Anxiety and self-esteem: Australia's growth industry

Much is made of the epidemic of obesity in Australia. At least once a week my news screen features carefully constructed body-only shots of fat people wearing inappropriate clothing walking down the footpath (sidewalk, for my American readers), consuming yet more trademark labelled sugar. Apparently we're all at risk of contracting contagious chubbiness.

Which is what "epidemic" means - the widespread occurrence of an infectious disease. Flu and ebola and measles come as epidemics. There are times, particularly while watching football on TV, that I can believe stupidity comes as an epidemic - spread by tiny particles called morons. I've yet to be convinced, however, that obesity is an airborne pathogen. Not that I don't think some of our major fast food producers haven't tried, in some dark basement of their R&D departments, to develop a tiny twisted virus thing to make us all crave their high salt offerings constantly. Just the sort of thing that can be spread via those auto-air-freshener things in the toilets.

This is why it's important to get out in the fresh air regularly - they'd need a air freshener the size of a grain silo.

Less inappropriately dressed and, so, less visible, is the growing problem of anxiety and low self-esteem. Maybe it's not so noticeable because we all suffer from it these days and there's no "normal" to contrast it with. We're all constantly on edge waiting for the next inevitable sign that we're inadequate and not meeting expectations. And I think I've found the culprit.

It would be easy to blame the media or bloggers - especially bloggers, opinionated bastards! - or the high pressure corporate society of today. Sure, they all make a contribution, but the real offenders are our appliances and our technology.

6.50 AM and I'm already feeling like I should be a multi-armed Hindu god given the number of things I'm trying to juggle; uniforms, teeth, baby breakfast, school lunches. There's some bread in the microwave to defrost. That should take care of itself, at least. Nope. When it's done it beeps to let me know. Great. Then every twenty seconds or so thereafter the bloody thing beeps again; a guilt laden tone that says, in one short second, "there's something you've forgotten".

Uniforms in the spin drier; they'll be ready to go tomorrow morning. Settle down for some sleep and the drier cycle finishes. Job done! Dad of the year! Just getting into the bliss of the hypnagogic state ... the drier starts again, runs for 10 seconds ... and beeps. It's got a little subroutine that does that to "keep the clothes fresh". Yeah, like fun! The whole thing was designed by an engineer that had come to hate the customers. It's timed so there's just not long enough to go to sleep between occurrences of the little reminder. My laundry is outside and downstairs. @#$%@#!

It's not enough that my smart phone wakes me in the middle of the night to remind me that I didn't plug it in to the charger, it has to become an instrument of third-party guilt by conveying me messages from other machines. I made an appointment and took a card last time I went to the dentist. That's as far as I wanted to go - conscience satisfied. I never intended to actually go to the follow up. A card is easily lost and that excuse is always valid. Now the computer at the dentist's colludes with my smart phone to keep reminding me of the appointment until I acknowledge by return of post. Another expectation that I have to live up to.

And so it goes. The car reminds me that it needs a service every time I start it. The computer tells me how many updates behind it is when I log on. My Outlook calendar fires up little reminders of appointments coming in the next 2 years and Facebook tells me all the birthdays I've forgotten. Then someone gives you a lifestyle monitoring band that can drive you to a twitching nervy by tapping you on the shoulder every half hour to remind you how far you haven't walked, how many hours of REM sleep you didn't get and how much body fat you've still got. Just bloody marvelous!

So I'm inadequate and anxious before I've even factored into my day time to worry about my income, my mortgage and my kids' reading ability or adequate space to feel guilty about being a middle-class white heterosexual male without a significant disability.

I'm sure there are some dark forces at work; some clandestine collusion between the manufacturers of anti-depressants, psychologists, software engineers and the alcohol industry. It's a mutually profitable arrangement.

"Hypnagogic", if you haven't come across the word, is descriptive of that heavenly state of being almost asleep.

Thank you for liking this post. Please share it as well.

Sound and Fury is published every Monday and Thursday morning, Australian Eastern Standard Time.

Shampoo

It tells me that it contains no soap, no phosphates, no arsenic and is BCP and asbestos free. It's dolphin friendly, child safe and ISO 9001 compliant.

It informs me that it contains essential oils, optional fats, totally unnecessary perfumes and rare seahorse extracts with no known benefit to anyone.

