Quotations narrow our focus to a particular thought or premise, maybe it is my fuzzy focus that fails to appreciate most quotes, whatever it is most are lost on me. I hope I am not just being prickly.

I was strolling down Smith St a month ago when I saw a building with a quote that stayed with me. A building with a quote is odd, there is no other name on the outside but apparently it is Aesop headquarters. Clever Aesop and a quote that resonates. I went back this week to photograph it with my phone and here it is published:

“As far as we can discern the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being” C. G. Jung

That’s it, I just wanted to share that thought.

That’s a list from someone who said that every day for six solid months she had to try really hard to stay alive. She doesn’t credit any one thing as helping and who could say what helps in the end? I like this list because it is from one woman’s experience, one woman who has generously shared her experience.

Again I wish Marian well and warm.

Depression is isolating and lonely, unreachable…

Listening can be more important than speaking. When someone starts talking a listener is a gift to the speaker.

My friend Charlotte recently described one of her darkest nights, a night on which she could hardly be, and she rang a friend. A friend she knew as a counselor or therapist, someone Charlotte turned to when she didn’t know what else to do. They stayed connected on the telephone for a very long time. One who listened and the other barely able to speak.

The friend didn’t offer advice or make helpful suggestions about what Charlotte should do or not do. She listened and kept listening when all that might have been audible were sobs. She was a friend, someone who was there on the end of a line and holding the experience of the other.

I think about that story a lot and the gift of doing no more than listening.

If you, or someone you know, needs emotional support call Lifeline on 13 11 14 in Australia. Crisis counselling is available around the world.

There is a poster visible from the Richmond train station, it turns to reveal one side and then the other. “Alcohol does not cause violence” it broadcasts as it spins. An unequivocal statement I recognise as familiar, being from the “Guns don’t shoot people” genre.

The annoying billboard creates a squall in my head by claiming there is no causal relationship between alcohol and violence. I thought alcohol use was associated with all kinds of violence, but I could have assumed wrongly, or maybe I have listened to too many news story beat ups attributing social problems to alcohol use or perhaps it is convenient to explain away problems by blaming something. I ask my friend Google for clarification and Google provided a review of the scientific literature on the relationship between alcohol and violence.

I know, I know I can’t believe everything I read on the internet – or a billboard for that matter – and this review is well credentialed, coming out of the Presley Center for Crime and Justice Studies, and Department of Sociology, University of California, Riverside, California

The researchers, Robert Nash Parker and Kathleen Auerhahn, conclude that “… consistent finding that we can report from this review of the empirical evidence is that when violent behavior is associated with a substance, that substance is, overwhelmingly, alcohol. Study after study indicates that,even in samples containing relatively high baseline rates of illicit drug use,violent events are overwhelmingly more likely to be associated with the consumption of alcohol than with any other substance” They don’t make a causal link between alcohol and violence, more empirical tests and data are needed. “Much work is yet to be done, but the prospects for greater understanding of how and why alcohol and drugs contribute to violence have never been brighter.” Maybe I should have searched for further other studies but as I am debating with a billboard I have sufficient information to doubt its veracity.

…and the billboard spins around “Blame and punish the individual.” it says. That’s when I start to get anxious about when my train will arrive and put some distance between me and the billboard. That is quite a statement and presumably the anonymous body or individual responsible for the billboard are suggesting that violent, and intoxicated and violent, individuals are blamed and punished, the intoxicated non-violent and sober individuals are off the hook for now.

I don’t know enough about the psychodynamics of addiction. I doubt blame and punishment will address the implied problem, and the idea that this be used as an approach bruises my empathetic heart. Back to Google and a search on “blame and punish the individual”. No matches from the Academics at the Presley Center but I am relieved to find local support from others who have posted about being affronted by the same billboard.

As well as collective outrage it has prompted thoughts about collective responsibility around alcohol and violence. I am smiling now…and my train is pulling in.

A thought for Easter time: “Taking in traumatic information and transmuting it into life-affirming action may turn out to be the most advanced and meaningful spiritual practice of our time.” Richard Heinberg

Transmuting is what we do if we can.

