That Benny is right of course. And he’s right to feel good about having that honest voice going on. I was sure he didn’t pay attention all the time, so it’s also good that he realises this. It shows progress.

There’s a lot to be cheerful about actually, and one of the foremost reasons is that progress. It feels like Benny is getting closer, and coming to the realisation that there is a definite point to all this. He had come to see that everything has potential to add to the mix, even seemingly negative situations — sort of like that girl who tripped and fell at the roadside, or the runaway shopping trolley, or even the spoon-in-the-sink soaking. At least some conclusion of sorts could be gleaned out of these situations, or even just provide something to add to the table.

At least something was being achieved, and Benny felt that this aspect at least should be viewed as something he could be happy about — that he had some hope of maintaining an engaged attitude no matter what. And this little bit of sunshine was, in fact, something I knew could become a permanent happier attitude.

Chapter index and link to slogans

“There’s something I became convinced of ages ago, even when I was still living at home, and it was that while there’s the ‘yourself’ who’s parading around that everyone else sees and gets to know, there’s also the ‘yourself’ that isn’t so obvious, but who’s always present and you don’t really get away from all your life, not even for a minute. It’s sort of like there’s the public ‘you’ and the private ‘you’, one of those ‘same same but different’ scenarios, like it’s the same flavour but a variation to it.

“I was thinking about how to tell the difference, I mean if I had to explain what the difference is to someone. I mean, we’re just ourselves so what’s to explain, you’d think. But like I said, I became convinced that there is something to explain, about these two observers to this life. Getting down to the real issue at stake here might be like trying to describe the difference between ‘nuanced’ and ‘subtly different’, maybe trying to explain that to someone who doesn’t speak English very well.

“Then again maybe one way to get somewhere near describing the flavour variation that I’m talking about is like when I brush my teeth — which sounds strange, but I’ll explain. To anyone else it would be obvious that I’m brushing my teeth and that after doing that they would be cleaned and feel fresh all over. But I know that in behind one of the molars on the left side, the upper molar on the left, there’s a part of that tooth that’s really hard to get to, or at least the action needed with the toothbrush to get behind there is a little more involved than just brushing around like with the rest of my teeth. Maybe I’m just imagining it, but I’m sold on the idea that to really get to it I need to do some convolutions with my mouth and cheek, and sneer up the top lip on that side. It’s not pretty,” (it’s hilarious) “and it’s not something I’d do if anyone were watching. But it’s something that I know myself, if I want to get to that difficult place on the inner base of my upper left molar, I tend to have to pull some faces. Well, maybe I don’t have to, but that’s the thought I have, and the actions I take, if I want to convince myself that that area has really been given a proper brushing. Anyway, that’s a part of the difference.

“So there’s the me that people see and know, and then there’s the me that’s just mine, the one that feels the need to pull a face sometimes. And only I know that information, just me… I mean just the private me. And I know that this principal observer is the one I can trust, most of all, to be absolutely truthful. There’s no bullshit in here, there’s no denying or making excuses. There’s no-one to impress. So the first self of these is the one that I know will reliably have the right opinion and give the most truthful assessment of everything I do and think.

“And it’s not so much of a self-centred thing, more a self-honest acknowledgement, because there’s no posing going on… no posturing or ‘character’ to live up to. And I think it’s good to have that reliability — even if I don’t always listen.”

Chapter index and link to slogans

At times, there seemed to Benny’s mind that there was no steady progress, or at least no way to measure any personal changes. Not that this mattered a great deal to Benny most of the time, but now and then he wondered about the point or direction all this prognostication was taking him — which, were he asked, he would say was a curse, but I knew he didn’t really think it was all a bad thing. In fact, if there was one thing that Benny and his private thinkings were convinced of — yes, okay, I know, guilty as charged — it was that there were far more negatives to stumble over from not thinking things through and not keeping focused.

What had become obvious was that an authenticity of outcomes was never accompanied (never channelled) by the self-importance that so many others brought to their own game. In the easy space of unguarded moments, Benny would find an open truth — that taking himself too seriously, and clinging to that conceit, can be a one-way ticket to getting tangled up on his own two smug feet.

The main focus for all the efforts along the way was to keep those feet on the ground, not get too uppity, not get too convinced that there was anything special going on, or anything that wasn’t also in the ambit of every other person walking around. All the thoughts and realisations and even the occasional ‘yeah!’ moments he’d been through and collected and filed away could probably be distilled down to one main point … drop the bullshit.

