After spending much of 2010 pondering whether it is at all worthwhile coming up with new year’s resolutions only to be overwhelmed by the weight of self-expectation and inevitable failure, I eventually hit upon the only lifestyle guideline that could, I think, actually make a difference. The ‘Golden Rule’ (that is, ‘do unto others as you would have others do unto you’), though of course entirely admirable and ever applicable, would do well to be turned on its head and viewed from another perspective: Treat yourself as you would treat others (that is, others who you love and care for most of all, not those who make you wish medieval torture methods would make a comeback in 2011). This at first sounds selfish and relatively inconsequential compared to the glowing and enduring Golden Rule, but if we think about it…

It’s very easy to treat yourself badly. Staying up until the wee hours (the irony of writing this at 3am has not passed me by – my blogclock is still on Eastern Standard Time), consuming too much too often of substances that would be dangerous used as fertiliser let alone ingested, telling yourself that you’re simply not good enough. But would you ever dream of advising your best friend to act and think the same way? Or, for that matter, would you accord your relatively helpless goldfish such disrespect? I hope for your sake, and that of your nearest and dearest, that the answer is a resounding no. And it follows that if you have enough respect for yourself to lead the life that deep down you wish you led, then you’ll be in a far better position to respect those around you. And thus begins the cycle of true reciprocal respect. The Golden Rule, it seems, is the most selfish of the two; the motivation for being civil to others is to receive top-notch treatment yourself. On the other hand, the Goldfish Rule (as it is hereby named) uses self-respect as a starting point for wider happiness; surely the most genuinely utilitarian of the two. And utilitarianism should be for life, not just for new year’s resolutions. Do unto yourself as you would do unto your beloved goldfish and, who knows, you may not feel the need to source those gallows after all.

As a consequence of my new attempt at self-respect, and with my back turned to a less-than-ideal 2010, I resolve to continue regular blogging activities after three months of sad silence and exactly one year after they began. And on that note I wish you and your goldfish (plus a shout out to my neon tetra Pablo and glofish Calypso) a happy, golden and respectful 2011.

I’m one of those people that finds the process of writing cathartic and somehow validating of thoughts. It makes sense, then, that I’ve been meaning and wanting to write about the car accident that my Dad and I were involved in, and the impact it has had on me, ever since it happened. But only now, almost 18 months on, having thought and thought to the point of brain saturation and, ironically, having just read the chapter ‘On the Sublime’ in Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel, do I feel I’ve done enough thinking and made enough connections to put fingers to keyboard. It’s amazing how reading what someone else has written, even if not directly related to your situation, can speed up the journey to perspective and understanding so significantly. On 6th January of this year, almost a year on from the accident, I wrote in my then six-day-old blog that I would try to explain what I called the ‘Car Crash Effect (or less sinisterly the CN Tower Effect) soon’. What I’m writing now is, finally, my first attempt to put these thoughts into words.

After the accident people sympathetically and understandably made comments along the lines of “you poor thing”, “what an awful thing to happen” and “I can’t imagine having to go through that”, and have usually been more than surprised when I’ve responded with “oh it’s fine”, “the recovery period was the happiest time of my life” and even “I wish that everyone could go through a similar experience, only with less pain, trauma and inconvenience”. Whilst lying on various beds during the weeks after the accident, and afterwards hopping around on crutches and being pushed around in my wheelchair by incredible and long-suffering family and friends, I felt an unprecedented and overwhelming sense of happiness and perspective that, at the time, made no rational sense. My ankle was broken so I couldn’t walk, my thumb was broken so I couldn’t play the cello, I was missing some of my final weeks in Cambridge, I couldn’t celebrate my 21st the way we’d planned and my Dad was in a worse state than I was. Quickly I decided there was no point in telling anybody quite how elated I felt, as the confusion felt by other people would have no doubt only made me frustrated through my not being understood, and others may well have come to the conclusion that I had been mentally as well as physically damaged. My Dad was obviously the closest person to understanding, and I’m sure he always will be.

At the time I put my happiness down to the facts that my Dad and I were still alive, we’d emerged from the accident relatively and almost miraculously well-off and that I was surrounded by a network of genuinely supportive and caring people who had the very best brought out of them. I was also suddenly relieved of responsibility, since I was obviously not being expected anymore to perform the Schumann concerto (which I’d barely started learning) in a few weeks’ time or hand in a first draft of my dissertation (which I’d barely started thinking about). I had the sobering realisation that your complex chain of responsibilities is rarely broken until a major, and usually unpleasant, event occurs in your life which excuses you temporarily from functioning like everyone else. Of course all of the above was true, but I knew there was more to it, and this extra mysterious contributory factor to my happiness has become less and less abstract to the point where I feel it can be grasped, or at least blindly groped.

