“I was roped in with a group of us to help out a friend and fix up a room, which was part of a bigger house renovation. There was no way of knowing at the time when I wrote it in the calendar, but this home improvement working bee ended up coming at the end of some very busy few days for me — one of those pointless hustley and busy times where everything seems to need to get done all at once.

“Although that’s not all that unusual, is it? Isn’t there seemingly always an endless stream of things to do or things to get done? Some days it just doesn’t seem to stop. But everyone knows hectic times can and do just happen, and it can be the busyness that we don’t necessarily think about too deeply that can fill the day — what with having to top up supplies with one thing or another, getting low on petrol, bills that are close to being overdue, even cleaning the odd thing here and there, dishes, clothes, yourself. And there can be the jobs that weren’t ticked off the list the day before, so they just bunch up into the next day as you try to catch up. It can be tiring. And it can be a headache.

“Anyway, that’s the flustery place I had just come out of when I turned up to help that day, and it was sort of a relief to know that there was just one duty to get on with for a few hours. I was given the job of peeling off layers of old wallpaper to prepare the plaster for patching up, if it needed any, and then painting — no more paper for these walls, was the plan. It was easy to do, and I don’t know if that was because it was an old sort of wallpaper or if it just hadn’t been put on properly. Mostly I just had to mop water all over the wall with a wet sponge and keep it wet for a while, and it wouldn’t take long before the first layer of paper just lifted up with a scraper — or even just my fingers if I kept it really wet for longer.

“I say the first layer, because once that ugly green and brown autumn leaf motif lifted off there was a second layer of another sort of dated patterned wallpaper… and as the wetting and peeling process continued on, it showed that there were more layers to get through, which probably represented years or maybe even decades of repeated wallpapering. Soon there were about five layers exposed, but I guess each could have been up for years at a time.

“I could have dug in a little with the scraper and tried to get to the base layer, wherever that was, so I could get all of the old paper off and have done with it — and that’s just what I would do soon enough. But actually just for then it was intriguing to try to have a peek at the old fashioned wallpaper patterns that were being revealed, one under the other. I wasn’t going to carefully peel away at the whole roomful of old wallpaper, but just this first area, and just to have a look at how people’s ideas of what they thought looked good on a wall had changed over the time this room had been occupied. At the time I started out peeling back the layers carefully, I was sort of hoping to find a really kitsch wallpaper pattern under there… you never knew.”

Benny had the playful thought of finding wallpaper with, say, 1950s style spaceships or maybe cowboys, and that he could have cut a rectangular shape of it to leave stuck on the wall so that, he imagined, an empty picture frame could be hung over it. It was a humorous whimsy, and would have been cute, he thought, if the person who had the room was on board, but he had no such luck with the patterns he found.

“It was a very old house, so it was interesting too to think that over the years there would have been a lot of different people occupying this space, living with these different patterns on their walls, maybe the same wallpaper for a few rotations of occupants, until someone else’s urge to redecorate took hold or a new owner came along and the next layer of wallpaper went up. All those past lives and the living days that went on in this house weren’t something that I would normally think of if this was just a room that someone I knew lived in right now, even if it was a bit rundown and had that ‘lived in’ look. But somehow these layers of wallpaper that were being revealed were more obvious evidence that people existed here, had good times or stressful times and just lived their lives and probably felt ‘at home’ and safe right in this same room.

“I bet they had some hectic busy days too, like I’d just been through, full of ordinary hassles or maybe something more serious, a busy time that just buzzed along for them, keeping up with one thing or another from morning until night. Just ordinary things, but they can take up so much of someone’s time.”

A mug of tea was brought in and the progress he’d made so far admired. Then Benny sat down and had a break, looking at the area of wall he’d been working on and the layers of different wallpapers he’d so far exposed. Sitting there quietly, his train of thought couldn’t help but blend those notions of bustley existence with the evidence laid bare on the wall — that past and unknown people had lived their busy lives and fretted about their own problems, had to go to the shops, ran out of petrol, missed paying a bill… and that now it mattered not one little bit. These old wallpapers had witnessed times that were full of busyness in their own way no doubt, but that was all forgotten now, and could be peeled off and swept up.

