Don't think about pink elephants

Hello dear readers, just a quick one from me on a Sunday. I have been busy writing and editing my previous piece dealing with a very ugly topic: xenophobic and racist Singaporeans. Exposing oneself to the uglier side of human behaviour can be depressing - it is human instinct to want to try to right a wrong, to try to do something about the situation and perhaps in blogging about it, I am trying to, in a small way, rectify the situation by addressing the balance and speaking up against racism. But sometimes it's just not enough you know, you feel you wanna reach out and grab the people involved and deal with them until you make things right - but of course, I can't do that. What can I do? There's just one of me and so much going wrong with the world around me.

Is it just me, or do you also sometimes see someone who is just so wrong, so screwed up, so rude or behaving so badly and I just get this feeling of  "damnit you, what's wrong with you? I want to fix you, I want to make you see sense, I want you to be a better person, I want you to stop being like this! Damnit this is frustrating! Aaaaaaargh!!!"

Anger & Frustration by Warren Miller 

On an somewhat unrelated note, I also had to deal with a local council employee yesterday. Long story, so let me just focus on the parts that matter. The local council in the UK refers to the local government who provide services such as police, fire, recycling, refuse collection and removal, schools, leisure centres, park and ride schemes, parks and open spaces, street cleaning, subsidising of public transport, tourism, museums, social housing grants, housing and council tax benefits, environmental health and food safety in pubs, restaurants and shops, planning services, support for voluntary groups, meals on wheels, facilities for young people, adapting homes for disabled people, play centres for children, CCTV installation, sports facilities, issuing taxi licences, flood defences, and many others. Councils are funded entirely by the government (ie. tax-payers' money) and you have the equivalent in Singapore of course.

In any council, you will see the full spectrum of human ability - from the brilliant scholars who are fast-tracked their way to the top of the civil service to the bottom end of the food chain: people employed to deal with repetitive, boring, mundane tasks which do not require them to think at all. It can be frustrating to deal with people at the bottom of the food chain because they possess no ability to think on their feet or take any kind of initiative - they are like robots who have been programmed to deal with one task and if you ask them to do something even slightly different, their response would be "the computer says no" (see video below). This skit sums it up pretty well, I'm not exaggerating.

So you get the idea - I was confronted by an employee of the council who had this "the computer says no" attitude when it came to dealing with me. Oh he had the unique talent of turning a very simple task into something that well and truly drove me up the wall - exactly like that receptionist in the skit in the video. People like that exist and you usually encounter them in jobs reserved for those at the bottom of the food chain. I looked at him and thought, "you probably didn't get much of an education did you? People like you never made it to university, no way. You're so on the wrong end of the IQ bell curve, how disappointed are your parents? I bet they wish you were just a little bit brighter, I feel sorry for them. I bet you weren't exactly the brightest kid in the class back when you were at school otherwise you won't end up doing a shitty job like that for the council for very little money."

There was a part of me that wanted to fix his attitude - I wanted to tell him off, I wanted to scold him, I went as far as to say, "Well I'm very disappointed in your attitude." But I left it there, I had to stop myself because I knew I couldn't fix this man at the council. It is not my responsibility to do so - and besides, you can't help someone unless they want to be helped. There must have been an entire story about how he ended up where he was, doing this pathetic dead end job after a disappointing education that failed to get him a better job. It's not like I was so very altruistic that I wanted to fix every broken person I came across in life and solve their problems. (Though I really had to stop myself from getting dragged into those ridiculous flame wars on TherealSingapore's Facebook page, because the urge was there to enlighten the ignorant.) No, that's not what I wanted to do at all. The fact is I just wanted him to do his job properly so I could get the service I wanted.

Yeah, I feel like that when dealing with my local council.

Sometimes I think the whole purpose of working hard in life and getting rich is just so one can avoid ever having to deal with people like that. Oh wouldn't it be nice to have a troupe of personal assistants, secretaries and servants to deal with people like that - "Jenny, this letter is from the council, phone them and find out what they want and sort it out, I don't ever want to talk to the brain dead plebs who work at the council in my life time as long as I can afford it." But no, I am not rich enough to have a PA to deal with crap like that on my behalf, so I have to grin and put up with these super low-IQ council employees at the very bottom of the food chain.

I simply had to take a deep breath and distance myself from the situation. This man had a bad attitude, was bad at his job and bad with people - well that was his problem. Not mine. I would only let it become my problem if I had allowed him to upset me - thus I had to actively choose to ignore his sheer stupidity and bad attitude. That is of course, a solution that is far easier to prescribe than to actually practice because it is so tempting to get angry when you meet people like that in real life! (Ref: the American mother in the skit above, try telling her to rise above it and not let it get to her.) If I gave you the instruction, "don't think about pink elephants" - what do you think of immediately? That's right, pink elephants. You can't help it. This is because your brain focuses on the object in that sentence rather than the command - we think in terms of images rather than words per se.

Don't think about pink elephants!

So I couldn't simply just tell myself, "don't think about that idiot from the council" or "don't think about the racists in Singapore" - I had to give myself something else to think about instead. I found solace in a BBC radio 3 interview with the wonderful choreographer Arlene Phillips who talked about the most beautiful pieces of music that inspired her best works of choreography over the years. It was a thoroughly fascinating piece of radio, as she explained why each piece she selected meant so much to her and how the music inspired her. I lost myself in the world of her music, closing my eyes and listening intently. Oh such beautiful music.

I felt much better after listening to that piece of radio - it was just what I needed. So my friends, the next time something ugly in life gets you down, remember the "don't think about pink elephants" rule. You need to actively focus on something else, something you find beauty in to cleanse your mind of all those negative feelings the ugliness has brought upon you. It can be anything you find beauty in - it could be as simple as listening to a piece of beautiful music that inspires you, you may wish to watch a film or visit an art gallery. Or you may draw inspiration from nature and find solace in beautiful scenes in the natural world, such as observing wild animals at play in the African Savannah or a flock of birds soaring across a clear blue sky.

There is so much beauty in nature - do you ever think about it?

The bottom line is this: you can't fix all the screwed up people in the world. Bless the people who try to help them (eg. social workers), but good grief, you can't help them at all especially if they are clearly not interested in any kind of involvement from you in their lives. At times like this, all you can do is to try to remind yourself about the beautiful things in life, in this world, that still hold so much beauty and wonder and focus on those objects of beauty. After all, in this world, there are beautiful things and there are ugly people - whilst you cannot change the ratio of those two things in the world around you, you do have control about what you choose to think about.

What do you do when the shits in life gets you down? Let's talk about it, let's talk about our feelings. Leave a comment below, don't be shy. Thanks!