It was like that steaming cup of tea in the sunlight, that pretentious confection that this would ‘look better’ to someone else. He was glad to have realised some of the ridiculousness that ego and self-aggrandisement can allow. And glad that he had the occasional unguarded moment to be reminded. He needed more of those.

Chapter index and link to slogans

During one bus ride to the city, an ambulance raced by with its siren going, and the following thoughts ran through Benny’s head. “I read somewhere about how one of the significant stress factors for people who attend emergency or crisis situations, like anyone in an ambulance or fire fighters, what the Americans called ‘first responders’, who arrive at maybe a big disaster (I’m sure I read this on a US site), was mobile phones — or rather the ringing that can come from phones that are in the pockets of the dead or dying, or even coming from body bags later on.

“Like after a major accident or emergency incident, where there might be a lot of victims lying around, the sound of mobile phones ringing apparently can really get to the people who are there trying to help. The sound just makes a bad situation harder, and it’s not just all ringtones and bleeps, but maybe worse can be the favourite songs, the cheery riffs and the personalised alert sounds — they’d seem so incongruous to the horrible moment when these sounds are playing. But of course it must also be the thought that the ringing is probably from friends or family trying to call the people lying there, trying to check up and see if they’re okay, when they’re not okay at all.

“The emergency people in that situation said how this sound made the victims seem so much more human and frail, more close and familiar because they have people who are trying to call them, who are worried about them, who will miss them.

“I think I can understand the feeling they’re getting at — that we’d all be like that if it were us.”

Coincidentally, or maybe it wasn’t because of that ambulance going by, Benny was running these thoughts through his mind not long after finding out that an old teacher of his from his time at college had died some time over the past year. They had always got along well — he was one of those teachers who would put in time with his students, and always seemed ready for a chat or a serious discussion, if someone wanted to follow up on either the matter at hand in the course or whatever else they wanted to talk about. He had always seemed so genuinely interested, and they had many deep-and-meaningful talks — at least that’s how Benny remembered it — about nonsense or about the details of life or a few other obscure issues.

One that had resonance for Benny, and stayed with him in subtle ways, was about how everyone can benefit from being more disciplined in their thought process, about the steps a person could take to make sure their brain was in gear and that there was some kind of back-up for thinking clearly. That long and involved discussion from years ago really started Benny on the way to coming to the conclusions he eventually reached about those five back-up steps to staying focused and on-track. These were quietly percolating away in the background for a long time, and never really articulated until very recently — and only really to me in here.

So when the news of his old teacher dying of throat cancer finally reached him, Benny of course felt bad about it, but also felt bad because he hadn’t heard about it until now, and this was only through someone from the same course who he rarely caught up with. It was just another example of life getting in between then and now, and Benny could not have changed anything along the way, and wouldn’t really have wanted to. Time just passed, things just happened. There was a reason, but like a lot of us Benny could not have fathomed why he would have remembered reading about those emergency workers and the awful distraction of mobile phone ringtones that became an until then misread provocation — that was also a gift. Another tiny bit of gravel in the shoe. It seemed to me in here that ‘time just passed, things just happened’ left a ringing echo that intruded on his moment, just when he was trying to process the news of his old teacher.

He hoped, and he felt he could assume, that between then and now the life of his confidante from those immersive times back then had been filled with the sort of mindful engagement he remembered them discussing so well, and that lingered in the memory, from all that time ago. That was a person who had always seemed to conduct himself in a thoughtful way, and that was important. Right now it seemed that much of the other ‘from-then-to-now’ noise was just that — and Benny had begun to see that people can be all too attached to it, can use the noise and buzz of all the general doings and goings-on to underline an identity, to personalise their own living ringtone. But all it took was a straightforward, undeniable actuality to juxtapose that din of doings with the now-obvious frailty that was left exposed. Benny hoped, and he felt he could assume, that a strong thoughtfulness stayed.

Chapter index and link to slogans

“If I sat down and thought about the achievements I’ve made, and I don’t mean educational qualifications or the kind of car I drive or anything, but the sort of qualities that you’d hope good friends would talk about if they were making a speech about you, I’d like to think they’d say I’ve built up a few of my own personal strengths over time, or maybe they’re just ‘positives’. Or that’s what I’d like to hear anyway.” (Sorry mate, can’t help you with that.) “Maybe no-one else sees it, but I think I’ve built up a sort of bank of reserve battery power that kicks in when there’s a bit of slack, or when I really need it — although you know probably everyone’s got that back-up power lurking somewhere. Not for the day-to-day doings so much as those other times, when there are decisions or efforts that have to be made about things that really matter. It’s a bit hard to explain, and even though I know what I mean, it’s not something that I’ve tried to put into words before.