Benny would much prefer to keep the frame of mind he sat with now — tea in hand, and helping out a friend — just taking in the moment, rather than with that running-around head he’d been saddled with lately … I knew we could both benefit from that. In fact, it wouldn’t hurt for Benny to remember what had been shown to him in that room today, to remember this the next time he started to get that frantic feeling on future hectic days… and this was that those times that are filled with a never ending string of demands that he has been lost in before needed to be approached with more of a ‘tea in hand, helping a friend’ attitude.

The things we have to do and the obligations we need to face are naturally always there; they’re not going to go away. But if Benny could face all the usual and everyday activity that naturally makes up the day-to-day with that one intention — to take on that attitude — then no matter what came along, it wouldn’t sweep up his attention and mix that up with its own clutter. This could be a worthwhile goal to keep in focus.

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It was on one of the occasional trips Benny made to his old neighbourhood that he met by chance someone who always seemed to be around when he was growing up (they both went to the same primary and secondary schools) and who Benny hadn’t seen for years. It was pure coincidence that he ran into Gil Sharden like that, seeing as Benny didn’t make his way to that area so much now and Gil had moved interstate a long time ago and was only back for a family event. But he looked much the same as he did way back then, older of course but still recognisable — and still a bit of a dork, thought Benny. It was irritating to hear that from in here, and I thought it was slightly lame of Benny to so easily fall back on an old habit of judging so easily and unfairly.

They got to chatting about this and that, mainly of course about what had passed in the intervening years (and it was funny to hear someone today still call him Benny, not Ben, but that’s how long ago it had been since these two first met). But while they talked, percolating up from some hidden vault, a memory of ours was prodded to wake up and make itself known again.

The details seemed tedious now, but there was a girl involved, a funding shortfall on Gil’s part and an incidental pimple outbreak, but the essential part had to do with some hard luck that came Gil’s way and how that played into Benny’s hand and made his situation better at that particular time, but to Gil’s disadvantage. Benny wouldn’t have admitted this part, but I knew that at that time he was very glad the circumstances played out the way they did, which left him landing on his feet while Gil got the raw deal from it all. The dork and knucklehead label that shadowed Gil in those long-ago days played right into the younger Benny’s ability to so easily overlook that it was someone else’s hard luck that was the only reason for his coming out on top.

Now, all these years later, with the girl and the circumstances forgotten, talking to the grown-up Gil there in front of us — he was a chef now and stood relaxed but assertive — the stirred remembrance could so easily have become an awkwardness, especially given the other triggered memory in here … that Benny had even secretly hoped that something like that would happen. Add the long and positive evolutionary roads each of these people had taken since, and the exploitative nature of that initial hoping and the eventual nothing outcomes, and this had Benny almost feeling an eyes-down embarrassment (figuratively speaking… he didn’t, but felt the urge). The ‘win’ from those days was revealed as limp and flimsy, based as it was on someone else’s loss. Benny would have to take off those blinkers and be wary to watch for when similar circumstances arose. I’d try to make the point too when I could, and perhaps whenever I felt this chest start to puff up it would pay me to check that there wasn’t a ‘Gil Sharden’ moment evident.

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“I’d decided somewhere along the way that rather than avoiding difficult people or situations, sometimes it can be better in the long run to face these things head on. I mean, not confrontationally, but not to avoid, as your default reaction, anyone or anything that gives the impression of being a bit of a bother. And the main reason isn’t like standing your ground or anything… it’s more that the annoying things can do you a favour of sorts just through being so annoying, because the next time those bothery bits happens you’ll be just that little bit more prepared. I mean, people, or just things, are always going to come along to upset whatever peaceful moments you might find yourself in sometimes, and I reckon that finding those moments is going to happen less and less if you let people or situations get to you, or if you view it all from the safety of having your head in the sand.