It's adorned with pictures of molecules - to show that the graphic designer has heard of them - and signatures of some random person - to show that even people I don't know can sign their names.

It assures me that it will prevent my ends from splitting, my colour from fading, my curls from flattening, my skin from wrinkling, my kids from taking drugs, my shit from stinking and my eyesight from failing.

Which is just as bloody well ... because

NOWHERE, except at the very bottom in 3 point font which is completely unreadable through the steam in the bathroom and the water in my eyes does it say "Shampoo"

I hate to admit it, but ...

I'm a geek. Anyone that knows me will confirm that much. I have post-graduate qualifications in maths, I watch science documentaries for fun and think that knowing the Latin and Greek roots of words is one of the best things a person can do.

What many people don't know is that I am also very contra-society. Not sociopathic - I don't dislike people or the society I live in - I just find myself swimming against the current all the time. Well not against the current. Being a good Australian boy, brought up on the beach, I would never swim against the rip - just diagonally across it.

For an apparently smart guy, I was dumbfounded to realise how many years it took me to get that Harry Potter joke: Diagon Alley. Apply heel of palm to forehead at speed - repeat.

Anyway,  here's my confession:

I didn't like Steve Irwin. I didn't wish him ill and I have an enormous amount of sympathy for his family but I just didn't like the guy and I certainly don't think he is a great Aussie Icon. He was loud and unkempt and uncouth. As a TV persona, he was everything the world has come to expect of our national stereotype. He may well have known what he was on about but he came across as ridiculous and reckless. I refer you to Sir David Attenborough if you want to see how nature TV is done properly.

Sport is a closed book to me. I understand the need to remain in reasonable physical condition and do a distressingly modest amount of exercise to attain that goal but that's as far as it goes. The sheer visceral joy that so many experience just by watching sport, let alone participating in it, is entirely mysterious to me. I live in North Queensland and if any anthropologists would like to study primitive tribal customs, come up here when the State of Origin is on. For those of you who are mercifully spared this annual circus, it's a three game football competition between New South Wales and Queensland.  Queensland wears maroon and NSW wears blue. If you've seen old footage of tribes in Papua New Guinea or the Zulus from Africa banging their shields and preparing for war, imagine that with a beer gut and a maroon football jersey and you'll have a pretty fair mental image of North  Queensland at Origin time. Even people with university educations seem to get involved. Why?

Reality TV is a waste of time and, worse, it's boring. Like sport, though, it appears to hold some level of unholy sway over even reasonably clever people. As a ruse, I would have thought it would not fool people who have figured out that there really isn't a creepy old guy watching and judging you every sleeping and waking moment and awarding toys accordingly. It's clearly not real; there's no way two soccer mums with no training or advice are plucked from their four wheel drives, given matching aprons and attitude problems, and then turnout Michelin quality meals with no more than a turnip, two sticks of asparagus, some butter and an annoying French judge. Equally, two indistinguishable police officers who've never handled a hammer are not magically finding that perfect lampshade to complement their Art Deco bedhead in the first shop they come to - with only twenty minutes to spare. Someone who bought a Jeep wouldn't fall for it. It was all filmed months before broadcast but people whose job it is to run the country or educate our children seem to find it fascinating enough to waste a half hour's conversation on it most days.

I'm probably of an age now when being in a nightclub would seem badly like I was hoping to form an extra marital interest in a 19 year old. Even before my beard needed a little colour support, I never really liked them (nightclubs that is, I had a very healthy interest in 19 year olds back in the day). What's the point?  The purpose of a club, presumably,  is to socialise. A chance to meet with and, if the night goes well, mate with one's fellow human beings.  How are you supposed to achieve this when you can neither see nor hear said hominids? Certainly I'm a musical sort of chap and can dance to a beat. So one does this. Perhaps a potential mate approaches and is impressed with my well shaken tail feathers and rhythmic stamping. What next? It's not like pigeons - you can't progress to congress there on the dance floor. You can somehow communicate through sign language that drinking alcohol at adjacent bar stools is an option.  Provided she understands my cryptic gestures and we are set up with two Tequila Sunrises at $25 each, we're still no closer to the end game.  Screaming at each other usually comes later in the relationship but there's no other method of communication possible amongst the industrial levels of noise. Maybe things are different in these days of smart phones; the boy can just text his bad pick up lines. How she gives him a disgusted look via SMS I'm not entirely sure, but they can do great things with emoticons these days.

