Back from Tesco and realised that I haven’t written yet and need to do that before breakfast.
In case you’re wondering why shopping day has moved from Tuesday to Friday, last week there were no four pint bottles of semi-skimmed, so I got a six instead, which didn’t run out till yesterday.
Although I wasn’t late waking up (around 5.30), the day seems to have slipped somehow – not helped by me sitting and staring at the screen.
Yesterday I was talking about my parents, and the apparent contradiction between love and tolerance for mankind in general but severe judgement and criticism of individuals, and inability or unwillingness to see things from someone else’s perspective – lack of empathy, I suppose you could call it. Here’s a really trivial example that popped into my head a while back when I was trying to remember my childhood. Like many of the generation who lived through the war, my parents were keen on saving electricity (for financial reasons, not environmental). So at certain times of year, while we were eating our breakfast in semi-gloom, comments would be made about our neighbours in the house behind, on the lines of: ‘They’ve got that light glaring out again! That house is lit up like a Christmas tree! They must be made of money!’ etc. Since I’ve been living in my present house, (where the kitchen is at the back and faces east, but is also quite long, so that the kitchen end can be quite dark, though the sun may be coming into the dining area) I’ve been reminded of those conversations. Yes, the back room of my childhood home faced south, so the neighbours in a comparable house in the next street ate their meals in a room that faced north – but for some reason it was okay for my parents to pass moral judgements on them for having the lights on.
Well, yes, I did say it was very trivial, but I also think it’s quite illuminating (sorry about that!) When it occurred to me, it was a bit of a light-bulb moment (really, I just can’t help myself!) For a start, what gave my Mum and Dad the right to make these moral judgements? And even if that was okay, there was a reason why the neighbours’ experience was different from ours, so weren’t they entitled to behave the way they did?
I often feel that much of the unhappiness in my life has come from this sense that there is a set of ‘rules’ that sometimes I break consciously (and live with a morbid fear of being ‘found out’ and ‘punished’ for), but often I don’t even know what they are, or where the boundaries are drawn, so at any moment I might overstep them without even realising it and bring all that judgement crashing down on myself. And if I am ‘caught out’, what might the punishment be?
Where could that sense of shame and fear possibly have come from?