the Ladybird Book of Mindfulness

This book, part of a recent effort popular among British hipsters in their late-20's-early-30's (no actual research done here I'm just going by stuff I've seen on social media and my own preheld stereotypes) to revive the old Ladybird Learners - you know, those A5 hardback books for kids with delightfully calming full-page watercolour illustrations and easily-readable friendly informative text educating the young reader about a particular topic, for example 'Vehicles' or 'Dinosaurs' or 'Space'? Everyone's dad or mum had them when they were young and they've kept them somewhere in a box of old stuff and you probably had a passing familiarity too throughout your own childhood because of these books' sentimental value to your parents. Eh, maybe I'm assuming a minor aspect of my early life to be more culturally typical than it is. Do you know what I'm on about? No? If not you may as well just give up, this post has nothing for you. Actually no, stay with me. You might like the idea of this. You might not like this post though, I can tell from glancing over what I've already written this is gonna be a pretty sketchy one. This has been a horrific paragraph and all - I'm starting a new one.

   So, anyway, this is part of a publishing effort to pay homage to these classics, only with a satirical twist - these are Ladybird Learners Books 'For Grownups' - i.e. tackling not general concepts to educate oneself about in childhood but large social and cultural challenges facing [contemporary British hipsters in their late-20's-early-30's, sue me for inaccuracy]. Titles include not only Mindfulness but Hangovers, Dating, The Wife, The Husband, The Shed and Hipsters and a couple of others that I can't be bothered to click 'next' on my Amazon search in order to name. The format is the exact same: calming full-page watercolour illustrations (cannibalised from the Ladybird's classic range of books) and easily-readable friendly informative text, only rather than educating, every page pretends to explain the illustration in a slightly absurd and completely sardonic way. To give you a taste of what this looks like: a delightful calming full-page watercolour illustration of a mill in a windy cornfield with autumn clouds scudding by overhead: the easily-readable friendly informative text to the left reads "Mindfulness is the skill of thinking you are doing something when you are doing nothing. One of the good things about mindfulness is that you get to do a lot of sitting down. Sitting down is good for the mind because so much energy is stored in the lap." Or a delightfully calming full-page watercolour illustration of a middle-aged farmer kneeling at his prize turnip amid a largely-weedy field: the easily-readable friendly informative text beside it announcing "In ancient times, Guru Bhellend entered a state of mindfulness that lasted thirty-five years. During this time, he thought about everything. When he had finished, he wrote the answer on a grain of rice. He never married." It's pretty low-level entertainment but amusing in a dry little way, like how a stranger who manages to be both a bit eccentric and a bit boring starts making comment-sized chunks of conversation with you during a prolonged passive encounter (e.g. at a bus stop if you had first exchanged a brief complaint about tardy public transport to break the ice). (I have no idea where that came from.)

   Mindfulness, to get back to this book, is a concept much punted about by young adults I know, or at least the culture they're a part of: it's a pretty vague but agreeable state or feeling people try to experience to improve inner peace, self-knowledge, stress relief, and a variety of other kinds of psychological and emotional stability. It's a lovely idea, one the practice of which can involve almost anything depending on what helps you focus on a simple physical repetitive task or arrangement of mental/sensual inputs, so as to free the mind from concerns about anything not included within that experience. For some people it's scented candles and a hot chocolate and knitting along to folk music, for some people it's jogging to a park bench and sitting down and staring into space for a bit, for some people it might be stroking a cat, for some reorganising a bookshelf, for some making chapattis or pancakes or cheese on toast, improvising jazz on the piano, whittling in the bath, cracking open a can of lager and watching football or cult sitcoms, covering entire pads of paper in intricate doodles while vacantly humming along to Classic FM, whatever. Variety is the spice of life.
   I've actually tried practicing mindfulness recently;* to be honest it just felt like a pretty normal 'solitary attempt to relax' so the deliberate intentionality with which I embarked upon it just made it feel forced, and while I certainly had a peaceful life-affirming time, it wasn't in a particularly different way to any normal successful 'solitary attempt to relax'. Hence my cynicism about mindfulness, which endeared me to this book's skewering of those strange impractical beings among us who strive for it. Just calm down and relax like everyone else does, do something you enjoy and affix your attention to it so you enjoy it properly. That's not a groundbreaking mode of how-to-do-life (this is though - lolz); it's just part of how you should be doing stuff anyway.
   I think this might be one of the most stream-of-consciousness/actually-just-bonkers posts this blog has ever witnessed. I'll just wrap it up here. This Ladybird Book of Mindfulness, along with (one would expect) the other [7? 9?] books in the series. Note to prospective readers of this book - if you're interested in mindfulness, expect to be amused but not aided in your striving to be mindful. More to the point, if you're interested in mindfulness, stop taking it consciously seriously as a lifestyle/mindset/worldview pursuit! Just start relaxing naturally - throw your mind and senses more fully into your activities and pleasures, whatever they may be.