So I swim across the current.  I know there are those who enjoy such things and I don't judge them for it but I remain baffled - even after 40 years.

Just wrote my CV - now unemployable

I've just gone through and rewritten my CV and am now unemployable due to the mental state in which the process has left me.

There is nothing more likely to reduce your brain to a gently spreading pool of pink goo than trying to write a CV.

First is the process of remembering everything you've done. I always dread the idea that I will be a witness to a crime one day,  because I struggle to remember what I was doing this time one week ago, let alone what a person said to me two years ago last Tuesday. The detective would say to me:

"Can you describe the offender?"

And I would say something like

"Well, he was a man. Maybe tall. Probably brown hair ..."

And then I would be taken out the back and subjected to a little rougher than usual handling, just for being so bloody useless.

I can't even describe what my kids are wearing on any given day. That's why they have locator beacons surgically implanted; I would be no use providing a description if they got lost.

I'm pretty sure that anything on a CV older than two years is at least 50% made up.

Next is the painful process of customising your CV to the job description. This is fine, provided that you can understand the thing in the first place.

You pull up the position description and you read something like

"To be successful in this role, you will have at least five years experience as a strategic business analytics change specialist in a leading ICT organisation"

Which more or less rules everyone out of contention. No one even knows what a strategic business analytics change specialist is, other than a winning card in Buzzword Bingo. Hunting around on the internet, you can't see any evidence that this type of job even existed six months ago and so the idea that someone out there has been doing it for five years defies belief. In reality, the odds are that someone in HR somewhere, following a few budget cuts, has taken two job descriptions and smelched them together like two bars of soap - which, as we all know, never works (and, yes, smelched is a real word - at least in my house). Having given it a good flerching (another real word, thank you) they've wound up with an amorphous blob of uselessness onto which they've whacked a title and made believe is a real profession.

Which is why it's always best to be at least halfway down a bottle of Cab Sav when you start writing these things. With a little of the Barossa Valley's finest in your veins, you can elevate your mind above these mere words and, in a moment of blissful enlightenment, realise that it's $120K + super for setting up a whole lot of Excel spreadsheets and staying awake during strategic planning meetings.

The final cue for the exit of any remaining sanity is the Sir Humphrey Appleby process. Named for the famous character in Yes Prime Minister who summed up the problem beautifully in this conversation with the Prime Minister, Jim Hacker, looking at the issue of whether having nuclear weapons was a good idea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lre6gD4lbCw

Sir Humphrey: It's a deterrent.
Jim Hacker: It's a bluff. I probably wouldn't use it.
Sir Humphrey: Yes, but they don't know that you probably wouldn't.
Jim Hacker: They probably do.
Sir Humphrey: Yes, they probably know that you probably wouldn't. But they can't certainly know.
Jim Hacker: They probably certainly know that I probably wouldn't.
Sir Humphrey: Yes, but even though they probably certainly know that you probably wouldn't, they don't certainly know that, although you probably wouldn't, there is no probability that you certainly would.

And there it is. I don't know how I seem to myself, let alone how I seem to anyone else. Notwithstanding this lack of knowledge, I'm forced to consider how a person I've never met with a set of priorities I'm trying to guess will read a document in a style they've never seen about a person they don't know and, if that wasn't enough to take your breath away, on what basis they will then compare that document to other documents and then make a decision about who they'd like to talk to with a view to giving one of these strangers a job.

It's something like blind dating with very little change of a glass or two of wine and a meal of some sort and, unless you're applying for a very special kind of job, almost no chance of getting laid as a result.

So I'm unemployable on the grounds of insanity. Any intellectual prowess of which I boasted in my beautifully presented two pager is now sliding away across the floor, looking for a better life in a world where the laws of physics remain constant from one day to the next and the interactions with other beings of sentience have more basis in reason and logic.

Please LIKE and SHARE this with your friends.

Sound and Fury is published every Monday and Thursday morning, Australian Eastern Standard Time.

We need to be far more careful

I volunteered to help out at my kids' school fete today. If "fete" isn't a word you know, it's that special day in the school year where you donate a whole lot of stuff to the school then go there at night and buy it all back again. They disguise the deception with show bags, jumping castles and garishly lit caravans selling three days on the toilet in a bun for $7.50. The teachers also take the opportunity to get revenge on you for inflicting your kids on them, by making you sit through hour after hour of performances by the school musical groups - many of them featuring recorders or brass instruments of some kind.

