Getting over a row means gradually realising – with quiet satisfaction – you can cope with a problem that you can’t solve directly. We’ll give up trying to be a couple in this particular area. It’s not what either of us would have ideally wanted. But we’ll be OK. The nature of the relationship evolves slightly. From now on, maybe we won’t go to the supermarket together; it will be a solo performance from now on at family gatherings – the in-laws will think it’s odd but we’ll survive that. We’ll adjust the boundaries of our joined life.
Conflict is a pretty much unavoidable part of living closely with another person and being involved in big, complicated mutual undertakings. But we’re all right now and that’s nice – until the next time.
43
Planning the Ideal Routine
It’s enjoyable to sit with a big sheet of paper and map out what the best arrangement for a typical day or week would be for you. It’s not a fantasy – you’re not daydreaming about a roster of lovers or the ideal time for the butler to bring the cocktail tray. The ideal routine is closely aligned with your actual life: it just tries to set out a good way of organising the things you are already involved in.
The background to the pleasure is our familiar awareness of a day going badly wrong. We get in a panic because we end up with four things all needing to be done at once – in the next five minutes, you have to have a shower, pick up some things from the dry-cleaners, pay three bills online and finish a report for work. Life is slipping away, yet we’re not using the time we have wisely. The hope – enshrined in the notion of an ideal schedule – is that we’d discover that in fact we do have enough time, if only we can learn to use it wisely.
It’s nice just to be clear about what the recurrent things actually are and to assign each one a distinct slot on a daily or weekly basis. The chaotic multiplicity of being very busy starts to devolve into a limited set of repeatable tasks. A starting point might be the overt demands of pretty much every day: when to get up, when to go to bed, a time to catch up on correspondence, what time to have supper or when to fit in some exercise.
But a crucial part of the charm is making definite space for things that don’t typically get included in a to-do list. There’s the inclusion of apparently eccentric things – 10.35 am, have a nap; 3.00 pm, think of someone you dislike and for two minutes imagine being them; 6.55 pm, look at a photo of a skull and think about the fact that you will die. There’s a specific slot for things that don’t normally feel like they should be planned for: stare out of the window, eat a nectarine. One might plan a specific ‘Marcus Aurelius moment’ (taking up a suggestion from the stoic Roman Emperor: while brushing your teeth, mentally run through a list of people you are grateful to and recall the good they have done you).
Taking an overview of a week or a month, we can also mark out times for ritual occasions. Tuesdays, 11.45 pm, go for a walk, think about a specific area of childhood: this coming week, aged 12, the year you changed schools; what were you like then? What did you care about? What was tricky? What went well? Two weeks’ time: 13–15, the early stage of adolescence.
All these activities can sound odd when stated on an agenda – but that’s not because they are unimportant or unworthy of intelligent consideration. It’s just because, unfortunately, their contribution to a proper life hasn’t as yet been fully appreciated or collectively admitted.
A key question is how much time should you assign to any one thing? Some tricky tasks lose their sting if we break them into brief chunks: if you find domestic accounts annoying you, just slip in one painful thing at a time. The schedule tells you – pay two bills online (11 minutes) prior to a snack of salted biscuits and a wedge of Emmental. We’re envisaging a release from procrastination. And it can also help us with things we like but that get distressing if we spend too long on them. The routine says: 2.15 pm, read the newspaper or scan a news website – but at 2.30 pm you have to go on to doing the laundry or working on a review of the corporate recruitment strategy. It’s lovely to catch up on what’s happening in the world, but if you spend 56 minutes on it, you start to feel you’re wasting your life; the routine offers to protect you from your own annoying tendencies.
A charming promise of a routine is that many more things will become habits. You won’t have to decide to do them and summon a special burst of willpower: after the first dozen times they start to become semi-automatic. The day begins to flow. You’re not always prodding and badgering yourself to get on with what you should be doing.
The pleasure of thinking through the ideal schedule takes issue with the Romantic idea that what’s organised, planned and recurrent can’t also be lovely. The Romantic imagination likes to peg enjoyment to what’s rare and unexpected, to what happens on the spur of the moment and to the chance turn of events. It’s not entirely wrong. Obviously, sometimes, sweet and fun things are spontaneous and unexpected. But it fosters an unfortunate negative attitude towards the expected and pre-booked; it looks down on the carefully arranged diary. But now we are reminding ourselves of another, though less widely recognised, delight: the pleasing vision of life organised, sorted – and carefully timetabled and mapped out with colour-coded pencils.
You are not necessarily going to stick to it in every detail, and you might revise it tomorrow – or you might only put a sliver of it into action. But the thought of the ideal routine is helping one understand a little better what one needs to become a slightly better, more organised, productive and calm version of oneself.