Peace, fellow human.


* The first time I literally just listened to techno-funk remixes of vintage soul tunes for ninety minutes while colouring in a mandala and eating pistachios. The second time, I'd found out that the YouVersion Bible app has an audio feature, so I coloured in another (arguably better, at least more intricate) mandala while listening to the entirety of Ecclesiastes and eating a small range of sandwiches. The third time, I lit an incense stick, made a cup of lemon & ginger & honey tea, and just listened to Kanye West's new album The Life of Pablo all the way through (only available on Tidal and, erm, Piratebay, because nobody has Tidal and nobody's going to get it just because Kanye's on too erratic and immense of an ego-trip to just release an album like a normal $53million-in-debt Greatest Artist Of All Time would. Dammit Kanye, why do you do this to yourself!?).
   I would highly recommend any of these activities as 'solitary attempts to relax'. Reflective prayer and going for walks and reading Good (Søren Kierkegaard or Emily Dickinson or the Catcher in the Rye or the Remains of the Day kind of Good) books are also things I've found surefire ways of instilling clarity and tranquility.

The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F**k

This book, a lifestyle/mindset/worldview/self-help/whatever book by Sarah Knight, is much less counter-cultural and irreverent than it pretends to be. I bought it literally because I'd had a weird day and the title made me laugh, but then once I started reading it, I realised there was more subtlety to her lifestyle/mindset/worldview/whatever (let's just call this a 'mode') of Not Giving A Fuck* [NGAF] than I'd presumed.

   Rather than completely sacking off everything that you don't unquestionably want to do (I call this amoral extreme-end of NGAF the Zero Fucks Given [ZFG] mode), successful NGAF is about 'budgeting' the fucks you give to maximise personal happiness - it's more of a form of mental decluttering.** This budget operates by scrutinising demands, real or perceived, on your time, energy and money, and assessing which of these are actually worthwhile given their impact on your happiness. Things which genuinely do improve your life, or upon which you're dependent in some reasonable way, it's worth giving a fuck about: things which you simply do out of social/cultural/economic obligation, if reasonably avoidable, go ahead and cease giving that fuck. A big part of this is detaching yourself from caring too much what other people think of you and your choices. She is careful to stress that adopting NGAF as a mode shouldn't turn you into an asshole - determining whether it is someone's feelings or someone's opinion 'obligating' you to give a particular fuck is a good way of negotiating situations where you can legitimately give fewer fucks without hurting someone (even if you might upset them a little bit, but that's their fault for thinking something they give a fuck about is of universal value). I'm not entirely convinced that she's solved this Not Being An Asshole problem, as I'll discuss shortly, but she's definitely worked out a fairly reliable model for organising fuck-giving decisions (there's even a fucking flowchart).

   Having established this framework, Sarah then walks us through Things, Work, Friends, Acquaintances & Strangers, and Family, to help us determine which fucks to decide if we give or not - these sections are accompanied by listing exercises (which I've not done yet as I gave more of a fuck about finishing the book*** than actually performing NGAF-style decluttering). Once we've decided what we give a fuck about, she then provides some helpful pointers about how we actively stop giving particular fucks (without being a dick about it); these methods revolve around honestly and politely explaining yourself, and actually she gives some really helpful pointers. The whole book is littered with examples as well. Finally, she revisits our NGAF-enlightened life, decluttered of unwanted fucks, and shows us how much better for body, mind and soul it can be. Great.