“It’s all got to do with getting a bit more patience together for yourself, to fall back on. There’ve been people that I’ve come across, where there isn’t really a choice, like at a job or in all sorts of situations really, who just need that bit more patience to deal with than others. And I think I’ve been able to get that together over time, although I know people can be difficult to deal with depending on what they’re thinking. But as far as circumstances that aren’t ideal, I’m pretty sure that I could keep my cool under most circumstances. I think that’s one virtue I can notch up, not that I’d want to brag about it.”

No, you wouldn’t want to skite about that too much Benny, because I recall once when you valued this part of your achievements to the detriment of good sense, and your own physical comfort. The particulars at this point are not all that relevant, but there were tickets that were bought and the event was marked (on the wrong day) on the calendar. Come the assumed correct night, there was Benny waiting outside, and waiting and waiting — long after another person would have got to thinking that something was not right about all that waiting. But it was his precious ‘patience’ at work you see, that virtue he was just a little superior about.

And all he had to do was to look at that ticket he had in his pocket and it would have all been cleared up. But no, Benny fell right back on what he thought he had as an advantage over a lot of people, and that perceived virtue of patience become a sort of weirdness for him on that night. The effects of a simple mistake were dragged out and turned into a bigger deal for him than it should have been, simply through the course of an otherwise positive characteristic being changed into a negative by some basic preciousness. He finally realised, but I know Benny must have already started to join the dots as he ended up not telling anyone, and just turned up on the correct night as he would have done otherwise — except that it’s been exposed now, within this exclusive club in here, as I wanted to make sure Benny made the connection.

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Coffees were ordered and his friend asked for directions to the toilets and headed for them with a purposeful step while Benny found a couple of seats, and was just sitting there looking at the small pile of change he put down on the table when the coffees and the companion arrived simultaneously.

Benny had been picking up each coin, rotating each as necessary and squinting to see the year stamped on the heads side (the light wasn’t great in the café). It was an occasional tendency that I’ve mentioned before, and that he sometimes rediscovered in quiet moments, an inclination that developed in a casual sort of way over time to connect one of the revealed years with a remembered moment. There was never an assurance that the back of a coin would jog a memory, significant or otherwise, and of course Benny couldn’t always tie a particular year to a particular moment of his life.

‘Lost your lucky dollar Ben?’ “Oh no, just… nah,” and he slid them into a hand and put them away — but at the same time was honest enough with me to admit, without really forming the thought, that there had been some toying with the possibility of opening up right then about this year-on-the-coin quirk of his. It wasn’t lost on Benny that this could seem an interesting or intriguing idea to someone else, and not be viewed as strange or obsessive as he had feared in earlier times.

It could all depend on the person, and if they seemed attuned to what could be unearthed from this incidents-recalled pastime. The tingle that lightly brushed the edge of his mind was that they might appreciate the thought — he knew from his own experience that lost memories can be rediscovered, although sometimes these could have been forgotten for a reason. Still, it’s an idea they might like, a tip they could try, it could be doing them a favour…

But Benny kept all this to himself (and yes, I was grumbling from the back room). The motivation wasn’t to do anybody any favours… except maybe himself… as there was also the hidden motivation of maybe finding some kudos from his little trick. This may seem like a very small way to chase up some points, but there it was. There was a bit of a twist in his logic that seemed to come from somewhere near the ‘ulterior’ neighbourhood, and I’m glad he had picked up on that just enough to hold back a little. He knew himself that there would have been just a touch of sneakily looking for recognition.

Later I would try to remind our boy about a passage in a book he admired years ago that struck a chord in his mind at the time, but the echo since had trailed off to silence. This touched on people, especially those in the public eye, who eventually admit to making a mistake and come clean about something, whose confessions always seemed to ‘stink a little bit of the writer’s pride in having given up his pride’. That had made sense to Benny, and the general thrust would have stuck just as well today.