“Like being pretty determined, when I want to be. Most days I can just drift along with the rest of us, doing whatever comes along and just getting through the day. But sometimes it just seems to require a more focused effort, and at those times I can choose a course and stick to it. And I don’t just mean for the same day or hour, although it could be a short burst if that’s all it takes. But if I’ve decided for instance that I really need to, say, learn to use the computer mouse with my left hand instead of my right because the right hand keeps getting tingly, then that’s what I’ll do, and keep at it until I get it right. That’s not the sort of change I mean though. Of course the better examples of the determination I’m talking about are those times when the goal is deeper than a physical habit — it’s the changes you make under the skin that really matter.

“Then there’s being able to adapt and become really familiar with these sorts of achievements. If you make an improvement, the last thing anyone wants to see happen is going back to the original less-than-optimal situation that could have been so annoying before, or at least annoying enough to make me want to make a change. After making an effort over and over again, where you get to isn’t somewhere you should retreat from. One of these positives I think is being able to become comfortable with that, so there’s no longer the feeling of any change being a big deal. Of course that also comes with having some sense of determination, when it matters. It goes with the territory.

“Another thing I’ve noticed is that probably most of the times when I have seen a noticeable improvement in personal approach, especially through adopting a viewpoint or attitude, is arrived at because there has always been an inkling somewhere inside, like a seed that’s been dormant, that this was where I should have been heading anyway.” (And who tickles them inklings, Benny boy?) “It’s interesting because that’s never an effort — when I realise a more helpful approach has been stirred, it’s like a puzzle just unravels and falls away, and it all just naturally makes sense — maybe more so because these improvements seem to have the nature of being more ‘true to form’, and not imposed.

“Another positive, and it could seem strange to nominate this as a positive, but it is, is an easy access to self-criticism — or you could call it reproach, maybe auto-censorship. Most of the time this comes about because I’ll have lost sight of those first three developments, and lost track of what’s been achieved already. The aim is to get back to the straight and narrow, not to wander, to tell myself off for slipping back to the assumption that there’s not much I can improve on. The point is, it’s no use pretending everything’s hunky-dory when there’s so much that can be improved, and no-one’s going to get any closer to that by dropping the ball right now. So cut it out. Get back to it.” (Hey, did you just mumble that last bit out loud?)

“And that leads right to another positive that can be viewed as part-and-parcel of this five-part back-up reserve battery pack. This one is more about having some sort of inspiration, or maybe it’s aspiration, an aim. It’s okay to have determination, get into whatever that’s about, like it was always second nature, and keep focused, but overall there’s got to be a goal worth chasing. And I’m not nominating any nitty-gritty focal points here, which is also kind of the point. Yeah, aspire to a better outcome, but not just regarding specific items. There’s an overall ‘one-size-fits-all’ here. When you condense right down to the pithy middle, all of the above is applicable in whatever situation you find yourself.” You know what? That’s inspired too.

Chapter index and link to slogans

There was a tablespoon lying in the sink of the kitchen at the office where Benny was waiting for a job interview, although he couldn’t have known that as he sat there waiting to be called. He found out that it was there after he asked the person at the front desk if he had time to duck out to buy a bottle of water. It seemed to be a nicely casual workplace, as she said there was no need to go buy some if he didn’t mind water from their tap, and raised an arm in the direction of the open door to the office kitchen to one side, and said there were clean glasses in the cupboard above the sink. She said there probably wasn’t time to go out anyway as he’d be called in very soon.

That seemed a fine option, so he went in and grabbed a glass. Benny had a habit however of letting a tap run just a bit before taking any water, but when he turned on the tap it was a stronger flow than he was used to, and the tablespoon was, as we know, lying there in the middle of the sink.

The stream of water hit the bowl of the spoon full-on and sent a spray of water up and out of the sink. It splashed all over the front of his shirt, soaking most of it, and making him take that classic ‘I’ve just been wet’ stance — hips back, shoulders forward, arms up and out, as if this would somehow help un-wet him. It was a disaster, and had to happen just then, just there.

His initial thought was how to escape. He really didn’t want to ruin his chances just from a stupid incident that wet the whole front of his shirt. But he was trapped. There was no way out of there without going through the reception area again. It was an unforeseen thing that no-one would have expected, and he couldn’t really be prepared for — like he wasn’t going to carry a spare shirt, just in case…

There was nothing to be done. He simply had to deal with circumstances. So Benny stood there a while, shut his eyes, took a big breath, and accepted the facts. ‘Okay, so you’ve got a wet shirt… so what?’, and I whispered a reminder of the runaway shopping trolley, of our Uncle Ted, that seemingly negative things happening don’t always have to mean a disaster. ‘Take it easy, go with the flow, see what happens.’

