Now, I have an easy relationship with food: if I want a piece of chocolate or cake, I say F**k It and enjoy it. If I do not want to eat what I am served, I say F**k It and leave it on the plate. If I am keen to do some sport, I say F**k It and go for it… If I feel lazy lying in bed and do not want to move even my little toe, guess what? I say F**k It and stay and enjoy.
I will continue with my ‘F**k it Diet,’ because it is the only way my life seems to work … and if I lose some more weight it is okay, and if I stay just the way I am now, feeling happy, well then I simply say F**k It, that’s just fine.
Lydia Plankensteiner, Austria
Just one of 100 F**k It stories in the new e-book I Said F**k It, available at www.thefuckitlife.com/extras.
That, then, is how to be free in Wellbeing Town, how to apply F**k It to wellbeing: don’t label it, just tune in and follow it. It works in funny, mysterious ways sometimes, which you can’t pick apart and understand, but it works.
BEING FREE IN THE TOWN WHERE NOTHING WORKS
I intended to write this chapter this morning; I was pondering what to write about regarding how to be okay in a Town Where Nothing Works. I started to set up in the place I would be writing for the next few days – the Urbino Estate and Spa – the luxurious venue we use for many of our F**k It Retreats. I found a suitable table near a window for some sunshine and fresh air, and near a power source to plug in this laptop. And I went to insert the plug into the socket and found it wouldn’t fit. I tried another socket, but it wouldn’t fit there either. Now I know what you’re thinking if you’re from any organized, sane country on this Earth… ‘What, John, you were trying to insert a foreign plug into an Italian socket?’ No, friends, I was trying to insert an Italian plug into an Italian socket. And it wouldn’t fit because there’s more than one type of plug in Italy, and more than one type of socket. Some plugs have three pins; others have two, but not two at the same distance apart… some are wider, some are narrower. Grrrrrr. So we have lots of adapters in a drawer at home that turn one type of plug into another type of plug, and thus allow you to plug whatever you have into whatever someone’s decided to put in a wall as a socket. Grrrrrr.
Now I know we Brits have a different kind of plug from everyone else, with its three pins in a triangular shape. But at least we have that and nothing else. If you’re foreign (definition of ‘foreign’ in this case is you don’t live in Britain, not just that you speak another language. I realize that there will be some of you who are foreign in this sense, but don’t speak foreign at all, like Americans, for example, who, I think, have a different kind of plug from the Brits, but I’m sure have a standardized plug. In fact I remember reading once about an American woman who was driven mad by the different light bulb fittings and bulb types in the UK, she was used in to a standard fitting in the USA)… Okay, if you’re foreign, just buy an adapter from your foreign plug to a UK plug and you’re sorted for the duration of your stay.
It’s the same with our roads. We drive on the other side, but we’re consistent in that. You don’t cross over the border to Wales, for example, and have to switch to the other side of the road (Wales, by the way, is a small and beautiful country attached to the side of England like a big beer belly, not that the Welsh are famous for drinking beer… they’re famous for loving relationships – with sheep – mining, rugby, singing, and lovely, fluffy, attractive sheep).
I’m surprised here in Italy that they’ve managed to keep it together in deciding which side of the road to drive on. That said, if you’re used to driving on the country roads, as we are, you’ll know that most of the locals don’t seem to know which side of the road to drive on at all, especially on bends.
Back to plugs. Gaia, thankfully, had packed some adapters, which I found after a few minutes of rummaging through bags. So here I am, adapted to the hilt and tapping away happily. But whenever I face such a plug crisis, I do wonder how a country can expect even to start to work things out for its people, and go out there and do well in the world, if it can’t even organize a simple, consistent system for its plugs? It’s not that bloody difficult, is it?
I think the same thing when I have to go to the post office to pay a variety of things because nobody can be bothered to work out a way for you to pay online, or even at the bank.
