from my hang-up about originality from Jan 19 (‘You Say Nature and I Say Nurture‘):

Most people, including Albert in Sophie’s World, agree that, once upon a time, in fact once before time, something had to come ‘ex nihilo‘. But, now that the world exists, can pure originality, in thought and action, really exist? Or is there just a cycle of three ‘I’s, imitation, inspiration and (re)interpretation?

Don’t think too hard about this one – someone else will have got there first.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but nobody wants to read a blog about the life of a person who sits in front a computer screen all day writing blogs. I doubt anybody would buy a painting by an artist who never emerged from their windowless studio to see the light of day. By extension, certainly for me, a musician worth listening to is not a musician who camps out in a practise room from dawn to dusk.

Without life, art becomes a science.

Having said that, I should probably stop writing and at least set foot in my practise room today before I turn into the Serial-Blogging Busker.

A music-specific continuation from Jan 26 (‘The Problems of an Ideal Rabbit‘):

For me and many others, one of the main and eternal aspirations of a musician is to break down the physical and mental barriers to genuine expression. Last night, listening to my friends perform as I’m often lucky enough to do, I had a thought as to what one of these mental barriers might be.

When we play music, we have in our head a concept of the performance we want to create. To put this roughly in terms of Platonic idealism, we have a concept of the ‘ideal’ form of a piece which we then strive to reproduce in our material world of change. But too often I think live performance remains only a faint shadow of our ideal interpretation, because the latter plays in our mind in sync with and more loudly than the sounds we actually produce. And this is why listening back to our own recordings can be so illuminating and so disappointing; suddenly we’re stripped of the comfort blanket that is the illusion that we’re doing justice to our sound concept, and we’re left naked with only the inferior product of this concept in the externally audible world.

So, aims for the next time I pick up my cello: 1. Turn down the volume or even hit pause on the ‘ideal’ performance in my head in order to truly listen to the living sound. 2. Be reassured that, in music, there are infinite versions of the ideal (so a work of music, as a concept abstract in the material world, can’t strictly exist in Plato’s world of ideas anyway). 3. Play loudly enough to be heard in Indonesia; surely one culture will find my tuning ‘system’ ideal.

I often think that if I had better knowledge of psychology, sociology, history etc. I’d have been better qualified to address the issues I’ve raised in the Rabbit so far. But yesterday, after writing my post, I reassured myself with the following thought which, even if untrue, makes me feel justified in continuing my blogging activities…

The word ‘ignorance’ has such negative connotations, but remaining ignorant to existing literature, theories, experiments etc. can, in one sense, give us the edge over those ‘in the know’. Absorbing someone else’s theory can, for example, build a brick wall around our own thought capacity as the theory infiltrates our own ideas (whether we like it or not), just like listening to recordings can subconsciously influence the way in which a performer shapes a musical phrase and place limits on the development of their individual interpretation. By avoiding the brainwashing of others and the belief that we’ve arrived at answers, we can also retain that healthy sense of awe that Jostein Gaarder holds up as the key to being a good philosopher. It’s no wonder that children are so creative. [I also realise that educating ourselves can also provide us with tools needed for further independent enquiry, but that goes against today's point...]

What I’m trying to say is this… Another person’s thought could very well act as as a useful foothold (it is, after all, someone else’s book which sparked the idea for this blog), but it could just as easily stand as an obstacle on your own personal rabbity journey. Behind every big personal library there isn’t necessarily a genius/someone you’d take out for coffee.

This just popped up on twitter from Plato via philoquotes: “Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil”. I’ll hazard a guess and say he probably wouldn’t agree with this post then.