   For all the efficacy of NGAF as a mode, I had two main problems with this book. Firstly, it's a mode very much tailored to highly-autonomous individuals - people without social, cultural, or economic disadvantages holding them back from deciding exactly what they want to give fucks about. The book's target market is almost definitely American middle-class misanthropes (every single example given reeks of this: oh no, an acquaintance's weekend wedding in Europe! oh no, a skiing holiday with the inlaws! oh no, a colleague's poetry recital!), but something as generalistic as a mode should be one that at least works for people with varying degrees of privilege. People who are constrained by social, cultural, economic, or any other kind of disadvantage often simply don't have the freedom to not give fucks about certain things that someone with more autonomy in how they allocate their time, energy and money would readily stop giving a fuck about. That's not to say I expect a mode to completely solve all inequalities of individual capabilities - that's fucking absurd. However, NGAF does clearly work better the more privileged you are, but unfortunately so does life in general in many ways (like, that is the nature of privilege), so maybe this isn't a problem with the book at all and I'm just upset about injustice. Probably. I often am. Who gives a fuck.

   Secondly, I had a bigger and more substantive objection to NGAF as a mode. I think it lies at too much risk of turning into ZFG - i.e. a mode where no fucks are given about anything that is not of direct self-determined desirability to an agent. Although Sarah Knight has tried build a consistent safeguard against this into her methods, I'm not convinced they'd stand the test of real people. Let's use Rick as an example. Rick's catchphrase is literally "I don't give a fuck"**** - he's narcissistic, nihilistic, basically just a nobhead. Now, he's also fictional, but he represents the selfish core of all human agency, which is especially strong in highly-individualistic neoliberal societies like modern Britain and America. Empowering neoliberal nihilistic narcissistic nobheads with the sense that their happiness is the top priority of any exercise of their agency isn't spiritually healthy for society - you don't have to think too hard once you start NGAF to realise that the constraints of not hurting other people or their feelings aren't objective boundaries, and you may as well just maximise your own happiness-oriented agency and give zero fucks. If part of NGAF's foundation is detaching yourself from what other people think, where does the requirement to not be a dick come from? If you can live with yourself being a dick, surely other people's opinion doesn't matter, and the only reason you'd need to mitigate your dickishness in any ways to any people is because you've worked out you get more from maintaining a relationship in a particular way than you would by letting your ZFGness taint it. Basically, I believe that people are naturally inclined to be as selfish as they can reasonably get away with unless hooked onto a positive love-oriented mode,***** but NGAF is the opposite of love-oriented - it's self-fulfilment-oriented, and so will naturally tend towards decaying into ZFG - people will become Ricks (apart from not elderly alcoholic genius scientist terrorist inventors: at least not in all cases. Lots of people might just not be very smooth at the ZFG method and become this guy).

   So, this book makes some interesting recommendations about how to mentally declutter, but I think given our sociocultural context of rampant individualism, we should be wary in accepting modes of life like NGAF - it will only further fragment communities, widen inequalities, perpetuate injustices, and loads of other things that I give lots of fucks about.

* I was going to censor this post but I decided that since nobody reads this blog anyway it would be a waste of a fuck if I worried about offending someone. I censored the 'fuck' in the post's title because she censors the 'fuck' in the actual title of the book - I guess you can't have the word 'fuck' proudly displayed on public bookshop shelves or something. Also, it's 2016 - how are you not completely desensitised to the word 'fuck' yet? I have been since the age of twelve or so (unless around particularly sheltered company, where conformity instincts kick in and I feign a little flinch if Rude Words are said). If you have a problem with this word, Sarah Knight's book is probably not for you. I didn't count but I'm pretty sure there's over a thousand fucks included in its wordcount - simply because the 'fuck' is the key concept to her system of ideas and practices, so why the fuck wouldn't she fucking mention fucks a lot? (I've used 42 in this post. Just did a search.)

** Sarah Knight does in fact attribute the book's inspiration (and title) to a Japanese bestseller, Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up - this book is basically an extension of those principles into what you give fucks about.

