Sometimes I find that I cannot move forwards to follow the path that I want to take. The gears whirr noisily inside my head, and The Controller shouts “STOP. What If?”, “STOP, What If?”, again and again, at the top of his voice.
Racked by doubt and paralysed by fear, I find that I have lost my will to continue, and so I grind to a halt – frustrated, cross, until stillness descends, and I remember that however wide or deep the chasm, I can build a bridge that even only spanning imagination, offers a moment when a step can be taken. Then, slowly, I can make progress once more, to come closer to where I want to go. And I and am able to scream at the top of my voice: “So What? To hell with it.”
(c) Tim O’Hare, December 2023
WHAT IF? SO WHAT?: This poem came quickly. I was writing in my morning journal about how I had not found any time for poetry writing for several months, and starting to wonder whether perhaps this might be an indication that my well of inspiration had run dry. At the same time, I was thinking about the value of just putting my poems ‘out there’ without any expectation that they might ‘land’. Suddenly, I found that I was writing again, and this poem emerged. I wasn’t sure what to give it as a title but settled on What If? So What? based on a phrase that I vaguely remember hearing the singer Tom Jones use in an interview years ago – something along the lines that “we must always try to turn ‘what ifs?’ into ‘so whats?’”. Don’t miss the hidden message in the second verse…!
In recent summers we have take a series of summer holidays walking in the Yorkshire Dales – first in Swaledale (staying at Low Row near Reeth), then in Wharfedale (based in Ilkley) and last year in ‘Bronte Country’ near Haworth. In each case we combined our week in Yorkshire with a day or two staying somewhere en route to and from our home in Plymouth, or in one case a second week away in Norfolk and Suffolk. For a change, this year, we decided that we’d like to spread our holiday time out over the summer months, and so we picked a couple of fairly local destinations for ‘long weekend’ walking holidays and also booked five days over in Suffolk, combining this with a visit to elderly relatives and an old university friend on mine.
The first of our summer 2025 mini-break locations, in June, took us back to the very familiar territory (for me at least) of the Quantock Hills and the Somerset coast. I grew up a short distance from there in Bridgwater, and we would frequently go on family outings to the area. I also spent quite a lot of time at an activity centre in Kilve on short courses of various kinds (mostly musical).
Although I do like discovering new places, I also very much enjoy returning to familiar haunts, especially for a short trip when you want to be able to slot straight into holiday mode without having to spend time orienting yourself and getting the lie of the land. Our Somerset trip – staying in an AirBnB Shepherd’s Hut near the village of Crowcombe, tucked at the bottom of the western side of the Quantock Hills ridge, very much fell into this ‘familiar territory’ category.
While we were away we enjoyed completing a couple of lengthy walks direct from our accommodation (I particular enjoy a stay away that doesn’t involve having to get in the car), and I was able to spend quite a bit of time painting. In this post I’ll feature four of the pictures that I produced during the break, and I’ll pick up the thread with another post soon that will feature a further group of five pictures.
We started our holiday with lunch at a favourite cafe, the Driftwood Cafe at Blue Anchor – the subject of my first picture (shown at the top of this post). It’s not a fancy cafe at all – I’d describe it as a ham, egg and chips or baked potato cafe – it’s just a nice, simple, easy-going place for a quick bite to eat.
Suitably refueled we then drove the short distance to Kilve and did a short walk (~3 miles) along the coast to East Quantoxhead, before turning inland and returning to the car, with a stop at the Chantry Tea Garden at Kilve where we were the only customers and had an interesting conversation with the owner, who used to be a frequent visitor to Plymouth. The two pictures below show a view of a field that we passed on the return leg (I’ve got a thing for trees silhouetted on the horizon) and the view that we had from our table in the cafe garden of The Chantry itself and the white cottage from which the cafe was run.
Grass Cut Field Near Kilve, SomersetThe Chantry Tea Garden, Kilve, Somerset
Finally, for now, here’s a scene I painted of the view looking west in the direction of Exmoor from the base of the Quantock Hills. I’ve tried to capture the way that there are successive ‘layers’ of rolling hills as the eye moves towards the horizon, each becoming progressively just a little higher than the previous one. Although wild landscapes can be exhilarating, I do like a farmed landscape – a patchwork of fields, hedges, copses and the odd farm building.
