For years I struggled with the concept of meditation. I never did get past the first principle of emptying the mind. Then, when I was training as a coach, I suddenly got it. It’s not nearly as difficult as I thought and you don’t have to sit cross-legged in a silent room.

For anyone who has the same block as I had, this is how it works for me:

Any activity can be meditative and healing if:

• you are wholly absorbed in it as you do it
• you’re not preoccupied with something else and on ‘auto-pilot’
• it involves some kind of  physical activity
• you’re under no pressure to achieve, strive, try, improve
• there’s room for little thoughts to cross your mind.  

Anyone can do it – and many of us do so without realising that’s what it is. Forget the ‘empty your mind’ injunction. That’s  impossible. Instead, think about letting thoughts float into your mind and out again, easily. It’s a bit like the fast-forward images of clouds forming, dissipating and reforming as shown on TV nature programmes.

 The trick is to let thoughts, words, images, melodies in and  not to hang onto them or chase them: not to think things through, draw conclusions, extrapolate, pounce on them. Just let them come and go.

That’s easier to do if you’re involved in an activity that needs focus and uses some of your brain – and that you enjoy. ‘Proper’ meditation techniques  use sound (as in a mantra and/or a prayer bell ) or breathing  as a  focus. You can use running, walking, sport, dancing, singing or playing an instrument, painting , gardening - and cooking if it’s not stressful or pressurised.  Some people can do it sitting on a train or bus, gazing out of the window. That’s not wasting time, it’s putting yourself back together.  

I think it’s important, in our busy-busy-work-work world, to do something every now and then that is completely in the present. It gives the brain a breathing space, away from the forward-planning, worrying and regretful thinking that life is often so full of. It’s not only a rest space and soul food, but also a creative space where ideas can move, change and settle.

Do it once a week.

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No, not as dramatic as it seems. Last week, someone bashed into my (perfectly) parked car in Otley, leaving me with a scuffed bumper, a mangled wheel and flat tyre. There was a note on my windscreen with the registration number of the other car and the time. No phone number, so I imagine it was left by a passer-by.

I didn’t have my mobile on me  and I can’t change the wheel myself. – I’ve tried before. I have a Ford KA and, delightful though it is, the one design horror is that the spare wheel is bolted to the underside of the car - hard to access.

I rang the AA from a cafe. No luck – the AA charge a £102 callout fee if  another vehicle had been involved. News to me.

I lef t a note for a Traffic Warden and walked to a garage. They were (how do I say this?) reluctant to come and look at it for me/change the wheel – I offered cash.

Still no sign of a Traffic Warden, so I walked to the Police Station.

And they were so helpful. A PC came back with me and changed the wheel so that I could drive it away.   

And I wondered whether this kind of thing is part of their formal target structure. It seems to me that it is a core value and one that is taken for granted. I expect to be able to get help from a friendly policeman if I need it. That’s why it’s so shocking to see clips of policemen clubbing citizens.

I feel like a one-woman police marketing board when I say let’s remember that when we (rightly) condemn inappropriate police actions, we’re starting  from an expectation of trust and helpfulness.

Does anyone know if acts of kindness are included in formal police targets?

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I started off being so impressed with Seth Godin’s blog. Now I’m not so keen. Firstly, his blog about the ‘new’ marketing – first find ten people, then they will spread the word and do it all for you. Hmm.! Haven’t small businesses been doing that for some time, along with other marketing methods? And then – finding ten people who will spread the word about you. Ten? Who will go out and get you ten more people each?? That’s a lot. So, less impressed now. And he’s a bit boysy. And there’s no way of commenting on his blogs.

Obviously, Seth himself has been roped into that kind of marketing for this Chris Guillebeau person. Seemed quite interesting at first , and claimed to be unconventional. But isn’t. He seems a nice young man( I can say that nowadays), writes well and is very very very enthusiastic about how you can make money and be just like him (only not so successful, as he’s so very very enthusiastic). That’s not supposed to be the point of his blog, newsletter and website, but it is.

So I’m unsubscribing now.

NB. I say enthusiastic, he says passionate.

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I’ve finally submitted my ‘Life after redundancy’ article (it will appear on the jobs.ac.uk website/Career Development soon). Here’s an addition to it.

After a few interviews, I realised that the most interesting and useful question I asked was ‘What is your advice to anyone in this situation?’ I saw that, as people’s experiences and how they dealt with it were all very different, the best thing I could do was to show the differences and pass on the advice, more or less unmediated by a unified ’message’. 