*** I'd planned on breezing through it and then writing a one-sentence blog post about it, simply stating that in the spirit of the book I wasn't giving a fuck about this particular post, but I actually had some pretty interesting thoughts about this book and the NGAF method, so here you fucking go.

**** Okay, so he has several. Wubba-lubba-dub-dub, whatever, I don't give a fuck.

***** Yeh, five is definitely too many asterisks. I've already opened tabs for the links I was going to use to expand on this point though, so I'll type up the fucking footnote anyway. Humans are social animals by nature, highly community-dependent and enmeshed in complex layers of obligations: I believe this is due to our being made in the image of a God who is primarily relational and exists as love. This means social systems of obligation, i.e. things we're made to give a fuck about, can't be reduced to individual decisions - some things are required for communal cohesion, for effective societies, for justice - and responding to these complex structures of obligation in a way that truly reflects our nature as beings made to love and be loved is bigger than simply giving moral fucks, as all fucks which we do or don't give reflect part of our volition to work for collective good or for our own. And that means non-individualism should be fundamental at the individual level. (Didn't know which words to use as the link for this but it's also somewhat relevant.)

Works of Love

This book, a series of in-depth philosophical-theological-social-ethical meditations on the nature of Christian love by the great Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard, is one of the most rewarding, challenging, and uplifting books I've ever read. I started reading it way back in October 2014 as it was one of the recommended readings for a philosophy module I was doing - I used it as one of the foundations of my mini-dissertation but never actually finished it, despite finding it thoroughly enjoyable and stimulating. This was probably because it's very long and very dense, and I prefer reading shortish easyish books so I can finish more sooner so my blog racks up more posts (only half-jesting here): but in the last months of 2015, given a particular prolonged mindset that came over me, I returned to Søren's work and it has genuinely helped me keep my mind and heart oriented in joy toward God who is love. The blurb of my copy proclaims boldly how 'LIFE CHANGING' a 'SEMINAL WORK' this is, and it is, but like Emily Dickinson (another writer whose work in recent months helped me continue to know God, love and joy), Kierkegaard's life is not as fondly celebrated as his works, because it was also often characterised by loneliness, illness, and sadness.* What I find brilliant about these two, American poet and Danish philosopher, is that their work does tell of this misery - but refuses to let it define it (or them) by being the ending: both resolutely turn to God, to love, to joy, and adroitly display what a complete comfort that is. So yes, for a struggling Christian, this book probably would be life-changing, for the depth, breadth and persistence of its complaints, rebukes and encouragements.

   I should probably discuss the book's content a bit.

   This is easier said than done: Kierkegaard is a highly analytical but far from a systematic philosopher, and the subject matter lends itself to deep idiosyncratic meditations on a particular aspect, angle, or argument. It's not just random reflections bundled into chapters though: coherent structures to his thought are evident throughout, and every point he makes or conclusion he reaches is, with some thought (or, thankfully, more often, his own continued explanation) consistent with the overarching pictures he paints about what love is and how it works. I won't really go into these, as they run very broad and deep. The first half of the book tackles the meta-nature of love: how Christians understand God as being love, how God's eminence as the primary and defining being therefore makes love the primary and defining force and essence of all reality and how this should upend everything we think we know about goodness, since human ideas about 'love' are minute, immature, corrupt and skewed compared to the actuality of God-as-love. He also explores the notion of commanded love, how there is no contradiction in love being a compulsory facet of human activity, questions of who our neighbours are (hint: everyone) and why human nature's relationship to God's nature compels the loving-each-other-as-ourselves core of Christian ethics.

   The second half of the book is applications of this radical conception of Christian love to various active aspects of life: encouraging people, trusting people, being hopeful, seeking others' good, forgiving and forgetting, remaining loving, being merciful, winning over the unloving to the cause of love, mourning the dead, and praising love itself. Kierkegaard examines each of these facets of how we live in love, building from the conceptual base of the first part. One point that he frequently restates I will mention because it's a brilliant realisation: if God is love, then in any functional relationship between humans, all feelings and actions between those humans is irrelevant, as a functional relationship is a loving one, which necessarily includes God as a third element in that relationship, and God in perfection necessarily flattens all non-perfectly-loving elements of each of the two persons as they are no longer just relating to each other but to God. This holds for any two persons, be they friends, enemies, you and some homeless guy you'd really rather not feel compelled to buy a sandwich. Of course, such relationships, in our broken and sinful world, do not de facto occur, but by the grace of God and the uplifting work of his loving Spirit, we can (should) strive to emulate them.