Somerset Fields Looking West From Near Crowcombe
All of these pictures were really just quick ‘practice’ pieces, but I like them all in different ways – Driftwood Cafe for its small details, the grass-cut field for its slightly abstract form, Chantry Tea Garden for its looseness, and Somerset Fields for the way it captures something of the wide expansiveness of the view.
If you have a favourite of these four pictures write a quick comment to let me know!
I listened to the audiobook of Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome’s classic novel for children during the period from late March through to early June this year. It was a fairly long process, almost 9 hours of listening, accomplished mostly on my walks to and from work. There were two reasons for my choice of listening, the first linking to my desire to read explore more novels for children as I tried to find stories that were in any way comparable to my own attempt at a children’s adventure story (something that I have written about in my post on Cornelia Funke’s book The Thief Lord), and the second being that Swallows and Amazons was a suitable ‘R’ pick as I worked my way, for the second time, through an alphabet of author surnames in James Mustich’s wonderful book ‘1000 Books To Read Before You Die’.
Swallows and Amazons is, of course, a very well known title, and for many people it is a much-loved one. But despite its name being very familiar to me, I had never previously read a single word of it. I had a vague idea of what it was about – a bunch of kids having adventures on a boat – but for some reason I thought it was set in the Norfolk Broads rather than the Lake District.
The story revolves around the adventures of four siblings, conveniently, to give a nice balance, two boys and two girls – John, Susan, Titty and Roger – as they spend a summer holiday camping on an island in the middle of a lake and sailing their boat, Swallow, around and about each day. Published in 1930, the children unsurprisingly fall into neatly gender-stereotyped and age-constrained roles, John is very much the responsible old-head, and, naturally, captain of the Swallow. Susan, next oldest, and mate of the Swallow fulfills the ‘mother’ role, taking great care and pride in keeping their camp tidy, preparing meals and keeping the younger children in order. Titty, the younger sister, is the Able Seaman and, it turns out, a little bit of a rebel (the privilege of youth!). Finally, Roger, the baby of the family and ship’s boy, is very much treated as the youngest – being taught how to swim, sometimes being allowed to stay up late or accompany the others as a special treat, and frequently falling asleep.
The main action in the story involves the Swallows interactions with two local children, Nancy and Peggy Blackett, captain and mate of their own boat Amazon, and very much portrayed as rather unsophisticated and down-to-earth locals, in comparison to the rather ‘smart’ Walker children. Initially, the relationship between the Swallows and the Amazons is somewhat hostile but, as you might expect, they end up joining forces, first against the Blackett’s uncle James, who lives in a houseboat on the lake and seems to be inexplicably grumpy and awkward, and then against some rather unsavoury characters who they become embroiled with. Throughout the story it is very much John and Nancy who are held up as the masters of the craft of sailing their boats and leading the adventures, but in the end it is young Titty who turns out to be the real star.
Listening to the audiobook of the story was quite an odd experience. The attitudes and happenings of the story are very dated, and I will admit that the constant references to Titty took some getting used to. The story is absolutely chock full of nautical references to the extent that practically everything the children do is rendered in nautical-speak – for example, everyone else is a pirate or a landlubber, they are constantly jibing or backing the mainsail or trimming the freeboard, and everything they drink becomes grog. All of these things – the datedness, the setting, the obscure language – left me wondering how it could be that, more than 90 years after its publication, Swallows and Amazons is still often lauded and recommended as a story for modern children. Perhaps there is some innate craving for a return to the semi-wild that a child can connect with, even if they (probably) haven’t got a clue about one end of a boat from another, and almost certainly have no idea whatsoever what ‘pemmican’ is!
So did I enjoy Swallows and Amazons? Would I recommend it?
Well, let’s be honest, Swallows and Amazons wasn’t written to entertain an almost 60 year old man with limited interest and experience in sailing, reading it 95 years after it was set and published. It’s probably not surprising then, that I would have to say that I was left underwhelmed… But maybe if I was 12 years old with my thoughts turning to imagined adventures and challenges, and yearning to escape from the constraining influence of the adults in my world I might have felt differently. Then perhaps, I would have leapt onboard at the chance to join John, Susan, Titty, Roger, Nancy and Peggy as they hoist their flags, cast off and allowed the wind to fill their sails and send them racing across the lake in pursuit of their next adventure!