44
Finally Gaining the Respect of a Previously Suspicious Colleague
You recently started a new job and there was a colleague who gave you a hard time. Or perhaps a new person has come in to a project to work alongside you, or now you are reporting to someone you haven’t worked with before. Admittedly they haven’t been overtly hostile or even impolite. But you could sense they didn’t as yet really believe in you. There was something slightly frosty about their manner. They didn’t pay much attention when you presented at a meeting; their emails were a touch perfunctory; they’d never solicit your opinion unless they absolutely had to. Once, you saw them laughing in a huddle in the corridor and the thought crossed your mind that they were saying something about you.
Now their smile is genuine. They are interested in how you see things. They’re glad to have you around. When they were under pressure they asked for your help.
One thing that’s nice is that you’d built up a slightly forbidding picture of this person – which is now being dismantled. Going on their initial behaviour towards you, you’d imagined them as someone generally severe and cold. But recently they mentioned – out of nowhere – that they’re thinking of moving house; they told you they’re interested in gardening and would love to have a vegetable patch. And a few days ago they confided that they’re worried they might have misjudged the relationship with one of the suppliers or been over-optimistic about the market position in Ireland. They’re ready to let you know something a bit vulnerable about themselves. You could use this against them, but they – rightly – realise you won’t. You’d only seen one side of them. Actually it turns out they’ve got some quite sweet sides to them.
And now you don’t necessarily hold their earlier wariness against them. They weren’t being mean. Their earlier attitude was (you’re coming to think) justified caution. You know that you’re a perfectly OK person in yourself and that you are pretty competent and devoted – but that doesn’t mean it was clear to them. They didn’t just want to know about good intentions. They wanted to know if you could actually be relied on in a tricky situation or that you could deliver really good quality work, or that you’d see the bigger picture or come up with genuinely helpful initiatives on your own. This person’s goodwill is worth having because they don’t give it away automatically. They have warmed to you because you have proved yourself. Their approval is a measure of your own development. One is being properly judged before being endorsed. Of course we like it
when people are warm and positive from the very start. It’s tempting to get annoyed because people don’t automatically know what we’re capable of. But we can actually come to respect when they wait for evidence of that.
45
‘Getting’ a Great Work of Art for Yourself
From time to time you’ve been standing in one of the world’s great galleries in front of an acclaimed masterpiece. You could see that the work was quite nice or fairly interesting. But not much more than that. It was hard to fathom what all the fuss was about. But you probably kept the thought to yourself. There’s so much cultural prestige swirling around art that it’s not especially good for the ego to announce to a group of swooning companions – or even to yourself – that you simply don’t ‘get’ the work. Maybe you’ve forced yourself into to a more cerebral attitude. You’ve learned from the audio guide that the work in question used to be believed to have been painted in Siena in 1423 but new evidence suggests it may in fact have originated in Florence in 1431, from the hand of an artist trained in Siena (this point is stressed) thus shedding light on the question of the cultural relationship between these cities at that time – an issue that, up to that point, had never greatly troubled you.
One senses that a huge quantity of intellectual labour has been devoted to this darkish, smallish object, and one is naturally reluctant to dismiss it out of hand. Well-informed people seem to be enthused. And here it is, in any case, on display with a spotlight training down on it, in a silk-walled room in a huge and very impressive building. It must be truly wonderful. Only a little rebellious part of one’s mind stays loyal to the sceptical thought: but I don’t get it.
We’re naturally worried about looking foolish or getting something terribly wrong: saying, ‘I love Leonardo da Vinci,’ when this turns out to be by someone completely different whose name hasn’t ever crossed our path before; or being bored by a work that’s drawn a big crowd and is presumably a highlight of western civilisation, by which it would be embarrassing to be unmoved. And of course there are varied versions of this kind of thing that go on around prominent examples of contemporary art as well. We’re informed the artist is interrogating the essence of photography or is a key influence on the Dusseldorf school – which sounds highly impressive in the abstract but doesn’t really answer the shy, but persistent, question: why should I care about that?
In contrast to all this, there’s the special pleasure of finding that, in fact, the work has an intimate meaning: it speaks to you. The change in experience can happen particularly if we’re looking at a postcard or screensaver image – that is, at things officially regarded as mere shadows of the original. But they have a huge advantage. We encounter them in private: we don’t feel the world looking over our shoulders, checking up to see if we’re getting it right. We can turn to them when the mood takes us; we’re not restricted by an external schedule, which tells us we have to make the most of The Night Watch or Guernica at 11.45 am on Tuesday morning, slightly jet-lagged and jostled by a school tour group, because that’s when our travel arrangements happen to land us in front of the masterpiece itself.
Mood is a crucial ingredient in the experience. A work of art has got something it wants to say to us, but we need to be in the right frame of mind to receive it. The mind is a bit like a radio: the waves are coming in all the time but the device needs to be tuned to the right frequency to pick up the programme. It’s an unfortunate accident that the big gallery itself can often constrain our moods and natural that a postcard or an image in a book allows that our mood can be more attuned: we can take a look at it when feeling sad or worried about what’s happening in a relationship or excited about a new opportunity, a bit wistful or sombre.
In the right mood, you feel close to that person in the picture who looks so sad and yet so dignified; or a bright scattering of paint looks like a joyful, hopeful gesture rather than a puzzling step in the evolution of technique. You can bring yourself into engagement with the work.