   If I've made it sound complicated please forgive/disregard me (or leave an angry comment if you're so inclined, goodness knows it'll be nice to at least know that I've got readers). Søren is a philosopher but this is not a philosophy book: he's not developing complex theoretical structures or proposing grand intricate maps of reality: he's a Christian, using his ability as a philosopher to walk the reader in wisdom through his many thoughts about the most important thing a Christian thinks there is - God-as-love. And yes, these thoughts are extremely deep at points, yes, at points he goes into a lot of detail to argue for a particular point and so the prose becomes difficult and dense, but stick with these passages, because he uses them to connect thoughts that bring you to a realisation of some truly beautiful things, some intensely challenging things, some immeasurably encouraging works of love.
   For a Christian reader, this book is now one of the first I would ever recommend someone read - it is supremely uplifting, and you genuinely feel you are discovering more about how to know, serve and emulate God. Non-Christian readers might also enjoy it but I would expect they'd find it confusing: the active reality of Christian love is so counter-intuitive, so against the grain of our modern cultural sensible individualism, that Kierkegaard's conclusions would just come across as mad. And in a way they are - I certainly felt that - but that's why it's such a refreshing challenge, because humans are built to know God, to know love, but we are so distant from its reality that hearing extensive in-depth truths about what it is and how it works and how we fit into it doesn't immediately feel like good news. But, of course, it is. [I was going to find a quote from the book to lend this concluding sentence a bit more oomph, but there's just too many good ones, and I can't be bothered to comb back through the whole thing. Anyway; absolutely worth a read.]

* A fact that is better reflected in his other philosophical works, most of which are about irony, despair, godlessness, and so on. Also, this hasn't got much to do with anything I've mentioned in this post but I want to include a link to it anyway because it's hilarious: follow this twitter account for a superb feed of Kierkegaardian thinking combined with the everyday lifestyle reflections of Kim Kardashian. You're welcome.

Dealing with Depression

This book by Sarah Collins and Jayne Haynes is a short overview of the challenges Christians face when struggling with, or knowing people who are struggling with, depression. I bought it because since mid-October I've been going through a fairly mild but still unpleasant bout (yes, that is the main reason why my blog's been fairly dry over winter - sorry) brought on mainly by prolonged unemployment and exacerbated by my lifelong insomniac (and somewhat neurotic) tendencies, and this seemed like a good resource. I can attest that it was, but not as immediately helpful as talking openly to close Christian friends, and even more importantly, praying, about the issues I was facing. Other books have also been huge helps, primarily Emily Dickinson and Søren Kierkegaard, writers who express joy and beauty in more accessibly poignant ways than almost anyone else I've ever encountered: perhaps because a constant self-aware love of God lay at the heart of each of their efforts as poet or philosopher.
   Anyway, I should probably say something about this book. It's a decent resource - overviews the basics of depression, its diagnosis, treatment, and particular problems that it may pose for Christians who may perceive it as spiritual as well as psychological; the writers take us to the Psalms, where comfort in sorrow can be found, and remind us of some solid gospel truths to keep in mind or speak to those suffering from depression. Each chapter closes with a Christian's account of their struggle with depression and how it affected their faith, or how others encouraged them: similarly, there are appendices recounting a pastor's efforts to disciple a sufferer, a husband's account of his wife's suffering, and an in-depth story of a first-hand struggle (told by Roger Carswell - a great man, he's written dozens of Christian mini-books like this one, and is an old friend of my dad's).
   I think this book could be an excellent little resource for equipping churches to better engage with depressed persons, but if you are actually depressed and struggling to fit that into your Christian worldview, this could be helpful but probably isn't the book you need: there are plenty of others out there, but honestly, I would recommend you turn instead to God's word itself. Oh, and talk to people - I know that can be hard, but hopefully Christians are getting better at picking up clues about mental health, and they'll be there to initiate, include, and encourage you.