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Benny had a minor win while waiting to be served at a bakery one Saturday morning. There was a small family-owned shop, not one of those bakery chains, not far from his place that in Benny’s opinion, and in the opinion of a lot of other customers apparently, had the best cinnamon buns —they were bigger than usual, lots of glazing, and the sultanas seemed to be softer and juicier than the usual offerings. He was on his way to someone’s place and thought he’d bring along a contribution, and a half dozen of the big tempting buns seemed like a good choice — if he could get some… they were popular and ran out fast.

When he walked in there were people waiting in something that resembled a queue, or it was really a bunch, shifting their weight and craning to see behind the counter area — as for the order of being served, usually the customers were polite about who was next and the people behind the counter seemed to have a good idea of that anyway. But Benny himself wasn’t too worried about any of that today, and took a calm view about his intended purchase… there were other things he could get anyway… which was just as well as this time there seemed to be a slight apprehension in the rest of the bunch about being served — not exactly feeling like the prelude to a scramble, he thought, but a mild anxiousness — which Benny guessed was probably due to there being only one tray of those famous buns in the rack behind the serving counter, and it was thinning out fast.

He would have been next, so when an older shopper, who Benny knew came in right behind him, deftly fronted up to the counter and asked for all of the last few buns, Benny thought he had unfairly missed out. He could have said something, but just then out from the back of the bakery came the old man himself, carrying a big tray of just-freshly baked buns, wafting a cinnamon ambience into the serving area that brought almost audible relief to the other hopeful bun buyers. So Benny got six, and they were still warm and fragrant. The pushy shopper put her paper bag of presumably cooled buns into the plastic shopping bag hanging from her hand and walked out, but Benny carried his brown bag of buns flat on one hand, enjoying their fresh warmth on his palm through the brown paper and tickled that he didn’t rush this time.

Okay, so it wasn’t a high-five, dance on the spot, victory for the little guy sort of moment… but the takeaway message for Benny, were he to put this tickle into words, would have come from the admittedly coincidental confirmation it represented of the calm attitude he walked in with. He may yet need intermittent reminding, but for now at least he had evidence that the otherwise generally-accepted strong point of being focused and keen to get an end result or goal may not necessarily be such a strong point after all.

And this wasn’t just about buns of course. Benny could benefit from taking on the view that the race to win, the push for a payoff of some sort, to get ahead of the pack, as it were, could also just of itself take the shine off that beacon in the distance. And he would be reminded of this through various circumstances, some occasionally extraordinary, but most of them mundane.

One reminder came about through Benny’s making an effort to learn another language with a friend, which they did with a vague idea of heading off on an overseas adventure if they could scrape together the funds. There were structured lessons for them to work through, learning vocabulary, different verbs and how these are changed with tense (and this language also sometimes had formal and informal variants), and other grammatical necessities.

It was Benny’s tendency to charge ahead and learn by rote whatever he could from each section of the lessons, but his language buddy took the time to get to know more of the details, the tenses, and try to get a deeper familiarity, even of the more nuanced usages, before moving on. It didn’t take long before Benny realised that by racing ahead he just ended up with a ‘word salad’ but not much of a useful grasp of anything that could be helpful for really communicating. His co-learner soon became the obvious choice for future chief translator, and Benny had to go back over several chapters of their book to try to catch up. So here was another example — that in trying to be the fastest, Benny just ended up being left behind.

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“Years ago I had a friend who just couldn’t take it any more. We were all quite young really, not all that long out of high school, so really who of us at that time knew anything much at all? Later he was going through some tough times in his life, and it wasn’t all that long since his parents had split-up, so Mike had just been through that and the pressure of finishing high school (I used to ride to school with him on the bus), and you know how some people have a harder time at that, well Mike was one of them. Also his dad really put some hard expectations on him, a really ignorant old-school ‘toughen-up’ type attitude. We all noticed, and when the topic came up we all kind of thought it was the dad’s putting his own shitty life dealings, which were all his own doing as far as we could tell, on to Mike.

“And there was that whole young-and-on-his-own insecurity thing going on with Mike, and at that stage of things I suppose we were all going through this to some degree… but Mike got the short straw with all that. It was so obvious that he was at a loss and not really doing fine, and he was smoking a lot of dope then too. He was the only one of our group who really got into that.