And why does the post office have a cashier for every type of task you might want to carry out (e.g., mailing something, or paying something, or withdrawing money), for which you take a different type of ticket and wait for 20 minutes? Now I know it would have seemed like a good idea at the time… so efficient, a leap forward in customer service technology akin to Adam Smith’s industry-changing division of labor… but, surely, ten minutes after this bright idea, someone in the office should have said, ‘But…’ and then continued with a long list of reasons why it wasn’t such a bright idea. For example, if I wanted to take some money out, and with that money pay my phone bill, and then send a letter to my mum, this is what I’d have to do: get a ticket to withdraw the money, wait 20 minutes, get my money; get a ticket for paying bills, wait 20 minutes, pay the bill; get a ticket for the postage cashier, wait 30 minutes (usually), and mail said letter.
Madness.
Last week I had to pay a bill and mail a letter. When I asked the woman who was processing my bill payment if she could just slip through my letter, pretty please, she looked at me as if I was the first person ever to ask. I explained that otherwise I’d have to line up again to post the letter and I was, after all, here now, with her, and that I’m sure she’d been trained to put a stamp on a letter as thoroughly as she’d been trained to process bill payments. She tutted and walked across to the lady who looks after postage and explained to her very loudly that I wanted to post a letter, and that lady tutted, then the whole line of people waiting with their letters looked over at me and tutted (though I have to say they all looked rather hungry, I suspect they’d been there for days, joining various queues and waiting patiently). But I got my letter posted. Success.
Hey, crikey, let’s stop the list… just the post-office system is enough to write a book about. It’s crap.
Italy is a funny place. People push ahead so naturally, so confidently, that I’ve had to give up telling them to ‘Get the F**k in line like everyone else’ because they invariably turn to me, looking all hurt, saying sorry, they didn’t realize and, of course, they’ll join the back of the line that they’ve, all of a sudden, realized is there.
It’s very hard to get anything done here. Everything is so bureaucratic it could drive you mad. And it does drive us mad sometimes. Italy is one big Town That Doesn’t Work. The economy is going down the pan. But ‘the Powers That Be’ still seem intent on raising every tax, making it harder to employ people, and making the red tape even thicker. Bonkers.
Yet we still live here. Why? Because it’s beautiful (Tuscan rolling hills, alpine mountains, Sardinian sea, southern olive groves, etc.); it’s rich in culture (Urbino is where the renaissance was born and is Raphael’s hometown); the people are generally warm, friendly, and hugely expressive (just watch the way they gesticulate when they talk, mamma mia); the food is the best on the planet (even in truck stops); and the women and men are nice to look at.
Italy is an AMAZING place.
But it’s also unbelievably RUBBISH.
HOW DO WE LIVE IN A TOWN THAT DOESN’T WORK?
First off, we’ve both lived in enough places to know that no town really works like you’d hope (and by ‘town’ here we’re clearly referring to street, town, city, country, or continent). There’s always something, isn’t there? I suppose the only exception might be Switzerland, where everything works, everything is clean, there’s no crime, and you don’t pay much tax. But even the perfection that is Switzerland has its price and that’s part of the problem – everything is very expensive. And the rules are astonishing. If you move into a new apartment, for example, you’ll be bombarded by a list of rules. The police patrol the streets looking for people
who are shaking their rugs over their balconies, or doing the vacuuming at the wrong time, or throwing water down the wrong drain, or putting a glass bottle in the wrong container – eek, give me South London any day.
LATER…
I had to add this extra paragraph, because it’s beautiful and astonishing… I wrote earlier about Switzerland being so ‘perfect’ then went off to lunch and found that one of the guests (and it’s a deliberately small group week this week, one of ‘Gaia’s Magic Six’ weeks, where the maximum is six people) is Swiss, and I mentioned my reference to perfect Switzerland and she said that she’d just received a call from her mother who’d told her that there had been a bomb alert in town (think small, perfect, picturesque town) just that morning. Bloody hell. Point made in every conceivable way, thank you very much. Not only does perfect Switzerland have its disadvantages in terms of personal freedom, it ALSO has the bomb alerts and crime like everywhere else. Actually, now I’m not so sure whether I’d still prefer South London. What you mean I can get bomb alerts, crime, tense threatening atmosphere AND the Swiss mountains, trains that run on time, and low taxes? Hold on, I’m packing my bags).