I painted this little watercolour picture of Mevagissey harbour back in June. I was looking to paint a picture to use for a birthday card for the son of one of my wife’s best friends, and brother to one of my elder daughter’s closest friends (by which I mean that the son was also the brother!). As it happened, a couple of months previously, his mum had seen some of my pictures when visiting our home, we got talking about art, and along the way she told us how he had surprised her by saying that when he finally got his own place to live (he’s in his mid/late 20s) he wanted to have pictures of two places that were special to him – Pew Tor on Dartmoor, close to their home in Tavistock, and Mevagissey in Cornwall.
As the date of the birthday approached I started to think of painting one of my ‘special place’ pictures for his card. The trouble was, I was faced with a choice, and anyone who knows me well will know that one thing I am not good at dealing with is choice. It’s tempting to think that choice is a good thing, and I am sure that I would say that I’d prefer to always have a choice than not, but in many ways I’d find life a lot easier if there was a little creature sitting on my shoulder, or tucked into my sleeve, whispering to tell me what to do all of the time.
Should I paint Pew Tor or should I paint Mevagissey?
I’d painted a larger picture of Pew Tor back in early March and knew that I could produce something smaller but similar that would work as a birthday card. I’d also painted various places in Cornwall as part of my Cornwall Landmarks Miniature Watercolours Series. But I’d never tackled Mevagissey… So, one morning I took a small piece of watercolour paper, performed a quick Google search for a suitable photograph, and set to work.
I like the results of my effort – the painting that introduces this post. The picture I chose was a fairly busy scene, with the quayside at Mevagissey backed by all kinds of interestingly shaped and coloured buildings, a host of colourful boats moored at the water’s edge, a pair of rather striking light-blue benches towards the right of the scene, and the bright yellow fishing boat pulling out confidently towards open waters. It was a picture that provided lots of splashes of colour that give the painting a nice sense of aliveness I think.
But, in the end, it was Pew Tor that won the mental tug-of-war that was taking place inside my head. I put my little Mevagissey picture, really just a test piece, to one side, and opted instead for the Dartmoor ‘special place’ rather than the Cornish one. If you are reading this soon after it was originally posted (on 9th September 2025) and want to see the Pew Tor picture that I ended up using, then you’ll just have to visit this site again in a few days time… because if all goes to plan I will post it here soon. For now, you’ll just have to enjoy a quick trip to Mevagissey – a perfect example of the many picturesque little harbour towns that line the southern Cornish coastline.
In the early months of this year I read and heard several references to a soon-to-be published book: Wild Courage by Jenny Wood. My interest was piqued further after I viewed a Livestream of an episode of the podcast ‘A Productive Conversation‘, in which the host, Mike Vardy, chatted with the author about her book (A Productive Conversation: Episode 611 – Jenny Wood talks about wild courage and fearless self-advocacy). I duly ordered the book and began reading it soon after it arrived on my doorstep, optimistic that it was going to be an interesting and enjoyable read.
Wood’s basic idea is that in order to progress we need to have courage – to push through fear of the unknown, fear of discontent, fear of failure and fear of judgement by others. She argues that successful people feel, but put aside, all of this fear, becoming their own strongest advocate, and having the courage to take whatever steps are necessary to advance towards their goal(s).
The distinctive feature, or twist, in Woods espousal of this feel the fear and do it anyway approach to life is that she identifies nine traits that generally hold negative connotations, and then recasts each of them as a type of courage that the reader is encouraged to develop and deploy. The nine traits, and their associate courage, are as follows:
WEIRD – the courage to stand out
SELFISH – the courage to stand up for what you want
SHAMELESS – the courage to stand being your efforts and abilities
OBSESSED – the courage to set your own standard
NOSY – the courage to dig deeper
MANIPULATIVE – the courage to influence others
BRUTAL – the courage to protect your time and energy
RECKLESS – the courage to take calculated risks
BOSSY – the courage to listen and lead
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this approach, in fact I think it provides an interesting route into thinking about this territory…
(can you tell that there’s a but coming?)
…but what I wasn’t expecting from the book, and what disappointed and annoyed me as I read it, was the way that at every turn Wood focused on deploying all of this courage in one area only – career advancement and promotion – so much so that I was left feeling rather battered by the notion that this is the only thing that really matters in life.