“It seemed like Mike was trapped. He really didn’t have the capacity, couldn’t shoulder all of the extra weight that was being dished out. And this from people who should know better, who should care and worry and take steps to do what they can to make it easier…. not make it harder.

“No one really expected that his mental health would crack like that. But I suppose being loaded up with the extra crap from everything else wouldn’t have helped. And maybe I shouldn’t say crack, because he seemed to slide into that state, like it was too steep, and gravelly, to hold on. Mike lost it and ended up at a psych hospital. I’m not even sure how he got there. I went in once and his younger brother was there, and I remember him sitting there complaining to Mike about how their mum was treating him… like Mike could deal with his problems. The brother was talking like they were still at home and the parents might be able to be reasoned with — he was so oblivious.

“Now, looking back, it seemed that we were actually no help. Mike’s family, his friends, us, we must have been so inept and stupid about what was needed, about how we could have helped. We just didn’t know, we were all so thick. It would be easy to lay the blame for his ending it all like that on Mike’s state of mind, but then again how did that come to be… there’s a cause and effect thing happening too, isn’t there? Even at the time, and especially just after what he did, which would haunt us forever, I know that a few people had the dilemma to grapple with about what to do or not do, and all that amounted to was a whole lot of inaction. Someone, or all of us, or me, should have stepped up. But no one did. I used to ride to school with Mike on the bus. Now it was like I kept going, but he got off. I think afterwards there was a lot of passing the buck around.”

Ever since, or at least when Benny was of a mind to remember his friend Michael’s predicament and the conditions the preceded his suicide, Benny recognised that there could definitely be an unevenness of distribution of responsibilities, or duties, or expectations — and that with the people he knew out there, not every set of shoulders is built to take the same weight. Offloading a burden on to someone else may not always be a solution — this was something to remember. And I hoped Benny would remember too that he was also one of the ‘people’ I’m talking about, and that an eye needs to be kept on how wide or otherwise his own shoulders are too.

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Every now and then a couple of friends of Benny’s would take a drive out to a farmers’ market, with one of their favourites being held on the first Sunday of each month, about an hour away, and they would rope in whoever was willing to join the adventure and make a day of it. Benny was glad to tag along now and then, and usually came home with some produce or some other bargain. And it was there, while walking by the open window of a ute with the sound of corny music streaming out of it, that Benny’s remembrance sprang back to thoughts of his childhood dog Milo. He didn’t know the song, but the lyrics he could make out in the time it took to walk alongside the car were ‘…let me be the kind of person my dog thinks I am…’.

The happy thought that flowed from those words was of the goofy dog that dagged around with him as a kid. Benny’s mental picture of Milo was one of him typically panting and grinning at the same time, and now, to this older Benny, those song lyrics added something more to the memory of his old buddy — always up for anything, any time, and whatever they did could never be anything but the best decision yet.

“It’s like old Milo only really had one way to focus on the world, which was that there were only good things going on around him, because anything that we used to do was A-OK by him. He was like that. When I was younger I probably didn’t think about this too much, but I’m sure I couldn’t have done a thing wrong as far as he was concerned — or I suppose that’s what I’d like to think. Maybe we all like to imagine that our dumb mutts think we’re the best; I suppose that’s what the song’s all about.”

Benny knew this line of thinking started with a memory of a dog, but still, to think that it is possible to be blind to anything negative was a new, or perhaps a re-visited, concept for him — and he tried to picture what humans would be like with that frame of mind. But it wasn’t long before he dropped the effort, as Benny thought it would probably be obvious to anyone, himself included, that people had a more judgemental attitude to those around them, and did not generally take up the open candour of the artless Milo.

I wanted to make sure that Benny followed the quality of his inklings… and that the default alternative that this human’s assumptions would be left with did not simply coalesce on the other end of the scale, and become a blindness to all positives. But it was clear that he was aware of all this, that it is all too easy to see the things that can be criticised in anyone, and too often criticism of others is used to shore up a person’s own feelings of being better. There’s even that deluded sense of ‘doing a favour’ for someone by pointing out where they are wrong, or how what they’ve been doing is a mistake. It was clear his scale hadn’t tipped that far, as I say, because of where today’s musical prompt took his mental meanderings.