Coming out of the kitchen, Benny heard his name called and he strode straight in — wet shirt and all. In the end, that unconventional dampness wasn’t so much of an issue. In fact his whole spoon-in-the-sink thing turned into an ice-breaker, and he walked out quite happy with the outcome. Yes, it was an unexpected incident that morning, and gave all the signs of putting him at a disadvantage. But he rode out the situation, took his chances, and was able to coerce the potential disaster into something better. He even got that job, in the end, which we found out later.

So that morning took Benny’s outlook from mildly hopeful, to exasperatingly negative, and then to a more positive acceptance — after he decided to take a viewpoint that rose above mere circumstances.

Walking home from the bus stop could be done via a strip of parkland, which made the walk slightly longer, or the more direct route along the main road and then into Benny’s street. His shirt was dry by now, and after his job interview that morning and its outcome, Benny took the greener way.

It was a long swathe of park in the wider urban space, which he just passed through most of the time, usually going somewhere else. But this time a shoelace came undone — maybe because they were shoes he usually didn’t wear much. So Benny sat down on a park bench to do it up. It was a quiet and mild sunny day, so he actually just sat there for a minute or two after the shoe was tied again, just looking out on the green space, a row of trees at its far edge. Then, looking up, he saw in a tree what seemed at first to be a stub of a branch that had broken off, but that he then saw was a bird sitting there. “An owl of some kind… yeah, a mopoke.” It was so well camouflaged that it was hard to make out, at first glance, but he could plainly see the owl that it was when he stared a while. The bird hardly moved, but quietly perched there, just sitting, looking out at the same scene Benny had just been resting his eyes on. He reached into his pocket for his phone to take a picture, but could tell it would be hard to see much of anything, and didn’t bother. Actually, why not just take the incident for what it was…. just enjoy that.

He did. And sat there for a minute or so longer before going on his way. It was a nice moment, and he found that when crossing the park in the future he would find himself glancing up at the same tree … but the mopoke wasn’t there again from then on.

Before the incidents of that morning, Benny would be more likely to, for example, panic about that wet shirt and scheme how to extract himself from having to deal with the embarrassment. And in the park it would have been more his style, or his until-then style, to put a foot on the bench, do up the shoelace and get along to wherever he was going.

What became crystal clear, eventually, was that the momentum of habit (or you could call it the generally accepted outlook) was not always, or maybe was not ever, the most helpful way of dealing with anything. Of course unthinkingly taking options more likely to be labelled ‘reliable’ probably has something to do with a tendency most people defer to — wanting to operate within familiar reference points. It was not just that this was a safe way of dealing, like a default setting we’re all wired for, but also a huge part of that tendency seems to spring from an innate wanting to belong to the human species.

So, sure. There were these programmed responses, or that toolkit of accepted versions. This was acceptable, most of the time, but even Benny could see that it obviously also paid to keep an open mind. Change and unsettling things are a given; they’re always going to happen, no matter how hard he tried to operate along ‘safe’ guidelines. For me, this witness to his trials, it was good to know that when the left field came at him, Benny at least could take a breath, draw on a little experience, and join these moments with an openness. Okay, so shit happens, but it doesn’t have to add to the chaos, and shit can be repurposed as manure, as fertiliser, to grow that sense of accommodating sanity.

Chapter index and link to slogans

One noiseless Sunday morning Benny had a dream, and it was infuriating. Not because of anything that was particularly annoying about any of the happenings slowly morphing around inside his imagination, but because nothing much went on at all — nothing memorable anyway. It was a funny thing, but while Benny would wake up and more or less forget his dream, because there was nothing much to remember, I knew that the picture show he had played for himself over that lazy waking-up time was really boring… jelly-like, slow and dull. He may as well not have had the dream at all.

When he awoke, late that morning and in a daze, and there was a text message waiting on his phone. Benny didn’t see it until he got up because the phone, which he had bought online, was charging in another room, which is also why he assumed he hadn’t heard the message arrive during the night — the text’s time stamp was for around 1am, so he was glad to have missed it and not been woken up.

“I didn’t really look at the text straightaway because it couldn’t have been that urgent, seeing as it came in hours ago. But the weird thing is, when I got around to reading it, the text was from one of the people I was meant to be meeting at a local coffee shop that morning, and he wanted to change cafes to one that was a couple of doors up because he said the first one had run out of muffins. But how could he have known that from the night before? Then there was the sound of another text arriving asking if I’d got the first one and did I know where to meet them now, so I rang and said yes I knew where to go and I’d got the earlier text, but hadn’t it been sent in the middle of the night? and he said no it was only minutes ago. I guessed I must have the wrong time set on my phone, but when I checked that wasn’t it either. It was a bit confusing. But I thought I was probably still waking up, so headed out.

