Benny being lost in the hot and cold of reactions reminded us of the very very pivotal importance of his keeping a hold on two qualities (or are they actions?) that had become incalculably crucial — and these are what he needed to be diligently reminded of.

One is to know what should be taken up and adopted, followed, absorbed (therefore also knowing what can be let go). The other is to act on these in the best way known, to make sure these decisions stick. To stay mindful, and aware of it too, was as central as this heartbeat I keep hearing — even more so… perhaps even to the point of its silence.

I guess the quiet whisperings will continue to float up.

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The day started well. When Benny stepped out from his front gate on to the street the first thing he encountered was a $10 note being blown along the footpath, which he deftly stepped on and picked up. “There was no-one else around that it could have escaped from, so naturally its next home was my pocket. And it’s funny, but being in the right spot at the right time kept unfolding for me that day. In the city, people were handing out promotional samples of a new energy drink at different random street corners, and the way I was going found me walking through two of those intersections that morning.”

Without really admitting it, let alone spelling it out in a conscious way at all, from then on Benny more-or-less expected that everything else on that day would go well for him. And generally things did — all that was meant to happen, and even those that were not planned, went very well or even better, and for no discernable reason. And just little things too… like when he later bought a coffee, he had exactly the right amount needed sitting in his pocket, precisely the right change (“…I think this one was when I got my first car”).

No-one could blame him for enjoying a good day, where everything just fell into place. After all, we all have days that are better than others. But the thing was that this time there were no mediating factors, no less-than-premium results or elements to take at least a little bit of shine off Benny’s pristine run of good luck. This might sound fine, but the trouble was that this unspoken positive expectancy seemed to be more firmly cemented-in from each piece of successive serendipity, and that outlook also seemed to be feeding an out-of-ordinary inattention. It was odd… and it was also conducive to complacency. His otherwise clear-mindedness was just switched to ‘off’, which I knew, under my watch, is not helpful. I wished that he would have listened a bit more carefully.

And at other times of course, like everyone, Benny also had bad days. “It was an early start to a cruddy day, my phone ringing at about 5am, and it was just one of those ‘private number’ nuisance calls. It was hard to get back to sleep then, especially when you know you have to get up not all that long after. When I did, one of the first things I saw in the mirror was that a mosquito had bitten me on the eyelid overnight, and as I have a mild reaction to them I had a visible bite mark on my eye all day.

“I should have read the signs and just stayed home, but of course that wasn’t an option, so out I went and straight away found myself being hassled by a bee at my front gate, which I guessed must have been sitting on the gate somewhere that I didn’t see as I opened it. I wasn’t stung at least, not that that was a sign that things were going to improve. I cut across the park and a friendly dog ambled over and got a big pat from me, after which I realised that my hand had picked up a bad smell from the dog’s back… he must have rolled in some very stinky dead thing. Just wiping it with tissues (I had a pack in my bag) didn’t do much, so I felt like I had to keep that smelly hand in a wad of those tissues in my pocket until I got to work and could wash it with lots of soap (which I had to repeat a few times before the smell was completely gone).”

That would have all been fine as far as having a string of bad luck goes, if it ended there. But after drying his hands Benny could see that after all the washing and accompanying splashing of water he had a wet patch on his pants ‘just there’. Immediately after, when Benny took off his coat to hang it up, he saw that a bird had crapped on the back of his shoulder — a very visible long white streak, and he guessed he must have been walking around with it on display all the way in.

But this wasn’t the last of it for Benny. Later, seemingly to remind him that this was not a stellar day, he couldn’t hold back a huge sneeze immediately after taking the first bite of his lunchtime sandwich. Later still, at the end of this day of bad happenings, he decided that he should wash the pants he had on in case some of the pungent dog smell hung around in the pocket that he had shoved his hand in that morning, but he forgot to take out the wad of tissues that was still in the pocket when he put them in with the load of other washing. The result would be a delayed bad-day confirmation.

The trouble was that this string of negatives had a similar affect to his string of good luck that we saw before — his otherwise clear-mindedness was just switched to ‘off’. Benny was just too caught up and worried about what had happened, and what might happen next, to really take a patient view. It was the same in both situations — either too caught up and blissful or too caught up and worried. With the first he indulged, things were going well, and he milked it for what it was worth. With the second he suffered, things were not going so well, and he hunkered down and felt miserable. Either way, good times or bad times, Benny’s focus lapsed (it felt like being in a fog), and it didn’t have to be that way. He just had to take a step back, be patient, and keep his head in a clearer place than where this daily life can take him. I don’t think I could ever tire of reminding him of that.

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Some mornings, Benny would slowly wake up and not be sure if the dreaming world had ended or not, even if he hadn’t been dreaming — although he only used those words for the occasional bleary just-woken-up moments because he couldn’t be sure that he wasn’t coming out of a dream of sorts, even if he couldn’t remember it. Mainly the association he’d have with dreams on these occasions was because there’d be a lingering idea on his mind, like something he thought he should remember, before his eyes got a glimpse of the morning light and the daily distractions took over.

True, the lingering resonance he may have picked up on was probably one of my whispers, and those subtle inner signals were certainly meant to be something he should remember, so it seemed Benny was getting the idea. Ideally he should have taken a minute or so, just to dwell a little with whatever was there for him to take into the new day. Just one little reminder, first thing in the morning, could set him up for a better daily outcome — certainly before another one of those ‘to do’ lists starts to form in his mind, which can absorb so much concentration.

The important thing would be perspective. Not to change anything about the day-to-day that comes along each morning, but before driving off into the looming day ahead, to adjust the mirrors, as it were, so that they’re not always reflecting square back into his own face — to just re-set the angle of overview and take in a wider field of vision.

Likewise later on, at the end of one of his days, a whisper may go up, just a tiny secondary intuition that Benny can pick up on as a passing thought, to look over the day just gone and see where his energy was spent. What Benny would hopefully be hearing, subtly, is not to find fault or blame, but just to step back, to review, and see if the morning’s moment of perspective stuck in any way, any small way. Hopefully, at the end of the day, he’d see what reminded him of the wider overview, and what may have caused him to forget.

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It was only days later that Benny had occasion to recall the intention to apply the preferred attitude he’d identified on the day of the wallpapers. But this time it wasn’t in reaction to his being pushed around by any external hassles.

“It’s funny how you can just wake up and find yourself generally in a bit of a grey mood — not depressed or in a full-blown misery really; just a fit of the all-around blahs, or maybe it’s a case of multiple-meh.”

Whatever the cause of such a malaise however (and from the quips, Benny obviously didn’t sound like he was in that bad of a place mentally), the cure was the same. And, it would seem, would be the same as well were the perceived obstacles he faced coming from somewhere out there. The heartening thing was his recognising that bringing himself back from any struggles he might find himself entangled in, or feeling stuck or under pressure, can be approached simply through one intention.

The aspiration I’ll aim to encourage him to adopt should be to make that his underlying bottom-line position. He can get back on focus just from remembering that he has lost focus — in a way, taking on a habit that also doubles as a signal to lighten up, and not take it all so seriously. So even just today’s recollection hit the right note. And as if to underline the proof, the next job on hand was to put away a pile of newly washed and dried clothes — a task our Benny would normally put off for as long as possible, and even after that, tackle reluctantly — “but this isn’t so bad,” he thought, “once you just make a start”.

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“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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