Benny thought that really there was room to take some clue from Milo the dog. Fault finding or keeping an eye out for someone’s vulnerable points can be a painful mission, and he had the feeling somehow that with that sort of focus you couldn’t ignore that there wasn’t some two-way traffic involved — like a thief being suspicious and worrying his things will be stolen, because that’s the way he thinks himself. And no, we don’t have to stand there panting and grinning … but I hoped Benny would also think about the balancing benefit if he could, in a level-headed way and to quote another very old song, ‘accentuate the positive’. Good boy.

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“You remember that I mentioned my Uncle Ted from a long time back? He was one of the better people to be in our lives back then. Well I had other older relatives of course, back when I was younger, and one on my mum’s side, my grandma’s younger sister, came down our way for a visit occasionally. Great aunt Esme was okay most of the time, but she had an occasional habit, or I suppose it was more of an irregular obsession, of raking over some bad incident from years or decades ago, sometimes from a time that seemed historical to me, where she’d been wronged somehow. It could be anything, maybe something a sister did (or maybe didn’t do), but she could sure hang on to a grudge, given that it could be an insult or something else that happened so long ago.

“Old Esme could be a bit of a whinger, and I remember my parents talking about that sometimes after one of her visits — and she made the occasional visit probably until my early 20s. I remember having the impression in later times that she must have been very good at hanging on to an insult, or whatever it was that irked her from the past. It seemed like it was the result of solid practice… in the way that everyone seems to be able to improve a skill by practicing it. Great aunt Esme had mulled over how she had been wronged so often that she had really become an expert at it, very proficient — dwelling on what hurt her feelings in the past made her get very good at dwelling on what hurt her feelings in the past.

“But later, when I looked back and thought about this part of her personality, all she was doing back then was keeping a negative feeling alive by feeding it through constant remembering. And in her case she could be still ticked off by something that went awry, in her mind, way back in time. And this was the more surprising thing about it all. It wasn’t that anyone thought an old lady, or a younger person as she would have been, could not be hurt by someone or some event… but those insults or grievances tend to fade over time, don’t they, or they’re meant to… unless they’re given regular resuscitation and are turned into solid-gold grudges.

“And that these grudges were kept alive for so long, in her case, meant that if there was someone she could have sorted it all out with, they would more than likely not be around any longer to be able to talk to. I remember mum said something like this, as one of the favourite gripes her aunt had was about a wedding and someone not being invited, or something like that… anyway, the point was that Esme had survived most of her generation, and now had no-one around who might have known the details to have it out with.

“It’s funny and sad that we can do that. We can hang on to a hurt, waiting I suppose for the chance to right that wrong. Or probably hoping we’d get an opportunity to get back at the person who was to blame. I can’t imagine waiting for years to do that, thinking all the time, even occasionally, that there’ll eventually be some vindication or ‘win’. Or thinking there’ll be a chance to spring one of those ‘ah hah, I knew it!’ justification moments on whoever wronged you somehow in the past, like you were waiting to ambush them with it. That just seemed useless to me now that I think about it.”

Yes, Benny nailed it. How much this would stay with him was yet to be proven, but for now this was the conclusion he’d drawn from relevancies and intuitions around him — that forgiveness isn’t letting the other person off the hook, it’s letting your own person off the hook, so that you’re able to be free of the grudge and walk around a little lighter in your step. Simply, let the hurt go.

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I’ll tell you about a little fact that has become obvious in here, and that’s how Benny frequently seems to pick up on tiny inner secondary intuitions, however vaguely resonant these may be with what he’ll be dealing with outwardly. And if this is the case he’ll either openly run with them as his own inspirations or put them aside as his own passing thought to come back to later. One case in point was the aggravating co-worker mentioned above.