Here is a piece of advice given by one of my interviewees. It was counter-intuitive, unconventional and – unedited - inappropriate for the article. I edited and buffed  it up for that. 

What he said was ‘DO take it personally’. I wasn’t expecting it from him as, years after his own two experiences with redundancy, he was still angry about the way he was let go the first time (but not the second).

I couldn’t use it as he had said it for two reasons:

1. Redundancy can be awful and is often arbitrary. People suffer. Any suggestion that  it’s the fault of those people is way out of order. I didn’t want to write anything that would compound the misery or offend anyone who has been made redundant through absolutely no fault of their own.
2. It needed explanation, reflection and preamble – too long-winded for an article,  but something I can do here

So ‘Do take it personally’. What did he mean? I was expecting ‘Don’t take it personally’ – which Iwould have endorsed. I did a cartoon-like double take  and had to ask him to repeat and explain it .

He said (I paraphrase, with his permission): ‘It’s too easy to feel like a victim of circumstance and to be sorry for yourself. The events surrounding my redundancy were badly handled, but the fact that it was me and not other people around me was definitely of my own making. I didn’t toe the line, join in with team hugs or work through lunch unless there was a pressing deadline (which I would always meet). I delivered value for money for the company, ran my department smoothly, got on well with my team, was good with clients and thought that was enough. But in-house, I refused to play the office politics game. I wasn’t  compliant or diplomatic. No – worse than that - I actively enjoyed the fights I had about my attitude.

The company was struggling and I was a high earner. That was one reason. Why me and not another high earner? The responsibility lies with me and my attitude. I needed to “take it personally”.

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Almost invariably, what you don’t want when you’re wrestling with a problem is ‘a solution’. Particularly when you’ve been living with it for ages and it’s been going round and round in your head.

I never fail to be surprised when I’m offered the first piece of advice that enters the head of the person I’m talking to. If it’s that obvious, surely he or she must know that it’s already occurred to me? And, if I’m sharing the problem, has been thought about and rejected?

What I – and plenty of other people – need, more than anything else, is to be listened to and heard.

Giving advice or offering a solution is often just a way of shutting someone up. If you really want to help, just listen, hear what is being said, be interested. Don’t give advice before you’ve heard the whole story, if at all. Sometimes all someone wants to do is to think out loud. OK, sometimes they really haven’t thought about the most obvious solution.

More often, though, they have.

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In the ‘breathalysed!’ blog, I generalised. I suggested that in this country we generally don’t have to make notes on what we do in case we have to defend ourselves later.  Twenty years ago, this breezy assertion and smug attitude would have made me furious. I’m a white, middle-aged, middle-class woman who listens to Radio 4 and potters in the garden, and the statement does indeed apply to people like me.

I do know that it doesn’t apply to everyone and there are people who have to watch their backs because they automatically attract suspicion. They may be the wrong age, the wrong colour, the wrong sexual orientation, have the wrong manner or just be in the wrong place at the wrong time, through no fault of their own. I apologise.

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I’ve been feeling very uneasy about my bald comment (on the About Melanie page) that I hated boarding school. Not because it’s untrue, but because it’s heavy-handed and unsubtle. Yes, I did hate it. Being there – at any of the schools - and dreading being back there dominated and oppressed my childhood. Why?

I wasn’t bullied, I wasn’t any more homesick than anyone else at the beginning of term, I didn’t struggle with schoolwork , I wasn’t overtly rebellious (though often in some sort of trouble) and I had friends.

I couldn’t identify what it was that lay so heavily on my soul and, certainly as a child and adolescent, I couldn’t articulate it well enough to explain or make a case against going back. The nearest I got to it was ‘existential angst’ – and even my adolsecent self  knew how abstract and pretentious that sounded, and how easily it would have been dismissed!

It wasn’t until I had children of my own that I began to see that school just doesn’t suit some children. One of my girls was fine at school. She didn’t love it  but she did well and thrived. The other one didn’t. In supporting her, I had to back off and remember that her experience was not the same as mine had been, although the theme was similar: lack of autonomy, being told what to do, being misinterpreted and misunderstood .

In my own case, at boarding school, it was also never having any unstructured time on my own and never getting out from under the oppressive atmosphere  during term-time.

What I’m saying here is that people are not only unhappy because of the bleedin’ly  obvious things. And neither are children.

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Last night, driving home from a jolly 60th birthday bash, with my partner, Chris in the front, daughter Martha and son-in-law Ben (in wigs) in the back, I was stopped and breathalysed for the first time in my life.