The particular brand of deception that I volunteered to collude in involves a tub of water, an indeterminate number of plastic fish and a small fishing rod, comprising a length of dowel, some knitting yarn and a magnet on the end. The patsy - let's call them a "child at the school" for the sake of the discussion - pays 50c and is then given the opportunity to retrieve a fish using said rod. Success is rewarded with a chocolate frog whereas failure gets you booted out of the school for being stupid in a manner dangerous to the public.

Now, in the old days, I would have just put my name on the roster for the most convenient half hour slot and that would have been that. I forgot, however, that we now live in the 21st century. Having agreed to be an accessory to fraud, I was then asked to go through the workplace health and safety induction and sign a form to that effect! Workplace health and safety !? What could possibly go wrong?

Clearly I'm naive and haven't given adequate thought to the possibility that I might try to scratch my eyeballs via my nostrils with the rod or could lose concentration for a moment, pitch forward in my excitement and drown in the shell-shaped pond in which is the native habitat for the fish.


Being careful is just something I'm not sufficiently attuned to. It's obvious.

The school did it properly - made me sign the form, helped me differentiate between my a*&e and a hole in the ground. Then, recklessly, I went ahead and endangered others without a thought for the paperwork.

I got in my car and drove. Two tonnes, kerbside weight, of metal propelled at unseemly speeds down the road. What if a sinkhole had opened up? What if a parachutist had fallen onto the road in front of me? What if the wheels fell off? Had I given adequate consideration to the management of those risks? I had not.

My next stop was a cafe for breakfast; also owned and operated by irresponsible lunatics. Where was the health and safety induction before they handed me a hot cup of coffee? Where was the personal protective equipment to go with the sharp pointed objects they gave me to consume my eggs benedict with?

So I've learned my lesson. The next time you come to my house for a BBQ, it won't be just "second door on the left down the hall if you need it", you'll get the full induction. We will go through an identify the trip hazards; front door mat, the join between the carpet and the tiles, the odd Duplo train. I'll give you a careful induction on which is the hot tap and there will be a short quiz to make sure you know your left hand from your right. Only those who have attained a Certificate IV in Tong Mastery will be allowed near the BBQ and all children will be confined to a specially penned off area with a pool-lock gate, soft fall on the ground and nothing they can climb above 30cm.

Then I can safely say I am a responsible adult!

The Lev Koverni Crisis

A magnificent job has been done, over the last fifty years, of keeping the lid on the  Lev Koverni  crisis but the recent declassifying of key documents has shed light on this fascinating story.

It started in the summer of 2013 with a series of Facebook posts detailing escalating human rights abuses in the reclusive state. Harrowing photographs of emaciated children accompanied the posts which went viral, attracting millions of likes and comments. Quite why atrocities of this sort should be liked so universally went unquestioned at the time.

Further disturbing images and descriptions of torture of people hostile to the government of LK leaked out into cyberspace, in some cases via social media, in others via MMS to journalists at major news outlets.

The growing weight of evidence of torture triggered a campaign by major human rights organisations who, based on the information gathered, launched an international push for coordinated action to be taken to stop this harm. Donations were gathered, protests organised and pressure brought to bear on all western, democratic governments.

In the meanwhile, the corporate world had its own issues to deal with concerning LK. Documents stolen from BP had appeared on Wikileaks. They detailed preliminary geological surveys suggesting that oil and natural gas were probably present in significant quantities in the plains region just outside the capital. Previously considered uneconomic, the tapping of these reserves was now in consideration due to the steadily rising international energy prices. BP denied all knowledge of the documents but the market had other views and BP’s stock gained 10% on the news. Rival companies started to make circumspect enquiries into how tightly BP had the LK market locked and what opportunities might exist.

Very little information was available at this stage. LK was not a member of the UN and the only known consulates, according to information from the LK Foreign Affairs department, were in Kazakhstan, Afghanistan and Oman. Attempts to contact the government in LK were met with silence.

Towards the end of summer, events began to move very quickly. Almost simultaneously, packages delivered to the Pentagon and to Thames House exploded in the mail rooms, spreading white powder over a number of people.  Counter-terrorism measures were activated, crisis committees of senior government officials met in secret session and analysts scrambled for what information they could get about these unprecedented attacks.