I knew I was feeling happy, uplifted and optimistic like never before and, despite my new disabilities, able to do more than ever before, which explains why I later felt the need to coin a new term, the ‘Car Crash Effect’. The ‘CN Tower Effect’, something I knew was somehow an equivalent, needs now to be explained. In the December following the accident I found myself driving with Andy and Abby from Rochester, NY to Toronto for auditions, and we decided we couldn’t leave the city without visiting the top of the iconic CN Tower, ‘the world’s tallest freestanding structure on land from 1975-2007′ (thanks Wikipedia). When we reached the top and looked out over Lake Ontario, the thousands of buildings, people and cars and beyond the land that we’d just spent the last three hours traversing, I suddenly sensed the feelings I’d experienced in the weeks after the accident being renewed. They had never gone away, but they were now instantly resurfacing. Why the almost identical extreme feelings on both a hospital bed and hundreds of feet above ground?

I believe that Alain de Botton, with the first clear explanation of the concept of the ‘sublime’ I’ve come across, has pointed me to an answer. The chapter explains that, over the years, writers have agreed on the idea that certain places of great ‘size, emptiness or danger’ provoke ‘an unidentifiable feeling’ (that of the sublime) that is ‘both pleasurable and morally good’. He goes on to describe the sublime as ‘an encounter, pleasurable, intoxicating even, with human weakness in the face of the strength, age and size of the universe’. He then discusses Edmund Burke’s theory that sublime landscapes are those that are ‘vast, empty, often dark and apparently infinite, because of the uniformity and succession of their elements’, and suggest ‘power greater than that of humans and threatening to them’. I’m sure it’s no coincidence that in my blog post of 25th March I wrote, having just seen a photo of Golden Gate Bridge taken from up high: ‘Healthy mental perspective can begin with beautiful, broad physical perspective. The world would be a happier place if we all lived on top of a green grassy hill’. Traditionally sublime places are entirely natural, but I know that in many ways my view from the top of the CN Tower could be described not just as beautiful but as sublime, however pretentious and contrived this may sound. In any case, writers on the subject in the eighteenth century, if transported to today’s increasingly built-up world, would surely agree that a largely manmade landscape could prompt an experience of the sublime. Like an ocean, desert or mountain, the Toronto skyline gave a very real impression of power far greater than the sum of its parts.

So, Alain de Botton summarises that ‘sublime landscapes, through their grandeur and power, retain a symbolic role in bringing us to accept without bitterness or lamentation the obstacles we cannot overcome and events we cannot make sense of’. Before reading this conclusion I had already started thinking: perhaps I am starting to re-evaluate my accident as a sublime experience. After all, the sublime is not limited to places, but it’s often referred to in, for example, more abstract realms such as music. Here is the final paragraph of the chapter which I think sums things up beautifully and which made me elated once more and probably a bizarre sight to behold when I read it on the train yesterday:

If the world is unfair or beyond our understanding, sublime places suggest it is not surprising things should be thus. We are the playthings of the forces that laid out the oceans and chiselled the mountains. Sublime places gently move us to acknowledge limitations that we might otherwise encounter with anxiety or anger in the ordinary flow of events. It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming, but it is the vast spaces of nature that perhaps provide us with the finest, the most respectful reminder of all that exceeds us. If we spend time in them, they may help us to accept more graciously the great unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.

I find it difficult to believe that anyone could disagree with this closing statement, whether religious or not. The accident was an event which, by definition, was beyond our control and certainly not driven (so to speak) by malicious intent, or indeed by any intent at all. It makes perfect sense, then, that the feelings provoked in me both after the accident and over Toronto resulted from a then-subconscious acknowledgment that I was limited by powers that were not suffocating and sinister but awe-inspiring, humbling and worthy of respect. Although we should never stop being determined to stretch ourselves, there is something both reassuring and empowering in coming to terms and being happy with our place in the world. By giving over some control of our lives to greater natural (or partially manmade) forces, whatever they may be, the weight of total responsibility and accountability is finally relieved. We can then happily begin to realise that all we can do is make the best of any situation to the best of our constantly evolving ‘imperfect’ human abilities.

Even if this makes no sense to anybody else, and although I tied myself in knots trying to make it coherent, I’m glad it’s been let out. In the interests of safety, perhaps each government of the world should sponsor trips to the top of their country’s highest building rather than skimping on salt on icy roads this winter.