Martha and Ben had been to see West Side Story (not in wigs) before coming on to the party and we’d been roaring through the hits as we drove home. Martha had just done a sotto voce solo (’say it soft and it’s almost like praying’) and, as I swerved round a roundabout, we all slammed in to Maria, Maria  at the tops of our voices. Then I noticed  the siren and the blue light behind us and stopped.

Now, here’s the thing. I was pretty confident that one glass of wine a few hours ago wouldn’t have put me over the limit, but when asked by the officer, I started to doubt my memory. I answered confidently and continued to act cheery- I may even have given them a snatch of song in the back of the car as they prepared the machine.

But my mind was reeling. The sequence of events became blurry. Had I inadvertantly had more than that? Ben had handed me a top-up not long before we left – what had happened to it?

I failed the first blow and my head filled with alarm bells. They did explain that I just hadn’t blown for long enough and had to do it again. At that point I lost all memory of the hours before. Though I kept up a confident, compliant but possibly inane front, I had started to panic. Then to think that I was acting a little too cheery for a someone so allegedly sober in the face of authority, thus drawing suspicion. I kept trying to remember the radio programme I’d heard recently about units and how-much and that almost all of us have very little idea of what a unit is.

I notched up a 6 – the limit being 35 – so all was well and I was let out of the car, vindicated. My memory snapped back into clarity. Once again I knew without doubt that I hadn’t spent the evening necking glass after glass of alcohol.

Now, I tend to be calm and clear-headed in a crisis. I can stand my ground and I knew I was OK, really. Even so, I was thrown into doubt.  I think that anyone  can doubt themselves – maybe only for a second -as soon as doubt is cast by anyone else, particularly anyone in a position of power.

If I’d continued along the trajectory of doubt that my mind was on, could I have convinced myself that I was guilty?   Would clarity have returned if the doubt continued – or if accusations been made? Had I been bullied (which I wasn’t – the policemen were polite and  genial in that particular British-policeman-to-responsible-lady-citizen way throughout) I would have been even less certain of my ground. Perhaps in a less congenial atmosphere, facing an actual accusation, my mind would have sharpened up… or would it have just got woollier? 

I’ve only been accused of something serious, involving lawyers, once, which was truly horrible and frightening. Accused of something that you have to prove yourself innocent of is very hard. If you believe yourself to be even a tiny bit guilty, it lets doubt in, puts you on the back foot and weakens your defensive stance. (That never got to court, by the way).  

I know that even excellent witnesses in the law courts can be unreliable. Memory itself is unreliable – some things we notice and others we don’t.  Add that to what happens if, as in my breathalyser experience, you doubt your own memory when challenged, and even the possibility of accuracy looks slim.

 Most of us in this country don’t take notes on our lives just in case we have to defend ourselves later. How reliable can your memory and your certainty of innocence be, then, in the face of torture?  I can’t imagine. I just can’t imagine it.

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I had wanted to look at and deconstruct some of the common cliches, sayings and so on that are trotted out in training situations, and I’m stuck on ‘fail to plan and you plan to fail’. I have a poor relationship with this phrase, good though it is in certain situations and pleasing though the flipping-words-round quality is. There’s nothing bad about this phrase. It’s the disapproving, purse-lipped patina it has acquired for me that I’m so irritated by.  My problem with it is the people who use it, when and how.

So often it’s used in an ‘I told you so’ way, when you’ve slipped up, by people who have taken it as an article of faith, berating you with it in the predictable way that distinguishes their own lives (forgive me, I’m generalising here). Or it’s used as an ‘I’ve got my eye on you’ injunction by a manager at the start of a project that, before the doomful warning, looked alive and interesting.

Planning is good, to a point, but you just can’t plan your whole life out. Short-term plans are often essential and prevent life being chaotic on all levels. But they don’t insure against failure. A long-term plan can grip you with iron rigidity, ensuring that no opportunity is taken up, or it collapses under the weight of reality – and fails. Thus ensuring that you have, indeed, planned to fail.

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Yes – this is what I’m going to blog about, as it’s the most immediate and pressing issue now. I’m new to it, and started off very enthusiastically. Since that first charge of excitement, doubts have begun to set in. What to write about? That’s the problem. Do people want to read about my musings? Do people want to know about the weather and crocuses and what good therapy gardening is (I dumped that one)? Will what I write about put people off using me as a coach? Can I comment on politics or say how very daft all this kangaroo-court ‘apology’ sham is (no – oops, too late)? All unanswerable, particularly if you suspect that no-one reads it anyway and your trivial pipings float into the ether and become part of the detritus orbiting the planet. Actually, that gives me confidence.

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