“As I walked along I couldn’t figure out how my phone, if it was set to the right time, which it was, would display the message as arriving in the middle of the night if it had really only been sent earlier that morning. I re-checked my time setting just to make sure.

“I had more or less put the text timing confusion out of my mind over breakfast, as I was really hanging out for coffee and something to eat. It was when the others started talking about getting in touch with a friend who was overseas, and what time it would be in the country where they were, that an idea sprang on me. Time zones — my phone could be set at a different time zone than for here.

“I checked the settings later in the day. Sure enough, there were a few zones to choose from, and it seemed that while the local time could be displayed and adjusted as usual, there were also zones to choose. As it was, the phone was set on a ‘GMT (UTC)’ of zero. I had to search what the hell that meant, and also found out that where we were was ‘+10’, which was one of the 20 or more choices. Even better, the time zone selection could be set on automatic, which made better sense, and I was surprised the phone didn’t come pre-set that way.

“This reminded me of an old Peanuts comic strip which people resurrected a few years ago to discredit the doomsday nuts who were saying the world was meant to end. Maybe it was the rapture or that Mayan prediction thing. I hadn’t seen the original cartoon, but I was told people here liked it because we got a mention. Apparently Charlie Brown or Peppermint Patty or one of them said the world couldn’t end that night because it was already tomorrow in Australia. It was a good point.

“Anyway it was a relief to sort out the message time stamp thing. Just a minor irritation I know, or it should have been, but the goofed up assumptions that tripped up the start of the day was strangely disorienting. Although it was good to get an answer to the seeming weirdness of having a friend text about muffins running out before they were baked, in the fuzzy theoretical situation my mind played with that morning, mixing international time zones into the solution to that riddle added a strange element. It was almost like too sophisticated an answer… too global, just for a very little local strangeness.”

Benny’s feeling of disorientation, of a disconnect between where his thoughts took him and the prompts that led him there, seemed almost reinforced when he realised that the confusion he experienced was directly contributed to by a perception that was based on extraneous things. It was the way things were set up and established that strained the way his thinking connected the dots, a reliance on arrangements that were meant to help make sense of the here and now that, when you step back and observe, are essentially off somewhere in the left field and seemed foreign to normal everyday life.

“It was like the end-of-the-world dingbats. I’m sure they actually believed the conclusion they came to. I read that some of them apparently even quit their jobs, set up bunkers, settled scores. How the hell could their minds have got to that point, to so believe in a theory that they would change their lives to match what was proven to be in the end just another misguided thought bubble. All that effort and change, all driven along by their empty string of thoughts. It must have seemed to them that lots of things were happening, but really nothing was happening at all.”

If anything, the quiet low-key moment of confusion, and the clarifications that followed, served as a handy reminder for Benny to not fall too readily into his own empty string of thoughts — and a sense of protection settled on our surroundings.

Chapter index and link to slogans

There was one thing that Benny noticed about not being so young anymore, and this was that as time moved along he found it easier to handle annoying or even nasty people. And it wasn’t simply that he developed a thicker skin as the years rolled on, which is probably what he’d say, or something along those lines, were anyone to notice and point this out. If anything (and I knew this to be the case, even if he didn’t), his being able to cope better with difficult people was more aligned to taking an attitude of opening up to others, which he was more frequently compelled to do in certain unguarded moments, rather than shutting them out. This could seem counterintuitive, if laid on the table in open discussion, to think that letting hurtful, complaining, annoying or draining people into his own space could be preferable to keeping them fenced off. But there it was.

It was like — well… Benny probably couldn’t count the number of times he’d travelled home in a daze, only realising this when he got off the bus. Getting to and from the city was more often than not a blurry unmemorable part of the day. But then there was that bus ride home one day when a truck load of pipes tipped off on to the road in front and blocked all the traffic. That day was memorable for a lot of reasons, but the commute itself would have been lost in the general fuzziness were it not for that happening. That bus ride became a part of the whole indelible day, and its interruption, I remember, even provided the conditions to coalesce Benny’s line of thought at that time. At the very least, a noticeable outcome of having these incidents interrupted or disturbed was that they lost an indistinctness they would have otherwise been coated with, inevitably.