Watching the historical but slightly surreal and almost farcical 2010 Queen’s speech debate on BBC News just now, I started thinking this: When it comes to debate and decision-making, isn’t the word ‘objectivity’ rendered redundant? If we were all able to gain true objectivity, wouldn’t debate be heading for extinction?

Within this realm, objectivity is synonymous with perfection and, as I’ve rabbited on about before, it is not only impossible for perfection to exist but the very concept can be dangerous. When making a decision for the greater good, we of course strive for and like to think we’re being objective, but surely all we can ever do is zoom out as far as possible on the big picture (or, in rabbit terms, climb up the hairs to the highest altitude possible). There’s only so far we can go and there are always going to be blind spots. We can’t accumulate multiple perspectives (unless of course we have multiple personality disorder); we can only broaden our own. As much as we like to think we’re divorcing ourselves from our own feelings, thoughts, motives etc. we’ll never be fully empathetic with those around us, simply because we are not them.

I’ve just realised this post must have been subconsciously influenced by something I read in the Times today: that one of the worst lies that men tell themselves is, ‘I am always objective’. The very fact that I am right now arguing with a man about the above backs up this article and this post very nicely. But this man has inspired me to raise the idea that an omniscient ‘God’, in whatever form he/she/it may or may not exist, is objectivity itself, and we humans are all on a spectrum of subjectivity, some of us far closer to the ‘ideal’ of objectivity than others.

So all this talk about working in the ‘national interest’ is admirable and, of course, entirely necessary, but we can’t expect miracles to grow from this intention, even if it is wholly genuine. What I would idealistically like to see, though, is a widespread recognition that objectivity is an unachievable ideal. With such recognition we wouldn’t get these politicians, and people in general, making brash decisions simply because they believe wholeheartedly that everyone else would agree, if only everyone else was objective themselves. Without wishing to disturb Socrates in his grave: Most objective is he who knows he cannot be objective. I agreed with Nick and I still do, but ultimately if he and his partner in (hopefully reducing) crime Mr Cameron are going to make changes that work 100% for me they’ll have to take up the cello, start wearing earrings and develop a taste for inconclusive blogging.

I’ve just arrived at (yet) another (hugely generalised) reason as to why many of us folk in the performing arts world are happier chaps than, say, investment bankers, who spend the majority of their lives having to live in the future. Living in the future can, of course, be the best kind of living of all – the possibilities are endless – but if you’re never allowed sufficient time and energy to feast on the fruits of your planning, life must be some kind of unfulfilling out-of-body experience. If your present is in the future, you’ll never get the chance to unwrap it, as it were.

There’s also the banking aspect of investment banking. Enough said.

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).

I was reminded in my music theory class today of the rabbit-duck illusion (naturally).

At first I thought I’d give my brain a mini-break by just posting this picture and leaving it as a nice decorative addition to my blog, but then it got me thinking (dangerous). Here’s one of my (contrived?) Photoshop-provoked thoughts…

Perhaps we’re ‘on the same page’ as more people than we first think. The ways in which others function, however, don’t allow us to relate to them. In bunny-related words, rather than climbing the hairs of an enormous rabbit others are, at the same pace and altitude, scaling the feathers of an equally huge duck. Surely this is at the root of religious conflict; we all have similar if not the same general aims, but people don’t recognise that there are different ways of approaching and actively achieving them within different personal and cultural contexts… Same carrot, different animal. One man’s rabbit is another man’s duck… You get the picture (literally).

Have you ever noticed how life gets in the way of ‘life’?

Plato had his ‘ideal’ and visual realms and, to illustrate, he used not rabbits but horses, i.e. he distinguished between the fixed idea or form of a horse and its physical manifestations in our material world of change. For more on these two realms, see the new little animated clay version of Plato’s allegory of the cave here.

I worry that too often we feel inadequate for letting our ‘imperfect’ and dynamic real lives get in the way of our attempts at living our static concepts of an ‘ideal’ life, something which is not just unattainable but non-existent. The Christian pressure on us to live in the image of God (in fact, pressure to live a certain way in society in general) doesn’t exactly help us on this one. Of course I’m not saying it’s a bad thing to strive for excellence, but surely it’s perpetually guilt-inducing and plain wrong to believe that there is one perfect life-path which can be followed. After all, we’re only ‘shadows’ of the ideal human living in the ‘cave’ that is our own world. [Thanks to amazing company, food and wine in Brighton, NY for fuelling this post and others.]

We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us – Joseph Campbell

P.S. I somehow just found the above t-shirt online – Plato’s cave- and bunny-related… my ideal t-shirt, so to speak.

Can music replace religion? Or does music itself necessitate religion?