Six hours after the explosions, video posted on Al Jazeera’s website claimed responsibility in the name of Shutka, a violent revolutionary organisation devoted to the overthrow of the LK government and establishment of a fundamentalist, Sharia state in the region. Answering Congressional Committee questions following the events, senior intelligence officials were forced to admit that Shutka had not been on the radar of their agencies to that point. An Al Qaeda connection was suggested and further videos, promising more attacks of the same kind, were posted to Al Jazeera and other sites known to be methods of communication for terrorist agencies.

A week later, secretive email messages, sent through a proxy, were received by the White House, the Kremlin and other major centres of government, begging help on behalf of the democratically elected Durak of LK. The Shutka had gotten out of hand, the messages read, and only intervention by the west could ensure ongoing stable, secular government. Multinational energy companies brought further pressure for intervention to bear to protect their strategic investments and interests.

The UN Security Council met in emergency session well into the night and, after lengthy negotiations, agreed to an urgent peace-keeping mission being sent to the region “to protect democracy and uphold the government of the Lev Koverni Durak.”

Ten days later, a US carrier battle group, supported by two British destroyers and five Chinese submarines arrived at the location of LK’s major harbour, much to the surprise of the three blokes in a small fishing vessel who were the only ones there. Taken on board the flagship for interrogation, the three seemed genuinely puzzled as to what was going on until one of them said, “Bloody Bob and Stan!”

Robert James Holloway (36) and Stanley Miles Probert (27) were arrested 12 hours later in the IT support section of the offices of a major Australian accountancy firm. They were found to be in possession of talcum powder, a number of jacks-in-the-box, map editing software and a large and long simmering grudge which had arisen from not having been allowed leave to accompany their colleagues on their month long fishing vacation.

The Conservative Agenda

Conservatism is a state of mind that holds that an idealised version of the way things were is innately superior to an idealised version of how things could be, which is the purview of the progressive, or the ugly, messy now which is what the rest of us have to live with. For the conservative, the social structure, tax arrangements, gender roles, music, fashion and front yard fencing styles of yore are infinitely to be preferred to any other possible model. 

To understand modern conservative thinking, it is necessary to go further yore than your wildest dreams; back to the days of feudal Europe. 

The lords of modern conservatism - let's call them Abbotts - don't really feel that the populace should expect the aristocracy to provide support of any kind; they should stand on their own two feet. Unfortunately, the ethos also calls for no wage protection so many people find themselves unable to afford feet of their own upon which to stand. Parents could, and indeed are expected to, give their children a leg up in life by providing them with feet and all the appurtenances thereunto.  Children of the less well heeled, however, may find themselves without a leg to stand on let alone the need for socks and shoe polish. 

Abbots also believe that while the peasants have a duty to pay tax, they should not expect anything in return. Paying a healthcare levy, for example, does not entitle the taxpayer to any actual care. They have merely purchased the right to pay for healthcare; people shouldn't expect to receive such things from the government, even if they've already paid for them. Anyone actually ill will need to pay a fee to see a doctor and, if they want some kind of cure for their illness before it kills them, they will need to pay a fee to another group who will, in turn, pay for some of the associated costs. 

Leaving peasants without lifesaving treatment is not really a problem though because many of those who die will be old and no longer contributing to the economy. Abbotts really have no use for the elderly, particularly once they've passed the age of 70 and are no longer able to toil in the master's field. There can be no expectation of largesse or support from the government in these cases. Those who have been imprudent enough to merely work their whole lives and don't have a gingerbread house they can eat, room at a time, will be provided with a bodkin, a copy of "To be or not to be" and an opportunity to second guess Hamlet's decision.  The bodkin must be returned by the family after the funeral or a fee will be charged.  

Feudal aristocracy does have one obligation in its primitive social contract - to defend the peasantry from attack.  For this, a castle or fortress of some sort is required, along with an enemy whose advances need to be repelled.  The only fly in the ointment is that there are really no enemies out there - at least none that couldn't overwhelm our defences almost instantly - so the need for subservience by the plebs might be questioned.  The Abbott responds by making one up - an enemy that is, he doesn't need to make up a pleb because he's got more than enough of those. Replacing the ravening hordes of Genghis Khan is a small cohort of poor people in leaky boats. Not obviously out for rapine and plunder - but that's what the English said when the Vikings turned up, seeking asylum at Lindisfarne in 793, and no one wants to make that mistake again.  The neocon convinces his subjects that his duty as a knight is being fulfilled by spending large amounts of the treasury on dubious military hardware and re-badging Customs officers as the Australian Border Force whose job it is to protect Australia's borders - unlike the regular defence force whose job it is to ... well this is an awkward moment.  