With cruddy people, as opposed to ‘things’ or situations, there was certainly more of an effort involved. Whatever shitty mood they were in, or whatever attitude they took, more often required a bit more concentration than simply any natural reaction on Benny’s part. And of course crapful people came and went, and Benny had also fallen into the same expectation as most others — that idiots are always going to turn up, and when they do it’s kind of best to avoid them or keep your exposure and interaction to a minimum.

And yet there was also the factor of indistinctness — which is to say, with the usually pleasant, easy-going, friendly people Benny may have hoped he would be dealing with day to day, it was always an easy task to get along with them, and just have a ‘normal’ not-much-to-comment-on experience. With someone who just rubs you the wrong way, or is downright difficult to get along with, we knew that it might not be pleasant, but they sure stood out in the memory.

It was like a guy who Benny had worked with a couple of years ago, and who had probably been an unspoken factor in his actively looking to change jobs, which he did soon after. Anyway, this was a person who just had one of these grating arrogant attitudes and would always seem to be making judgements or comments or both. There was always some feeling of hostility in Benny when he was around this guy, and overall it wasn’t a pleasant time for him to be in the same place with him for so much of the week. But with a change of workplace (which his verbalised reasoning would say had more to do with improving the pay packet), the drag of having to be prepared to deal with the antagonism faded from his mind, and the ‘usual’ experiences of the workplace flowed along for quite awhile.

And then she turned up. Another new employee started a few months later, and in a short time displayed the same sort of arrogant attitude and annoying almost combative way of occupying both her and everyone else’s space. The same sort of reactions as before started to percolate up for Benny, because (it was plain to me) nothing had been learned. The problem person, and coming to grips with finding out how best to deal with them, was avoided that last time, so Benny had nothing to fall back on this time around.

I mean, he would eventually — he had been through some things, and he listened to quiet inspiration a little better, and he would work things out and be able to deal effectively with this new annoying person. And in a way, she was doing him a favour. Without the difficulty, he would simply ride along and not have to deal with anything much at all — and this was the inspired thought he would be hearing quietly now and then. That whatever is negative or even hurtful provides the ground to really work on getting not just coping skills but his whole approach into a better state.

Benny, or any one of us, could maybe think of looking at difficulties almost with gratitude. Without obstacles in the way, we would never learn how to climb over them. Or it could be seen in another way, and maybe in a personal way — like the quote from someone Benny heard once, that people can be like no-name tea bags and that no-one knows how strong they are until they’re put in hot water.

So whatever the task at hand was, there opened up a way of using that, or dealing with it, in a more helpful way — and in the end it was another example of taking a view, not attempting to make any change to circumstances. In a small way, this approach was illustrated to himself, and hopefully to a work mate of his, when one day Benny was slaving away updating a huge spreadsheet. It was very involved and required getting different data from a lot of sources, and carefully transferring the figures into the assorted cells of a very big and involved spreadsheet.

Someone walked behind him and said ‘god Ben I don’t know how you have the patience’ and Benny just said “ahhhmm, it’s good practice” over his shoulder and kept at it.

‘Good practice? Practice for what?’

“….Patience.”

Chapter index and link to slogans

Waiting for the takeaway coffee he’d ordered at the café near his work, he overheard some people talking at one of the tables behind him about a recent incident that he’d also been hearing a lot about lately.

“There was a thing in the news just the other day about someone in the US who let another person into the queue in front of them when buying a lottery ticket, which must have been one of those random number picks. Anyway the person who was let in ended up with the winning ticket and got a squadrillion dollars or some ridiculous amount. It apparently really happened, and wasn’t just one of those urban myth type stories that gets dragged out now and then, which is what I first thought, but it was on the news and in the papers the next day, although I didn’t see it. It became a bit of a hot topic.

“A lot of the talk was of course about how unfair it was, and that’s what the conversation behind me was all about. People said the winner should have handed at least something over to the person who let them in, with others even saying they had some sort of right to a share and would be justified if they ‘went over there’ and demanded some money.

“I don’t even know how anyone would have known who bought what ticket, unless the loser recognised the winner from a photo after they won, and assuming they would still remember what the person they let in the queue looked like. But then, how could they prove that they had really let the winner into the queue, and that the whole scenario really happened? There was a lot of talk about should they have let the other person in, or shouldn’t they, or how something or other really sucked about it.”

Benny’s thoughts were interrupted when his coffee was ready. ‘Flat white for Ben’ the guy called, and he stepped up to the counter to get it but had to put the change he’d been holding in his hand into his pocket to be able to grab the takeaway cup. A quick look — “year before last… that’s when I started this job”, and into the street.