At various points in the book I found my anger rising as Wood gave precisely the kind of advice that I detest. For example, in Brutal she instructs readers to ‘let the tree fall‘, i.e. to skip ‘unimportant’ tasks quietly. She suggests that ‘if they’re actually necessary, they’ll come around again, and you’ll have been busy doing unambiguously important work in the meantime.‘. To this I say ‘no, no, no‘. There is nothing more annoying than colleagues who fail to respond to simple requests for information citing the ‘if it’s important I’ll be asked again’ line of reasoning… It’s selfish, inefficient, and plain and simply rude; it says to the person who has sent the request that their time is not important and that it is yours to waste. No, just respond to the request promptly and don’t force people to keep track of your lack of response and to ask twice, or however many more times it takes to rouse you out of your own little world… [rant over]
I also found Wild Courage to be guilty of over-using the ‘personal story’ approach to illustrating the points that were being made. Perhaps some readers like this kind of thing. The odd personal story is fine, I think, but please sprinkle in a few from different scenarios, different worlds, other people etc., so that not every example is drawn from the world of working for Google.
In the end, I found myself frustrated by my reading of Wild Courage. It’s not that the approach and the ideas contained in the book aren’t valid. In the end, the courage that might stem from embracing each of the ‘negative’ traits can be expressed in a nice, succinct and positive manner that has much wider application that career advancement simply by putting the word courage to one side in each phrase. Then, the lessons that flow from those nine traits become a simple set of instructions:
stand out
stand up for what you want
stand behind you efforts and abilities
set your own standard
dig deeper
influence others
protect your time and energy
take calculated risks
listen and lead
which to my mind is a whole lot easier to absorb and a lot more useful than getting caught up having to justify the adoption of those negatively associated words, spinning the idea of courage out of them and suggesting that there is something a little wild about doing so. And what’s more, it’s a set of instructions that is clearly applicable to almost every aspect of life and not just the narrow, corporate-career-focus that Wood chooses to target.
Over the last couple of months I have been gradually gearing up to start trying to sell some of my artwork. Obviously, I am not thinking that there will be crowds flocking to part with their hard-earned money to the extent that I might become rich through my artist endeavours. Rather, people who see my pictures often pass comment that they think I could sell them, and the inquisitive part of me thinks that it will be interesting to find out whether that is true, and if it is, which pieces of my output people like enough to pay for. [Okay, okay – I admit it – I’d also love to have the implicit praise and external validation that would come my way if my artwork attracted interest in this way… but I know that it’s far better for me not to get hung up on this aspect of things and, instead, to focus on simply enjoying the process of creating art and then allowing it to leak out into the world.]
So far, my art selling has only gone as far as listing prints of my Dartmoor Stone Circle painting on eBay (two copies sold, albeit to the same buyer, in almost four months…) and, more recently, to set up an online shop on Etsy. In this shop I have listed my Dartmoor Stone Circle print (one copy sold) and lots of different Greetings Cards based on some of my miniature watercolour series: Dartmoor Scenes, House Plants, Capital City Landmarks, Cornwall Landmarks and Exmoor Views (of which I have sold the grand total of two: one of ‘The Forbidden City, Beijing’ from my Capital City Landmarks series and one of ‘The Roundhouse Gallery, Sennen Cove’ from my Cornwall Landmarks series). Clearly, it is slow going, partly because I need to master the art of marketing and try to drive some traffic to the shop, but also, because I doubt that there are many people shopping online for greetings cards of random places or plants! Nevertheless, it was a bit of a thrill when my phone pinged to tell me that these sales had been made..
One of the things that I wanted to make sure of before I launched my online shop was that I had all of my art-related points of contact joined up nicely. To that end, I managed to get hold of an email address and accounts on all of the major social media sites (Instagram, X, Bluesky, Facebook, Meta) that matched the name of my etsy shop (@timohareart). To help with future networking and promotion activities, I designed some business cards to convey all of this information to anyone interested. For these, I decided that I would paint a picture of Plymouth’s most iconic landmark, Smeaton’s Tower, with Plymouth Sound and Cornwall in the background to use on the front of the card. It took me several attempts to set up the picture so that I could add the name of my art ‘business’ without the text crossing the darker parts of the picture and that could be cropped nicely into a circle for use on the back of the card and on my social media accounts. The picture at the top of this post is final version.