So, we realize that there’s no ideal place. We’ve chosen the place that suits us most, given a whole variety of variables. And then we could descend into a series of clichés to keep us sane, such as ‘Take the rough with the smooth,’ ‘You’ve made your bed, so lie in it,’ ‘Better the devil you know…’
But we have a simple approach to the stuff that doesn’t work: 1) we either decide to leave (which we don’t want to do at the moment), or 2) we find a way of getting around it (we gave up running a retreat center, for example, because it was so difficult to run a business like that); or 3) if there’s no getting around it, we try to accept it.
And each way is a different expression of F**k It:
F**k It, we’re off. It takes guts to make the big moves, but sometimes you have to.
F**k It, we’ll find a way. When you’re determined to find your way around an obstacle, you usually can.
F**k It, we need to chill, because there’s F**k all we can do about this. Don’t sweat the small stuff. It’s only a plug after all. To do this, you need to be flexible (okay, in my case, so I won’t write like I planned today, I’ll have a swim instead). And you need to be able to tap into calm, even when you’re feeling totally wound up.
And, of course, there’s a deep F**k It approach to the whole Not Working thing, too; that everything is working in its own perfect way (even the things that appear not to be working at all), and that everything placed before me in this unfolding beautiful mystery of life is placed intentionally and with love and for me, and so I will be guided by whatever it is that seems to be doing the guiding, lovingly and safely through things that may appear difficult, through times that might feel challenging, and through places that appear flawed but are actually all just right for me and my journey.
Or I can ignore 1, 2, and 3 and the Deep F**k It Approach, and bust a blood vessel getting pissed over the plug. Which, of course, I still will do occasionally. And that’s me, John C. Parkin, exercising my free will to be a stupid bugger. And that’s just perfect, too.
BEING FREE IN A TOWN WHERE SHIT HAPPENS
As seems to be happening on most days at the moment, when I start to think about writing a chapter, something happens in the real world, which dramatically informs that chapter.
This is what happened this morning. I’d dropped off the boys at school and had just turned onto the long track that comes down to our house. There are two other houses toward the top of the track. In the first house lives an elderly couple in their 80s and their son. The guy is coming out of his driveway as I pass their house. I stop to say hello. Now this man isn’t a pure-living Zen master (that’s our other neighbor). He smokes like a chimney and grumbles a lot. That said, he’s got a good heart, well, in the figurative sense, in the literal sense I think that not having such a good heart anymore is one of the problems. So he’s coming out of his driveway and I stop. And he tells me that his wife isn’t well again, and that they’ve called the ambulance, and he’s going up to the top of the track to make sure the ambulance doesn’t go sailing past our track (it’s easy to miss). He was clearly a little shaky and upset. It wasn’t an emergency, but it was a sign of how things were becoming very difficult.
And he said to me:
‘Ma dobbiamo abbracciare quello che arriva, non e vero?’
Isn’t that amazing? In such circumstances to say something like that. It blew me away. Especially coming from such an unexpected source. What’s that? What does it mean? Oh, sorry, yes. It means ‘We should embrace whatever happens, shouldn’t we?’
Easier said than done, of course. But that he was there in the middle of it, saying it, was enough for me. He was clearly trying to be at peace with the circumstances of his life in that moment: that – his wife is become sicker by the day and may not be on this Earth for long, and that he also might not be around for long either.
It’s a funny expression, but Shit Happens. And, sadly, Shit Happens in every town. If only we could immunize ourselves against Shit. But we can’t. Bad things happen to all of us. Bad things happen every day, in every part of the world. You’re just thinking that life is pretty sweet, then something awful happens. You’re just thinking that things couldn’t get any worse, then they do.