“But I got to thinking what if the two people’s positions in the queue were swapped … there wouldn’t have been any guarantee about which ticket would win and which one wouldn’t, or if any one of them would. There was no way to know anything really — but a lot of people seemed to get worked up about it all, or at least about what they seemed to take as the main sticking points. Essentially these seemed to be something along the lines of ‘what I would do if it were me’ variety, and every scenario seemed to hinge on the fairness or unfairness of something that no-one had control of. I mean, how can blame or accusation hang on a random coincidence that no-one at the time would know the outcome of anyway?”

And so Benny’s thinking was taking a general direction that could be given a gentle urge along, could lead him to infer a view that would be more helpful in the long run than latching on to that habit of making any first response be a ‘not my fault’ reaction — that sort of self-protection that fends off perceived negativities by distancing oneself from any association or identification, to readily seek out and blame external factors.

And it’s easier to do that. We want to be justified. We want to be able to explain what happened, and how there’s nothing in it that should stick to us, or be seen by others as having happened because of anything that we’ve done. And to Benny it seemed close to being able to be expressed on the same breath as a runaway shopping trolley… which in that case was an instance (the new mark on his car) that was aching for a chance to point a finger, but for the fact that there wasn’t a target.

So here again there lay a half-formed thought (that, as I say, needed a little kick-along), another side to the same coin of needing an excuse, a justification. And the thought that was simmering slowly on the back burner was along the lines of how the fall-back ‘it’s not my fault’ can end up being less effective than one imagines to deflect blame, relieve tension or aggression or the pressure from imagining oneself perceived to be ‘not up to scratch’.

And then came an incident to seemingly give Benny a chance to allow action to colour between the lines of his thinking. On the next corner waiting at the red light to cross the street he took a spot next to another on-the-way-to-work person who also carried a takeaway coffee, but she took the lid off as they were waiting so as to take a sip or two. It was a blustery autumn day and had been raining earlier. Benny took a step back away from a small puddle on the road in front of him to avoid a possible splash from an approaching car tyre (it didn’t happen) at the same time as another gust blew along the street, picking up leaves and grime with it. The trouble was, Benny’s body had obviously been acting as a bit of a windbreaker, and must have sheltered the coffee sipper temporarily. With the latest gust, her now unshielded cup got a sprinkling of street grit across the top.

It all seemed quite choreographed, but of course just came together in a random way. The holder of the ruined coffee let out a quiet ‘arrh!’ and half looked towards Benny, or maybe towards where the wind came from, with an ‘oh no’ expression frozen on her face. Of course we sympathised, but without prompting and all on his own mettle Benny’s musings led him to venture the comment “I think maybe I did that.” For the immediate group around them, any guardedness (which people can walk around with like a shell) fell right away — “Hah, yeah… what? No,” she squinted and, holding her cup by the top edge, turned towards a rubbish bin as the pedestrian light went green.

Sitting at his desk later, Benny had the impression that he had just experienced a good morning. He now felt more certain that situations can be made lighter from someone stepping up, to take responsibility in a small way, or at least showing that there’s really no one to blame. Like that morning, for example, when the web connection went down. Being in a good mood, he saw a joke in the disconnection and said loudly “Sorry everyone, I kicked out the power under my desk, I must have unplugged the internet. Sorry.” It was another instance of him getting an amused murmur.

Chapter index and link to slogans

An unfortunate feature of the open-air car park at Benny’s local shopping centre was that it had a gradient in one area. Not exactly a hill, or the sort of slope that made it harder to walk up, but enough to mean that pushing a shopping trolley was made a little more challenging — not only did he have to contend with erratic directional pulls from at times dodgy wheels, but may also have to make allowances for the added difficulty, depending on where he had to leave the car, of parking bays that ran side-on to the gradient. Directing a heavy full trolley between two rows of parked cars that ran side-on to the natural pull of gravity was especially difficult.

In this particular area of the shopping centre car park, it was not unheard of for a trolley to occasionally roll away if left unattended. Any such escape was usually fairly leisurely, as the slope was gentle, but it could be interesting from a directional point of view due to the rough mechanics of those wheels. There was more chance of a runaway cart if the last user didn’t bother to return the thing to one of those trolley bays, but had just abandoned it somewhere. And this was exactly what happened one day when Benny was sitting in his car, after he returned the trolley he’d been using and having just sat in the driver seat. Before he had even reached back for the seatbelt, a clang and a bump to one the back panels of his car had him flinging open the car door and jumping out, ready to confront whoever had dinged into his car.

