It's Valentine's day. And we spend it doing nice things together. It would be very nosy of you to expect details.
However I do have a question for you which I have been thinking about recently - why is it that a certain emotion - or set of emotions seem irretrievably associated with a certain place?
In our case, that place (currently at least - as I have in my possession the crystal ball known as 'hindsight' by virtue of being a few days behind with these blogs, I can tell you it gets better) is our 'base' in Bali.
Most of the time, in fact nearly every time we meet a new someone, we are assumed to be on our honeymoon. Back at 'base', I think everyone else in the adjoining cabins probably thinks we bicker all the time. Except today , obviously.
And, whilst it isn't call the time - it is sort of true. Our cabin is fine and you can't hear the traffic. Our host wanders past all the cabins often, with some food or cakes he's picked up and 'thought we might like to try'. There's a pool. It's fine. And its function is to base ourselves, recoup from our intense bursts of activity that characterize Bali due to its size and its roads, and leave our stuff in when we jaunt off to home stays and get our fix of the country.
So why, when we are here, do we bicker and look sullen, doing a very good impression of two people for whom life is truly awful, rather than two lucky, lucky so and so's taking a year out to see amazing things and eat chilli?
Habit, perhaps, this being the site of our initial Bali disappointment?
It often happens to people. A job, a house, a city can become, in our minds, a location in which we are <something>. We label ourselves as 'shy' in this office, 'unhappy' in this house, 'lonely' in this city. And we do it mind blowingly quickly. Even though it is totally irrational. Humans can move from one emotion to another in hours, let alone the days or weeks we might spend in those locations. It is very unlikely that we actually, naturally feel or are that thing all of the time. But we start to. Because we tell ourselves we are and then - whether true or not, it becomes so. We trap ourselves into our own labels, make the place indistinguishable from its arbitrarily proscribed associations.
It's natural. It's stupid and self limiting. But its often so powerful that the only answer genuinely is to change locations.
Of course easier than that is to change our attitude. I believe very strongly in the power of allowing yourself fresh starts. And if we can arbitrarily associate an emotion with a place, then we can use the same twisted mind logic to associate hope with a time period. You can hang a fresh start on a new year, a new month, even a new day (though that's harder). And a fresh start allows for the burning up and abandoning of old associations.
On the other hand, sometimes that apparently negative association of a feeling with a place can be helpful. It can be our mind's way of carving us a way out of a negative spiral. Yes, we should be careful with glib assumptions that we can run from ourselves and lose our problems somewhere in the ocean on a long haul flight. But sometimes we just need a thing to ascribe hope to. Sometimes the problems go no deeper than our own labels. Or the problem is dealt with, but the darker associations are preventing us from moving on.
People who have trained in a place feel they need to move on to feel like a professional. People who have been through some personal trauma might have conquered its emotional side effects, but need to start in a place where they don't have the memories. People who have been mentally or physically ill often do better in places where nobody knows. Where nobody asks them how they are, worries about them or expects anything less if them than anyone else.
But it's a difficult balance. How do you know when you're better? How do you know you'd be strong enough to handle the further emotional upheaval of change? And what if you can't move? What if its simply not practical?
Our case bears almost no resemblance to the serious issues I have just outlined, and I use it only as a spring board for this discussion. I have been thinking about people preparing for university and the chance they have there, to reinvent themselves. I did it at sixth form college. Then at university I did it again. After that perhaps there are less obvious chances for drastic new starts, but I certainly left a job in which I had told everyone, perfectly truthfully, that I was terrified of public speaking and would like, please, to never do it to walk into another in which my first assignment was to take on a series of public speaking roles in which I would be explaining to various departments and professionals a new set of company guidelines which would probably be seen as unwelcome ref tape. And everybody just assumed that I had been doing it all the time in my old job so must be an old hand.
So I just did it. And it went rather well. Or at least an enormous amount better than you'd expect from somebody who was apparently knee bucklingly petrified.
You associate things with places and then reflect them back on you so that in the end it is you that you find lonely or incompetent.
Which means you can actually break it from the inside. You can use a date, another person (new employee, new boss), another project, a change to your appearance. You can, literally and metaphorically, rearrange the furniture.
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