Normally, we feel we’re supposed to wait for others to tell us what we’re supposed to think about a great work of art. We peer at labels and tried to imagine what a friend who studied art history might say. What we’re discovering now is a kind of independence. ‘Getting it’ doesn’t mean that you’ve arrived at the same conclusion as the experts. It means that the work feels important to you in your own life. You might not know the dates or who influenced this artist or whether this was a late or an early work; you couldn’t say if this work was typical of the time (which was when exactly? You are a bit hazy) or innovative. But these factors don’t seem decisive anymore. Because you’ve latched onto something more fundamental: the work exists for you.
That’s why getting one work of art opens a door to the enjoyment of many others. Because you’ve discovered in yourself the key to engagement. As with learning to swim or to ride a bike: you don’t just master one bicycle or learn how to stay afloat in a single pool – you gain a general confidence that you can take to them all. You have acquired trust in the validity of your own reactions. There is a step away from intimidation: you can find yourself at home around something, or in a place, that used to feel alien.
46
Very Dark Jokes
It can be disconcerting for a nice person – one who wishes well to others and wants to be kind, reasonable and honourable – to think they may take quiet satisfaction in dark humour. On the face of it we’re smirking and giggling and occasionally practically falling out of our chairs with laughter at things which – soberly considered – range from the obnoxious to the horrific. We’re tickled by jokes about …
stupidity: a man encountering a toilet brush which he had, up to that moment, regarded as a fictional object – the domestic equivalent of a UFO.
cruelty: a story about Hitler getting frantic as he falls behind with his to-do list.
greed: three Wall Street bankers walk into a bar …
heartlessness: there’s this boat full of refugees and it springs a leak and …
violence: a jaunty entry in Jack the Ripper’s diary, ‘Somewhat tired after long walk last night. Get shoes resoled. Peckish when home. Egg sandwich! Nearly forgot, slashed lady.’
The pleasure that we derive from dark jokes is not really connected – as we may fear – with approval of the things we find amusing. It’s actually based on something that – at first – seems surprising: the feeling of closeness to, and connection with, other people. But it makes sense when we keep in mind how intimacy can grow around a shared admission that life is actually far weirder than we normally make out. A crucial ingredient of the pleasure is the idea that we are not simply laughing alone: our laughter is in common with the person telling us the joke and with the other people around us who find it just as funny as we do.
For sensible reasons, our public selves are quite heavily edited portraits of our inner lives. We hate with more vigour than we like to let on and we rightly school ourselves to be rational and to tone this down as far as we can around other people. But the loathing and disgust simmers in the dark. We are much more inadequate in multiple areas than we feel we can afford to reveal to others: horror at the prospect of phoning an acquaintance; a deep disinclination, painfully overcome, to brush one’s teeth; zero willpower in the presence of wine/porn/ ice cream; inability to stick to the simplest budget; a lifelong rage against one’s hair or lack of it; a tendency to get enraged by minor domestic affronts. We understandably hesitate to announce these frailties to the world but we’re hugely conscious of them and this creates a zone of loneliness. And typically we are more sexually desiring, and more perverse in our desires, than we would ever like to say: we harbour at the back of our minds scenarios that, apparently, no decent person would normally admit to.
All these things can be given a humorous spin using the standard comic devices: incongruity, unexpected emphasis, mockery and droll elaboration. And being funny about them is reassuring. It means the other person, who is making the joke, is on to
p of the rather combustible material. They can be witty because they’ve got a lot of distance on the subject. We know for certain they won’t actually embrace the thing they are joking about; that’s why they are joking. They’re not cheering on Jack the Ripper or sympathising with the tricky task of running the Third Reich. A joke isn’t a sly way of sketching a plan.
Dark humour at first appears like the enemy of the mature self; it keeps on asking us to find the least admirable parts of human nature entertaining. But its pleasure lies in its kindness: dark humour is inviting us to compassion for ourselves and for others; it teaches the generous, tender idea that the more disturbed parts of our minds are manageable and are, in fact, central to the noblest ideal: that of being able to love others as they truly are.
47
Midnight Walks
Maybe you should be in bed, but something – you might not know exactly what – is keeping your mind active. You need to extract yourself from home, get away from a screen and get a little distance from whoever else might be around. Maybe it’s cold outside and you tie a thick scarf under your chin.
It could be a blissfully warm night – the heat of the day has finally relented; now it’s the perfect temperature and you can go for a stroll just in a T-shirt.
You’ve got the world pretty much to yourself. The street lights are slightly yellow (if they still use the older sodium lamps in your area). It’s a deeply familiar, comforting glow. As a child you loved to look at the lights from the back seat of the car as you returned home late from an evening at your grandparents’ house. The street lamps are such little things, struggling against the vastness of the dark. It’s amazingly hard for the human race to provide even just a tiny fraction of the natural illumination of the day over even only a tiny portion of the earth’s surface.
Small Pleasures Page 10