The final form of the business card is shown below (front and back)…
… and just in case you’re reading this and are tempted to explore a little more, here are some direct links:
(Instagram is probably the best social media site to see all of my artwork as I produce it, but you can find my art via the same social media handle on the other sites, although these are not all updated to the same extent.)
I read Revelation, the fourth title in C.J. Sansom’s Shardlake series during April and May 2025. As with the other books in this series, it is quite a weighty tome and follows the lawyer Matthew Shardlake and his general assistant Jack Barak as they investigate another peculiar set of crimes during the reign of King Henry VIII in early 16th century England. The previous book in the series, Sovereign, had seen Shardlake travelling north to York, but Revelation returns the action to the rapidly expanding, crowded and evidently crime-ridden city of London.
Initially, Shardlake finds himself caught up in the investigation of a single, macabre, murder of a legal colleague friend. However, it soon becomes apparent that the murderer is working through the seven prophesies of the Book of Revelation in the bible as more bodies, brutally killed in ways that match the prophesies, are uncovered. As Shardlake’s investigation unfolds and they second-guess the murderers next moves and race to neutralize them, Shardlake comes to realise that he is also very much at threat, adding an extra dimension of urgency to his searches. This is added to by concerns that the crimes have the potential to impact at the highest level, drawing Henry VIII’s future wife Catherine Parr into peril. Along the way, Shardlake spends a lot of time working to free a young man from Bedlam, rekindles his love for an old flame (the wife of the first victim) and Barak becomes ever more distant from his new wife Tamasin, who he first encountered in York while helping investigate the crimes described in the previous book, Sovereign, after the death of their young child.
I remember really enjoying the first book in this series, Dissolution, and I have enjoyed the rest of the series too, but I feel that, perhaps surprisingly, rather than growing in strength as the characters mature and settle into their fictional world, the stories have become progressively weaker with each title. The introduction of the more personal, relationship-base activities of the main characters seem to be rather forced and somewhat out of character, and after making a significant impact in the first two books, Shardlake’s physician friend Guy, potentially the most interesting character of all, seems to have become rather sidelined.
Despite its weaknesses, I still felt that Revelation provided a fairly gripping historical adventure yarn with plenty of twists and turns, and I will certainly continue with the series in the future.
What is blue and is whatever it is the same for me as it is for you? A scientist might state that blue describes:
‘colours perceived by humans observing light with a dominant wavelength between approximately four-hundred-and-fifty and four-hundred-and-ninety-five nanometres‘,
which may well tell us how blue can arise – in the human mind, when a certain type of electromagnetic radiation enters the eyes. But this does not, I think, tell us what blue really is. For how can we be sure that the imagined colour that my mind selects, in its constant rush to paint upon its ever-changing canvas, comes from the same small pan into which you dipped your brush?
You can say that blue is the colour of the sky (by day at least), or of the vast expanse of open sea (mostly), or the shirt worn by the best team (certainly not). But what if you see all of those as I see green? (Well then we would agree – those shirts belong to by far the greatest team the world has ever seen).
So what is blue to me, or to you?
To complicate matters further… ‘blue’ could refer not to colour but, rather, to the tone of my thoughts. But if I tell you that just now the thoughts inside my head are blue, how do you know whether I am simply feeling a little down on my luck, or whether my mind, unleashed, is filled with images of a naked couple…? Again, we come unstuck.
We must agree then, I think, to put aside all ambiguities, and to take the definition, with all of its nanometres, at face value. Then we can label the sky as blue and the sea as blue, we can assume my mood is melancholy even if it is really full of sauce, and we can move on (although, we will never agree about those shirts of course).
(c) Tim O’Hare, September 2023
BLUE: I’m not entirely sure where the idea for this poem came from but I guess I just liked playing with the words and the rhymes and bringing together some threads from different aspects of my life – science, perception, atmosphere, ocean, sports.
A revised version of this poem was published in Issue 16 (March 2024, ‘Colour’) of Consilience – an online Science Communication/Poetry journal. I’ve repeated it below for completeness…
What is blue and is whatever it is the same for me as it is for you?
