Vivien Grey

For decades, I had an excuse for my rather poverty-stricken pondering: I had a poorly educated mind. Or perhaps my mind simply had a slightly jack-in-the-box, off-piste mechanism. Thoughts would spring up, collide with one another and disappear down rabbit holes. I would encounter feelings that I could quickly dismiss, rarely following them through to any conclusion.

Perhaps people fortunate enough to grow up with steady parents acquire, among other things, a certain orderliness of thought. They are supported in recognising and distilling the feelings generated by their experiences. Ideally, a coherence of thinking develops: This happened, therefore I think this.

Those of us who didn't have quite such an organised beginning may muddle along, usually muddling others at the same time.

But pondering can be interesting.

Every day, something interesting happens. You saw a dog chase a cat. Then the cat turns on the dog, and the dog backs down. A tiny drama, a reversal of power, over in seconds.

Or you're driving along a wooded country lane when someone overtakes you at speed. The fact that such narrow lanes are littered with the dead bodies of foxes, pheasants, squirrels, muntjacs and fawns seems inconsequential. So why did they do that; late, careless, unthinking, angry perhaps?

Someone told me about a colleague who had been sacked on the spot. Her colleagues saw her as pleasant and hard-working, with just a smidgen of slapdash. But isn't that where managing people becomes difficult? People aren't pieces of machinery. They arrive with histories, insecurities, hopes, fears, habits and blind spots. A manager has to cope not only with the intricacies of their own feelings but also with those of the people in their team.

This woman's job was on a university campus rigorously dedicated to exploring the sociological and psychological miseries of the developing world. Yet, before she lost her job, nobody had particularly mentored her. The hiccups in her performance had never been properly worked through. Her three-month notice period would be paid, but she was not required to return to work.

Some kind of point was clearly made. Perhaps along the lines of ‘a bad workman blames his tools’

Advancing age ponderings

Growing old I was left pondering on my own development and whether I was “born stupid” or “crafted into it.” The intricacy of the play between inherited traits and life experiences seems to have steered me down a path that was neither wholly defined by nature or nurture, but rather a constant negotiation between the two.

In my book ‘I Didn’t Ask To Be Born’ I begin with the mythology of the arrival of the baby.

So fanciful Storks and suspect thoughts: Top of Form

 

After the stork places its bundle of joy and mystery within the family there is much rejoicing. 

Carl Jung wrote about the collective unconscious and the archetypal figures and patterns that recur across cultures — the hero, the great mother, the child. Whether or not one accepts all of Jung's ideas, there is something fascinating about the persistence of these stories. Human beings seem unable to resist turning life into mythology.

In my book I Didn't Ask to Be Born, I begin with the mythology surrounding the arrival of a baby.

The stork is, of course, a charming fiction. But the idea that babies arrive carrying a whole universe of expectation is not fiction at all.

Perhaps we need stories to make sense of what we cannot yet understand.

Before a baby can speak, walk or even properly focus its eyes, we have begun imagining the person it will become.

The awaited child can become the golden child: special, chosen, radiant with the promise of future achievements. The child is not yet a person in any meaningful sense of the word, but already it has a part to play in somebody else's story.

And then the actual child arrives.

The sincere child may be anxious, difficult, dreamy, rebellious, awkward or exceptionally sensitive. It may simply have no interest in becoming the person everyone had imagined. Or it may want to, but be unable to.

Human beings, with our extraordinary brains, seem to be particularly preoccupied with questions such as: Who will this child become? How will they fit into the world? What have we created?

The rest of the animal world appears to concentrate on feeding its young and teaching them how to survive. Humans, meanwhile, encourage their offspring to follow their dreams, whatever that means, while quietly wondering whether those dreams will be impressive enough.

Most families manage life's unpredictability reasonably well. They adapt to challenges, disappointments and setbacks. They bend when circumstances demand it and find ways of carrying on.

For others, however, the unpredictability of life shakes already fragile foundations. Emotional difficulties can become patterns of thinking and behaviour, passed from one generation to the next without anyone quite realising what is happening.

The child grows up inside a story it did not write.

Perhaps this is where nature and nurture become so difficult to separate. We tend to discuss them as though they were opposing teams: genes on one side, childhood on the other. But a human being may be made somewhere in the argument between them.

Inherited traits meet experience. Experience changes how we understand those traits. The way we understand ourselves affects the choices we make. Those choices create further experiences.

And round we go.

The Trouble with Predicting

Perhaps my peculiar way of pondering is not entirely a defect. Perhaps the jack-in-the-box has a purpose.

A dog chases a cat.

A cat turns on a dog.

A car speeds down a country lane.

A woman discovers that she no longer has a job.

A baby arrives beneath the comforting wings of a mythical stork.

Somehow, in my mind, these seemingly unrelated events are connected. I'm still working out precisely how, but I think it has something to do with our inability to predict what will happen next.

We spend an enormous amount of time imagining how things will turn out. We form expectations about our children, our careers, our relationships and ourselves. We construct explanations for what has happened and use them to anticipate what might happen next.

Yet we are remarkably poor at knowing what comes next.

The dog, giddy with power as he chases the cat, probably assumes the outcome is obvious. Then the pussycat turns around and trips him up.

The woman thinks she has a job, until suddenly she doesn't.

The driver isn't planning to kill a deer, but the deer ends up dead.

None of these outcomes may have been intended. Some might have been avoided. Others may have depended on a chain of events nobody could have anticipated. But they all remind us that what we expect and what actually happens are not necessarily the same thing.

Perhaps the challenge is not to become better at predicting everything. Perhaps it is to become more able to accommodate the unexpected.

We need to limber ourselves up for uncertainty. To recognise that people are complicated, that circumstances change, that our own understanding is incomplete and that the explanations we settle on today may need revisiting tomorrow.

That doesn't mean abandoning judgement or refusing to take responsibility. The driver still has a responsibility to drive carefully. The manager still has a responsibility to manage fairly. Parents still have a responsibility to care for their children.

But it might mean leaving a little room for what we don't yet know.

Perhaps that is the real talent in pondering: not the ability to arrive at a definitive answer, but the willingness to keep thinking when the answer isn't obvious.

To follow the rabbit hole a little further. To look again at the dog and the cat. To wonder what happened to the woman, and what might have been done differently. To recognise that the child who arrives is not necessarily the child we imagined.

And to accept that our own lives, too, may have been shaped by forces we only partly understand.

Perhaps pondering isn't about solving the mystery of how we became who we are. Perhaps it's about learning to live with the mystery, without being quite so certain that we have it all worked out.

After all, the cat might turn around at any moment.