Of course a feudal lord needs a town crier and a herald to proclaim his deeds and decrees throughout the land. This is the role of public broadcasting in the modern conservative society. Were a herald to be unwise enough to commit lese majesty, however, one of his arms would be cut off in punishment. 

  

So all hail Sir Abbott, with his newly resurrected title and Joe his trusty steed. And beware, as famous kings have to their peril, of Malcolm, who will be king hereafter. 

For your reference, and because it's a justly famous piece of writing:

To be, or not to be, that is the question—
Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die, to sleep—
No more; and by a sleep, to say we end
The Heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks
That Flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to Dream; Aye, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes Calamity of so long life:
For who would bear the Whips and Scorns of time,
The Oppressor's wrong, the proud man's Contumely,
The pangs of despised Love, the Law’s delay,
The insolence of Office, and the Spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his Quietus make
With a bare Bodkin? Who would these Fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered Country, from whose bourn
No Traveler returns, Puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of.
Thus Conscience does make Cowards of us all,
And thus the Native hue of Resolution
Is sicklied o'er, with the pale cast of Thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment,
With this regard their Currents turn awry,
And lose the name of Action.

Mindfulness for Parents

Mindfulness - the ancient Buddhist art of being wholly present in and at peace with the moment- is gaining great popularity in the West as a cure for everything from depression, through stress and anxiety to reality TV overdose.

 
Parents, most of all, can benefit from this powerful technique. So here, as a public service from Sound and Fury, is a parent's guide to mindfulness.

First sit yourself somewhere comfortable. Close your eyes and un-tense your shoulders.  Start at the top of your head and relax. Move down to your forehead. Frown slightly. Stand up and remove the small piece of Lego from under your left buttock. Resume your seat.

Let your eyes slowly close. Ignore the little nuisances in the world around you. Ignore the crust of toast sticking out from under the couch. No, I said ignore it. Just let it go. Alright! Stand up, Slowly and deliberately pickup the toast and take it mindfully to the bin - be aware of your every step. Resume your seat.

Become aware of your breathing. In- 2-3-4. Out-2-3-4-5-6. In-2-3-4. Let the strong chemical smell from the laundry drift slowly through your mind. Allow the possibility of unlicensed scientific experimentation, involving bleach on the family cormorant, to pass like a neutrino through your consciousness; interacting with nothing.

Allow your senses to absorb the world around you but don't interact with the thoughts they inspire. Imagine your thoughts flying like birds in through an open window and back out through the opposite window; gone as quickly as they came. Yes, the bird is allowed inside and, no, it won't poo on the new carpet. Do not get up and close the window; it's not letting all the heat out.

Observe impassively as the birds of your thoughts sail gently across the room. Watch them fly but don't try to catch them. Don't engage emotionally with the things that occur to you. There goes the sparrow of washing up. Let it go. Here comes the pigeon of bills to pay. Don't spend tuppence to feed it. There is the raven of lost school shoes, lurking ominously in the skies - observe impassively. There flees the cockatoo that is your youngest closely followed by the eagle older brother, intent on violence.  Ignore the puff of feathers and the the loud squawk.  Detach yourself from the carnage that follows.

Well, OK, if you must, but deal with it organically and hurry back.

You did what to the birds of consciousness?  Someone's going to have to clean that up later, you know?  

 
OK, forget the birds.

Sit again.  Resume your regal pose. Find your centre. Listen to the sounds and rhythms of your body.

Become aware of your heartbeat. Be mindful of its beating - at about 120 bpm, driving your blood pressure to red line. Listen to your breathing which is now coming in ragged pants of the kind you used to enjoy before you realised what all that caused.

Now open your eyes,  turn the TV on, sit your kids in front of it. Go to another room. Pour yourself a large red wine, sit in a comfy chair and let your mind explore the astral plane while you take a siesta. It's the only way.

Please share this with your friends.

Sound and Fury is published each Monday and Thursday afternoon, Australian Eastern Standard Time.