A scientist might state that blue describes: ‘colours perceived by a human when observing light having a primary wavelength in the range four-hundred-and-fifty to four-hundred-and-ninety-five nanometres’, which may well tell us how blue can arise – in the human mind, when a certain type of electromagnetic radiation enters the eyes – but does not, I think, tell us what blue really is. For how can we be sure that the imagined colour that my mind selects in its constant rush to paint upon its ever-changing canvas comes from the same small pan into which you dipped your own brush?
You can say that blue is the colour of the sky (by day at least) or of the vast expanse of open sea (mostly) or the shirt worn by the best team (certainly not). But what if you see all of those as I see green? (And then we agree those shirts belong to by far the greatest team the world has ever seen).
So what is blue to me or to you?
To complicate matters further… Blue could refer not to the colour of a sight but, rather, to the tone of my thoughts. But if I tell you that, just now, the thoughts inside my head are blue, how do you know whether I am simply feeling a little down on my luck or whether my mind, unleashed, is filled with a tumble of racy thoughts? Again, we come unstuck.
We must agree then, I think, to put aside the ambiguities and to take the scientist’s definition, with all of its nanometres, at face value. Then we can label the sky as blue and the sea as blue; we can assume my mood is melancholy even it is really full of sauce; and we can move on (although, we will never agree about those shirts of course).
Back in early June it was the first anniversary of the wedding of my elder daughter (K) and wanting to find a unique and personal gift to mark this occasion I set about thinking of some kind of art-related present for the pair of them. I thought about painting a scene from one of their wedding photographs, but my attempts at including recognizable people in my pictures so far have not proved to be very successful, and so I quickly ruled that possibility out. I thought about painting a ‘standard’ picture of some kind, but it wasn’t that obvious how to select a scene that carried some relevant meaning – a view of the Park Bar on the Reading University campus (where they first met) didn’t really appeal and, in any case, that would have taken me back into ‘people problem’ territory again.
Instead, I decided to try out an idea I had a few months ago when I came across some small wooden boxes for sale at bargain price in the shop The Works. These little square boxes, about 6cm across, were almost exactly the same size as the miniature watercolour pictures that I often paint, and it had occurred to me that it would be neat to pop two such pictures into a box so that when it is opened the two pictures are revealed. Putting this idea together with the upcoming wedding anniversary it seemed like a natural fit – to celebrate the matrimonial joining together of two young people with a little box bringing together two pictures – one related to each person.
After a little more deliberatrion, I decided that the two pictures would show the places of origin of the two halves of the happy couple. In my daughter’s case this was the city of Plymouth, a familiar theme for my paintings, and for her now husband (H) I chose a view of Horsley Towers, a rather grand, gothic building that is the dominant landmark in the village of East Horsley in Surrey where he grew up.
Having painted the two miniature pictures and fixed them carefully to the base and lid inside the box, all that remained was to personalize the front of the box with their initials, package it up and drop it in the post to them.
I’m glad to report that they loved their little box of pictures. It’s obviously nothing grand or expensive, but I think the best gifts are those that have a personal touch and are the product of some dedicated labour.
The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery by Brianna West is probably not a book that I would have picked up to read of my own accord, despite that fact that I am pretty much certain that a lot of the struggles I have in pushing myself into action and gaining the sense of achievement and fulfillment that I crave are driven at a fundamental level by self-sabotage in one form or another. There is just something about the whole mountain metaphor, along with the kinds of words used in the book blurb that I read online (‘deep internal work of excavating trauma’, ‘building resilience’, and ‘adjusting how we show up for the climb’) that instinctively put me off. Why then did I work my way through this book for a few weeks in April and May this year? Because it was voted as the reading matter for the May meeting of The Timecrafting Trust Book Club that I participate in, and so, dutifully, I ordered myself a copy and set to work.
Almost from the start, I realized that there might well be a bit more value for me from The Mountain Is You than I had envisaged. I was immediately stuck with some obvious similarity between some of the content being covered and the ideas of psychotherapist Carl Jung that I found enthralling and thoroughly convincing when I read James Hollis’s excellent The Middle Passage a year or so ago.