But there was no-one to shout out to, and nobody to be annoyed with. Just a loose shopping trolley, now resting against the car, right next to a small but visible mark. Benny looked around, but there wasn’t even anyone close enough to hear his “What…?!” or be able to share a this-really-sucks shake of the head. There was no-one to blame, and not a thing to be done about it, and his sudden flash of being riled kind of petered out into nothing, because there was no-one to direct it at.

His mood was lightened slightly by another trolley slowly trundling past, on its way to bump into a small tree at the end of the row. So it wasn’t a personal attack. It was just one of those mishaps that happens — a shopping trolley made a break for it, and he just happened to be parked in the wrong place.

And seeing that next runaway trolley made Benny realise another thing. He obviously wouldn’t have been the first person to have their car bumped into in this way. Someone else must have had that same angry flash. And who knows, maybe they could have even falsely blamed another shopper who was nearby for letting their trolley get loose. It could happen. And it could so obviously turn into one of those misdirected reactions he’d seen before, an anger or aggression that in this case, with no-one to blame, would be simply pointless, but that would have already needlessly become an unsettling twist in an otherwise uncomplicated calm day.

But the noteworthy outcome, Benny realised, was his acceptance. Yes, a crap thing happened and his car now had a new mark on it, and he would have been very happy if it didn’t. But then again, if the trolley had been safely stacked in its bay and the calm day sailed on uninterrupted, Benny would not have had this moment of knowing that he could actually handle adverse occurrences quite well. He felt a growing sense of both practicality and resourcefulness, but knew that in this instance this positive approach was not manifest in what would generally be seen as a usual way (and I had not whispered a word, honest).

Benny sat in the driver seat and got to thinking about another instance of damaged property, a favourite uncle he had long ago, and a pragmatic approach to a problem that was still fixed in his memory. His dad’s much older brother, who had since passed away, had always seemed to like his nephew, and when Benny was a kid he let him ‘help’ do things all the time. “Uncle Ted was a great guy. He knew what to do when it came to the practical stuff, like building things or fixing plumbing. So this one time we had a delivery of something or other, I actually can’t remember what it was, but what I do remember is that the back edge of the truck clipped our house and took a chunk of wood out of the weatherboards, or the corner bit of the house anyway. It wasn’t a huge piece, but it wasn’t tiny either, and I guess my parents thought it couldn’t be ignored.

“So Uncle Ted was called on to come over and fill in where the truck ‘took a bite out of the house’ (that’s what he said it looked like), and I was hanging around like I always did. Uncle Ted had some two-part filler gunk that would ‘do the trick’, and he let me help. ‘Mix this together for me Benny, like it says on the back of the tin,’ he said, and left me to it while he got the ladder and tidied up some bits and pieces.

“I guess I would have been about 12 or something like that, and really glad to be helping, and I probably wasn’t listening to the last bit of what Uncle Ted just said. I was probably rushing it too and not really thinking. Anyway I just ended up putting a scoop of the gunk into a container and squeezed some of the hardener into it and stirred — but then stirred in more because I wanted it to be a darker pink. Uncle Ted came back a few minutes later, saw what was happening, and quickly put the ladder against the house, climbed up and tried to smooth some of the mixture into the hole, but by then the gunk had turned into something like dried out peanut butter. He tried to force a lump of it into the damaged hole but it wouldn’t stay there, and pretty soon it had hardened so much that the stirrer was stuck upright in the middle of what was now like a round piece of plaster cast.

“I had pretty much guessed that I had made a mess of it somehow, and was getting concerned about what sort of trouble I’d be in — from my parents, not from Uncle Ted. He was grinning, holding the handle of the stirrer with the hard lump of filler hanging from it, swinging it around. ‘You didn’t read the back of the can, did you Benny!’ And then I must have looked a bit worried. ‘Look, don’t worry about it. I’m always buying this stuff. I’ll just come back with more next time. The hole in the wall’s not going anywhere. Hey I’ll even get you to mix it again for me, but this time….’ and he shook a finger at me, but it was in a joking way.

“So the corner of the house wasn’t fixed that day, and stayed damaged for a few more days just to remind me. Later on, before Uncle Ted left, I said I was sorry I’d messed up mixing his filler. But he just said: ‘Listen, forget the mistake, but don’t forget what it taught you.’

“So that was my lesson from that time way back then, which I still remember and I was reminded of it again today. Yeah some bad things can happen, but it doesn’t always have to mean a disaster.”

Benny suspected that he knew this all along, and that in the back of his mind, right here, he would have known that the secret to being able to ride over any setbacks that are thrown our way has more to do with correcting an attitude than constructing some sort of justification. This was something he would try to remind himself about. And so would I.

Chapter index and link to slogans