i respect those who believe in a life after this one. but i don’t understand them. it seems to me that religion is no more than an excuse for not accepting the conditions of life. the here and now, nothing more than that. that is also the unique aspect of our life, the wonderful part of being alive.

henning mankell   

i quote others only in order the better to express myself

montaigne

it was an afternoon around the end of the summer last year. a couple of weeks previously, i’d finally bought a copy of the book a dear friend of mine, the wise owl, had published in 2012. my ME makes reading for any length of time impossible, but i’d dipped into the book and relished small portions of it. we hadn’t seen one another for a few years, and her book brought my friend back to life in my nowadays on the wrong planet. it felt like we were getting reacquainted. thus at that time the wise owl had been on my mind and in my awareness more than she’d been for ages. that afternoon i spent some time looking her up online. i discovered how active and well known she is on social media sites. then i put on some lipstick and went across the road to the local café, as i do on many afternoons.

it was a rather dreary bank holiday monday, and there were too many people i didn’t know sitting outside the café – which i think of as my café – for my liking. so i was in a distracted state when suddenly – hey presto! the wise owl appeared. for about seven years we’d not seen each other, had very little contact, yet just minutes after i’d been researching her online, and only days since i’d started to familiarise myself with her book, there she was. standing right in front of me. i’d magicked her up.

i could tell it felt odd to her that i didn’t register any surprise. my friend was pointing her face out to me for dramatic effect, gesturing – surprise! here i am! surprise! – but from my matter of fact response you’d imagine i’d seen her last week, or had been forewarned of her arrival. the reason for my surprising absence of surprise was that seeing her in the flesh seemed such a natural extension of all the other contact i’d had with her recently. it made sense. i hadn’t realised it, but i’d been expecting her.

***

people who don’t share the sense of serendipity or precognition which i and many others experience could find plenty of ways to shoot down what i’m trying to describe here. but…

and i am ever so wary about broaching this subject matter for a number of compelling reasons. but…

for one thing i am frightened, properly frightened, of being lumped in with new age thinking in any way, so frightened that i’ve not even attempted to post anything on these subjects before, despite how close they are to my heart. but…

if your life has been destroyed by a terrible physical disease which about half the world chooses to believe is a state of mind – a mistaken belief – you’re likely to get pretty pissed off with new age bollocks as the years go by, and the seventy-seventh person asks how come you haven’t been healed yet, or why are you so resistant to meeting the right healer in a place like brighton which is bursting at the seams with healers, or haven’t you heard of the lightning process, or…… but…

shouldn’t it be ok to talk about something which overlaps a little bit with magic if you are looking at it from one particular angle, and a little bit with spirituality if you peek at it briefly with your hands mostly covering your eyes from another, without being misunderstood and accused of, horror of horrors, being a little bit new age? but…

but this kind of experience, this stuff in the realm of prescience, is wobbly around the edges, uncertain, and hard if not impossible to pin down. and that makes it nervous subject matter.

***

since i first began this blog, i’ve been wanting to try to write something about belief. there are always a number of subjects percolating in my system, or in view somewhere on my conceptual horizon. i’m now recognising that belief is such a vast and weighty matter that it is overly ambitious to attempt to put everything i want to say about it in one post. so i’ve decided to simply start out, with no specific goal or endpoint in mind.

up till now i’ve based my beliefs about life, insofar as i have any, on my direct experience. one of the very few concrete conclusions this has resulted in is that i’m convinced that feeling my way through life works far better than trying to think my way through it. i find i’m much more likely to have faith in my decisions when i take this approach.

this is why i’ve decided to cast aside my natural tendency to cynicism and put my trust in something mysterious and possibly significant which has been happening to me for a long time. for most of my life, in fact. i’ve gone through phases where i pay it lots of heed, and others when i’ve pretty much ignored it. (it is frustrating how stupid our minds can be; how many times they can need to experience something before they pay proper attention to, and learn from, that experience. so although i like to think i know that life goes better for me when i am tuned in to my gut sense, or intuition, the fact is that when fresh trouble strikes, i tend to forget this vital resource.)

for a while now i’ve been trying to come up with a satisfactory term for this strange thing that happens to me. i’ve danced around different ways to describe this stuff to do with precognition for so long that i’m dizzy. i’ve gotten so bogged down in self-consciousness, so preoccupied with endeavouring not to put a word wrong, that until now i’ve ended up silencing myself.