Wiest begins her book by describing the various forms that self-sabotage can take along with the underlying reasons why each type of self-sabotaging behaviour occurs. There were quite a few lines in this section of the book that resonated with me…
‘sometimes, we sabotage our professional success because what we really want it to create art‘
‘sometimes, our most sabotaging behaviours are really the result of long-held and unexamined fears we have about the world and ourselves‘
‘human beings experience a natural resistance to the unknown, because it is essentially the ultimate loss of control‘
… because yes, I do increasingly seem to be seeing myself as an artist, yes, I definitely have a lot of fears squashed down into my head that hold me back, and yes, I do tend to get overwhelmed and feel very uncomfortable when I perceive that things are spinning out of my control. But why then, knowing all of this, does nothing much really seem to change? Wiest delivers the killer answer:
‘most people do not actually change their lives until not changing becomes the less comfortable option‘
Wiest goes on to argue that, in fact, we might be better off re-framing self-sabotage because, ultimately, the habits and behaviours associated with it are actually a result of your very clever subconcious ensuring that some unfilled need, displaced emotion or neglected desire is being met – that those actions are, in fact, deliberately designed to provide a positive outcome that some hidden part of your subconscious seeks.
Aand funnily enough, just this morning, quite coincidentally, I wrote in my journal that perhaps I allowed myself to procrastinate and hold myself back from taking certain actions even though I know this will result in an intense wave of frustration and anger with myself, because at least those negative feelings and emotions are something that I am familiar with and are, in some weird and twisted way, somewhat comforting.
The next section of The Mountain Is You describes a long list of different manifestations of self-sabotage, and whilst many of these did not feel relevant to me, some of them certainly did – hello Perfectionism, Worrying About Least Likely Circumstances, Being Busy, Fear Of Failure, to name a few.
The start of the process of overcoming self-sabotage begins, Wiest suggests, with tuning into, and listening to, the negative emotions associated with it – things like anger, jealousy, regret, chronic fear. She highlights a basic need to be able to ‘allow yourself to feel what you feel without judgement or suppression and notes that understanding your needs, meeting the ones you are responsible for, and then allowing yourself to show up so others can meet the ones you can’t do on your own will help you break the self-sabotage cycle’. For example, feel angry, notice that you are angry, understand why you are angry, remember that it is okay to feel angry… and then get on with life.
There are then a couple of chapters with fairly standard fare on building emotional intelligence and on letting go of baggage from the past, but as these progressed I could feel the book moving steadily into the kind of territory that my initial instincts had led me to expect. Then, aargh, I hit a section titled ‘Releasing your past into the Quantum Field‘ and my brain was instantly screaming at me that I was now thoroughly into pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo land… the kind of land where, apparently, ‘You store … emotions, energies and patterns at a cellular level‘. Now, I guess that in some sense everything associated with an individual human is stored at a cellular level, but I am pretty sure that Wiest is suggesting there’s something rather more mysterious and perhaps spiritual going on. I’d be inclined to simply say that statements of that kind are just nonsense!
I guess that from that point onwards, my brain was in a state of high alert, warning me, perhaps unfairly, that much of what I was reading had no real, solid basis. There were lots of nice, almost mantra-like phrases: ‘be willing to be disliked‘, ‘do your inner work‘ and a series of suggestions to ‘create aligned goals, ‘find you inner peace’, ‘detach from worry’, ‘take triggers as signals’, ‘honour your discomfort’, ‘stop trying to be happy’, ‘arrive into the present’ etc., but in the end it was all a bit too much – too many suggestions, too many affirmations, too many challenges to think about overcoming, with the result that I came away confused and somewhat disappointed. After a promising, really very readable first half, everything seemed to have unraveled as the book reached its conclusion. There was just nothing much that was concrete or tangible for me to cling onto.
Late on in the book there was one phrase that I rather liked in a section titled ‘Be aware of what you give your energy’, namely that ‘the wolf that wins is the one that you feed‘ and strangely, on the day that I read those lines some spoke almost the exact same words to me (perhaps that pesky quantum field was doing its thing…). In fact, the whole book is stuffed full of short phrases and sentences that you could lift off the page and incorporate into an inspirational poster or social media post if that is your thing. I may not have warmed to Wiest’s mountain metaphor or felt that the argument in The Mountain Is You hung together in a fully coherent and convincing manner, but she certainly knows how to write what might be called ‘soundbite sentences’. Forget all the gumph about releasing you past into the quantum field and storing emotions at a cellular level, and take this phrase, right at the end of the book… …
‘One day, the mountain that was in front of you will be so far behind you, it will barely be visible in the distance. But who you become in learning to climb it? That will stay with you forever.‘
Tim O'Hare 