It would have been easy for Benny to react to this guy, and have something to say about his grating ways or in answer to the attitude. That would have been Benny’s fall-to reaction were it not for a certain ‘undercurrent’ feeling he had that it was better to not do that. And I’m glad he picked up on this. Putting someone down or otherwise maligning them, even if they had kicked-off the bout of aggressiveness, rarely goes towards having any influence on seeing the negativity disappear — and I think he realised this, along with the other side to the same coin… that much of the time, if someone gossips about or disparages someone else it is done so that the critic, that is themselves, can be imagined in a better light.

His knack of picking up on the subtle inner signals had also become a little more reliable lately, which can only be a good thing.

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“I was window shopping online, just having a look around at the time of year when the temperature outside was getting cooler, so I was cruising some sites for something to put a warmer layer between me and the weather when I came across a sort of orangey-dark tan showerproof jacket, which was nicely longer than usual. They called the colour ‘tobacco’. Anyway, I clicked the ‘add to cart’ button so I could go back to it if I wanted, and then moved on to cruising around again. But it wasn’t long before I had second thoughts (it wasn’t that much of a bargain) so I shut the computer and dropped the idea for now.

“Later when I went back to check up on something else, I noticed that a new window was opened behind the main one — like a pop-up ad, but I’ve heard these called ‘pop-under’ — asking if I’d like to continue and ‘complete your purchase’. That kind of annoyed me, as I’d more or less moved on from the idea by then, and obviously the clothing website had this sort of reminder tool built in for people just like me — shown some interest but hadn’t followed up. I know I shouldn’t have been annoyed… I mean they wanted to make a sale and this pop-under reminder to go ahead and spend the money was just part of that. I think the annoyance came more from being lumped in with everyone else who didn’t buy their stuff, and that their view seemed to be that people were so programmed and predictable that this would be all it took to seal the deal.

“And it made me wonder just how programmed we all are, and how consistent are people’s reactions… do we really keep doing the same thing under the same circumstances, time and again? I mean it’s okay to have some consistency, in the way that can be viewed as making you ‘reliable’, but there’s got to be room to at least consider that there’s an alternative, rather than just to keep repeating what’s been done before. Maybe that’s how dumb predictability comes about, and this just makes manipulation easier.

“It reminded me of that famous experiment with little kids, where they were given a marshmallow or chocolate or something and left in a room and were told that they could eat it now, and that would be that, but if they didn’t eat it straight away and waited until the guy came back into the room they’d be given another one. As was probably expected, a lot of them ate it as soon as the door closed, but some didn’t. And I think the conclusion from follow-up studies was that the kids who could delay the reward so they got a better deal later grew up to have better outcomes.

“Anyway, my point is that there’s probably nothing to lose from interrupting our usual way of latching on to a viewpoint, and to at least make space for not-so-automatic reactions. Taking a different approach can work, and I’ve seen it before. Even taking a different way to get home from the bus stop can open another sort of experience that wouldn’t have happened with the tried and usual — like the time I saw that owl in the park. I remember there was a time when I tried threading my belt the other way — you know, starting from the right side belt loop instead of the left — because I’d read the idea in a book or somewhere that this sort of action can help take your thinking away from the boring usual. It sounds like a really minor thing, but the truth is just this little re-adjustment can wake you up a little bit more, like maybe in the dull-minded mornings, but anytime really… if you remember to do it.”

Benny had forgotten about a time when he had ‘changed lanes’, as far as an expected reaction would be concerned, while working a summer job when he was a student. It was an early sign of having a basic intuition about what he was just now ambling through. That time it concerned someone else at the workplace who was just giving him a hard time, being very critical and outwardly antagonistic. But Benny didn’t take the bait. He just kept his cool and took an even-handed approach. He knew, in a vague and subtle sort of way (yes), that it was a temporary situation — but it wasn’t just that, or that he couldn’t be bothered. That time rather, Benny’s reaction was one instigated through his taking a contrary attitude to what would have been expected under those circumstances. He stopped, stepped back a little, and just declined to get swept along.

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