for example; if i call it psychic experience i risk sounding like i imagine i could tour village halls helping people reconnect with dead loved ones. and when i bring magic into the conversation, i risk sounding fanciful. all i can think is that i must be inadvertently tuning in to a genuine thing – a real level of communication we humans truly have in our repertoire, but greatly underuse. one thing i am certain of is that being in touch with one’s gut sense nurtures foreknowledge. it is at those times when i’m best tuned in to my inner flow that i’m most likely to connect with prescience.

i feel like i’m seeking out a fragile middle ground where reason and mystery intersect.

though my problems are meaningless, that don’t make them go away

neil young

i take quite a lot of things too seriously. when i am at a particularly low ebb, i take some things which really aren’t worth bothering about far too seriously. i think many of us familiar with deep unhappiness and/or depression have a tendency to take things that aren’t personal personally, and have leanings towards comparing our own circumstances with those of others, unfailingly to our own detriment. unfortunately, recognising these unhelpful tendencies doesn’t make them go away.

one of the pointless things i get properly wound up about is how radio presenters talk to me. of course i realise they aren’t actually addressing themselves to me, but i spend so much time listening to radio that it sometimes feels like they are. and anyway, that is plainly part of the point of radio, to make it seem direct and personal. which makes me wonder who presenters do have in their mind’s ear, when they are chatting into their microphone. do they envisage someone they know well, or a neutral version of a friendly face?

the broadcasting tendency i object to most strongly, and which i regard as yet another sign of everything in our culture going down the pan, is relentless, meaningless cheer. i do not want to be advised on a daily basis to have a fantastic rest of the day. in fact, the more i think about this preposterous optimism, the more i consider that almost nobody could take it with a straight face; even the most healthy, cosseted, blessed members of the human race surely can’t achieve a fantastic rest of their day every day? surely what marks out a fantastic rest of your day is how different it is to all your other mornings, afternoons, or evenings? and if such salutations aren’t intended to be taken seriously, then i’d rather they didn’t say them. i was ridiculously grateful recently when a presenter suggested i have a passable thursday. this was a piece of unasked for advice i could really get on board with.

when john peel died i cried for hours. i lost a friend – loads of us did. one of the many things that marked him out as a different breed of broadcaster was that he read out song requests from people in prison. what a great idea. it must be the case that many of those who listen to radio lots of the time are not healthy, cosseted or blessed. the healthy and blessed people are out there having fulfilling careers, raising children, travelling to exciting locations and eating in expensive restaurants. they aren’t lying in bed at four in the afternoon so unwell that all they can do is listen to the radio. or stuck in a prison cell. or too poor to afford a television licence, and therefore wholly dependent on their radio.

i also mind very much the conspiracy of silence which dictates that presenters never, or almost never, mention the fact that not everyone listening is tickety-boo, that not all of their audiences’ lives are going swimmingly. i think what i find most uncomfortable about this don’t-mention-the-germans type approach is its tacit suggestion that topics like bad luck, poverty, ill health or disability aren’t brought up because they amount to bad taste. and when illness and disability are mentioned, it is almost always in a heroic context – to do with triumphing over adversity, or loss courageously borne. people who get sick and stay sick for decades – our stories don’t get told.

when it comes to my favourite radio station, radio 6, not addressing the reality of suffering is such deeply entrenched behaviour that it appears to be company policy. the most glaring example of this is how people who die – and, annoyingly, songwriters and musicians seem just as prone to dying as the rest of humanity – never “die”. they pass away. actually, not even that; they sadly pass away. i find this a very odd turn of phrase – i’m not sure of the grammar, being a lousy grammarian – but to me it sounds like the sadness is being attributed primarily to the dead person, rather than anyone still alive. the ultimate passing of the buck!

i get the point of not wallowing in misery (though my troll might say otherwise). i get the point of tackling complicated subjects with care and sensitivity. but it isn’t sensitive or caring to simply ignore difficult stuff. and speaking from my own experience, when my difficulties are silenced, they shout so much more loudly. they bash on walls and doors and cry out for acknowledgement. which makes it hard work to hear anything else. i assume there are radio listeners whose life circumstances are profoundly challenging who really do prefer broadcasters to present an idealised, sanitised world. but there are already plenty of stations catering for them; i want my favourite station, which identifies as “alternative” and “eclectic”, which is seen as john peel’s direct legacy, and which, reading between the lines, aspires to a heartfelt kind of right-on-ness, to expect more from itself, and to reach out to me and my kind. please, radio 6 – return the favour – listen to us.