Kierkegaard wrote that “All existence makes me anxious, from the smallest fly to the mysteries of the Incarnation; the whole thing is inexplicable, I most of all; to me all existence is infected, I most of all. My distress is enormous, boundless; no one knows it except God in heaven, and he will not console me….” He described anxiety as a simultaneous feeling of attraction and repulsion, and the dizziness of freedom.

I wish for the dizziness of freedom, just consider the alternative. Dizzy but not disabled by anxiety, a normal sort of instability and balanced by Kierkegaard’s belief, “Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.”

On Sunday after sitting through a 90 minute movie and enjoying a coffee I had a natural urge to go. As the door swung closed behind me and I was stifled by a synthetic floral stink, one of those unnatural bouquets, worse than any commonplace lavatory stench. My olfactory sensibilities were heightened and when I noticed the the advertising poster on the back of the door other sensitivities were insulted by what I read: “Depression and anxiety – it’s not a normal part of getting older.”

Really? While I might not take much pleasure in aging, and even seek treatment for any accompanying depression and anxiety, I find the suggestion that these states are not normal is offensive.

The poster was a little on-the-nose. My photograph doesn’t really do it justice but it does capture how dank my mood became, in the cinema toilets on that sunny Sunday.

As in evidenced by this blog, I do tend to side with darker outlooks and I would even argue that anxiety and depression are pervasive, if not commonplace, as we age. Normal. We are complex and multi-faceted beings and our thinking around what is normal can be too constrained, too narrow to accommodate experiences that might be unwelcome but are nonetheless characteristic of the human condition.

On one hand we are encouraged to celebrate diversity and accept what is different, rare, or unconventional. On the other hand if the very thing that is unusual is in some way dark or uncomfortable and can be medicated into abeyance, then it is labelled abnormal and that’s troubling – if not just plain wrong.

I wonder what hue I would be if I had only been coloured in with happy normal shades?

Thoughts of normal and abnormal cause me to wonder about being only normal and how I might be burdened with common, conventional, expected, standard, usual, and I would miss my quirky.

I have learned more from my experiences, both challenging and fabulous, than from any other form of education. I believe joys would be less joyous without knowing sorrows and that I would be less normal without my abnormal.

A Mistake – —Czeslaw Milosz
I thought: all this is only preparation
For learning, at last, how to die.
Mornings and dusks, in the grass under a maple
Laura sleeping without pants, on a headrest of raspberries,
While Filon, happy, washes himself in the stream.
Mornings and years. Every glass of wine,
Laura, and the sea, land, and archipelago
Bring us nearer, I believed, to one aim
And should be used with a thought to that aim.

It is true. We have a beautiful time
As long as time is time at all.

She’s not yet thinking about life without meds but in time slowly and gradually she may wish to reduce her dependence on meds. There may come a time when meds are no useful for her, right now they are useful.

In this 40 minute educational video Will Hall talks about Coming Off Psychiatric Drugs:A Harm Reduction Approach, and recommends finding out what works for you.

Will supports people to make their own decisions about their meds acknowledging, and trying to balance, the risks and benefits involved. This is information that supports choice.

Will has also published a written guide here.

…and if you, or someone you know, needs emotional support call Lifeline on 13 11 14 in Australia. Crisis counselling is available around the world.

I haven’t met the psychologist. In the aftermath of Mottsu’s death the psychologist rang me to offer condolences and express his regret. I know he was interviewed by the police, a matter of course, as part of the Coroners inquest. I know he talked about Cognitive Behaviour Therapy with Mottsu. I know Mottsu found his advice helpful, although ultimately not helpful enough.

I was glad Mottsu sought support as his well being deteriorated and I wondered about a cognitive approach for someone so ensnared in their emotions. I still worry that the therapeutic goal was to make him different, in some way less than who he was. I remember Mottsu feeling he had to be more spontaneous, to me seemed a goal that mocked and taunted his depressed state. I know he struggled with spontaneity and how he should achieve that ironic and impossible goal.

Anyway I saw his psychologist on TV and struggled to know what to feel – how do I feel about that person from the past? I waited a couple of days for my reaction but there is almost none – not resentment or acrimony but I do notice a little cynicism welling up. I am content that the past is becoming the past, and somewhere I can’t influence.