I haven’t been looking forward to writing this chapter because I don’t have a magic F**k It pill that can make the pain go away. In fact, quite a few people will ask me, ‘But surely there are some things you can’t say F**k It to in life?’ And I answer, ‘It depends how you define F**k It, but of course there are some things that are going to hurt like hell however much you want them not to matter so much.’ You can’t say F**k It to the sickly, wrenching pain of the grief of losing someone close to you, and stop feeling it.
I don’t have a definitive spiritual answer to deal with shit when it happens: i.e., ‘They’re happy up There, at peace now,’ or ‘This is God’s Plan,’ or ‘Everything happens for a reason.’ These sincerely held beliefs and sincerely meant reassurances, though, just feel to me like platitudes in the real time of need.
I don’t have the definitive therapeutic answer either: a six-step process to work through grief, or a positive-thinking philosophy to pull yourself out of a rut that’s beset you because of shit happening.
What I have is my experience of Shit Happening in my life, and of what I did and what helped.
First, it’s fine to be distraught when shit happens. You don’t have to put on a brave face, or bottle it up, or get on with things. It’s fine to howl at the wind, and curse the gods, and feel thoroughly sorry for yourself. We’re so keen to praise those who are brave in the face of adversity, those who are so positive in the face of the terminal diagnosis, but such praise then makes the opposite reaction wrong. And it’s probably best to feel something fully, whatever it is, before you put on that brave face (if you feel you have to at all). It seems that emotions felt fully move through us more quickly than emotions that are only half-felt, half-allowed, or suppressed entirely.
You don’t have to be brave. You don’t have to face it full on. Feel your pain and your upset. Scream and shout and sob if need be. There will probably come a time when you want to be brave, but that might not be now. So allow yourself that.
When the time comes to move a little out of the pain, there are, of course, things you can do that will make you feel better. When shit has happened to me, it has always helped me to think of what I have, rather than what I’ve lost. It’s the ‘at least’ list: Well, at least I have this, or that. So being grateful for what you have can help. If that just feels wrong and stupid, then it’s not your time. It also depends how the shit has happened. I was about to argue that if you’re in a concentration camp, with little hope for survival, having lost your family, and starving to death, then doing a gratitude list isn’t going to help you. But there are those who have endured such
awful experiences who teach that the only way to survive such an experience (psychologically at least) is to find something to appreciate and to find something that has meaning for you. In fact, there’s a whole branch of therapy, Logotherapy, based on this idea.
It does help to remember that there are (usually) people worse off that you. There are people who’ve experienced more tragedy, been even unluckier, been sicker, experienced more pain. I always feel slightly guilty when I do end up thinking about those who are worse off, because it feels like we’re using them for our comfort (or, at least, reduced discomfort). But the world would be a much poorer, sicker, more painful place to be without the efforts of those who have experienced their share of awfulness, then gone out and helped people in more difficult positions than themselves.
Don’t punish yourself with constant what-ifs and questions: ‘If only I’d done this, things would be different,’ or ‘Why did this happen to me, what have I done to deserve this?’ In terms of the ‘what if,’ if you apply it the other way around, you’ll find many shit things that you’ve avoided simply because you left home at a different time, or you happened to be somewhere else at that time, etc., etc. As for deserving something or not: I know too many good people, leading positive, contributing lives, who have been beset by shit from all angles and for no obvious reason, to know that you don’t need to deserve anything to get it (‘bad’ or ‘good’). Sometimes you just get it.
And surely this is something you can’t say F**k It to: when really bad things happen. Again, it depends on the definition. You can use these words in many ways when facing pain and difficulty in life. ‘F**k It, I don’t care how I “should” behave, I feel terrible and I’m just going to stay in bed and wail,’ ‘F**k It, this has all made me realize that I’m living a lie, I’m off’; ‘F**k It, I might as well do what I fancy now, it can’t get any worse than this,’ etc.
F**k It Therapy Page 23
