All you need is ...
Positivity? A cup of tea? Intentionality? Love?
A while back I had the song Spice Up Your Life by The Spice Girls rattling around my mind. There was one line in particular that kept recurring, the bit where they sing "All you need is positivity."
I like a simple imperative. Life is complicated and the appeal of the "All you need is X" formulation is that you don't need to do the hard work, you just change your mindset. While the Spice Girls song was going around my head, I would change the last part of the phrase — making some effort to preserve the metre — and reflect on the idea that that was all I needed …
All you need is punctuality
Punctuality has a reputation for being the preserve of the uptight, but I find it liberating. On one level, punctuality is respect for the person you're due to meet: acknowledging that their time is important and they shouldn't be waiting around for you. For me, though, punctuality is respect for yourself, giving yourself extra time to enjoy getting from place to place without rushing. The minute you start rushing, you lose all joy in the process and get focused on the goal. A punctual person has faced up to the reality of how long things take instead of being overly optimistic.
All you need is uninterrupted sleep
Despite liking punctuality, I much prefer to live without knowing the time. The annoying beep of the alarm clock is a terrible way to enter into consciousness. Far better to go to bed early and wake up naturally, long before you're due to be anywhere. Sleep is fundamental, the foundation of a happy existence, and should be sorted out before turning to pills and therapists.
Many people suffer from insomnia nowadays. It is an epidemic of sleeplessness, leading to poor decisions and depression. We have overactive minds, stimulated by a constant stream of information. Here is the technique that I use to get to sleep whenever I am feeling restless and ill at ease.
Step 1: Find yourself a comfortable position in the bed and relax all your muscles, particularly the facial muscles.
Step 2: Take a long, slow, natural breath and then pay attention to the next thought that arises.
Step 3: Once you have that thought in the form of a word, follow a stream of consciousness wherever it goes, making sure that there is no attempt to pin it down to sensible ideas. So, if you start with the word patent this might become patently absurd becomes absurdism becomes Ionesco becomes Rhinoceros becomes RINO becomes rhinitis.
Essentially you are following the chain of thought until the point where it loses the anxious meaning you've attached to it and it runs free in the semantic soup of the unconscious … and you can fall asleep.
All you need is a nice hot cup of tea
If someone is in distress, the British will attempt to calm them down with a cup of tea. It's not so much the liquid itself that is important but the ritual of making the tea that is relaxing. George Orwell has an 11-step guide to making the perfect cup, which gives you a meditation to perform when chaos reigns. In the tea bag era, much of the ritual has been lost, but simply drinking tea is probably better than nothing.
All you need is serendipity
I often like to pop into the library on my daily walk. The internet is fine, but my most serendipitous discoveries have come in libraries. Google Search is about finding the right answer, but libraries provide answers to questions you didn't know you had. You can quickly scan the spines before being drawn to something intriguing.
Over the last twenty years, the self-help section has grown exponentially. There are shelves and shelves of books offering solutions to life's problems. I sometimes go to this section and imagine that I will find one book the book - that provides the key to fixing all pathologies. Most of the time, I open one at random and read either vapid nonsense or something that sounds like too much hard work. Fortunately, there are plenty of other sections in the library to find inspiration.
All you need is intentionality
Intentionality is making a commitment to do something and then purposefully doing that thing. I've written before about following through but it always amazes me how motivations change according to our urges. When I wake up in the morning and I am rarely filled with intentionality.
I am barely conscious of my habits and compulsions: the desire to check my phone, doomscroll social media ... the self-sabotage that comes from giving in to distractions. All this is solved, in theory, by increased intentionality.
The trouble is that while it's easy enough to establish an intention, it is hard to follow through. As David Cain wrote recently, "the part of the brain that directs your attention to something is voluntary, and the part that sustains attention on that something is basically involuntary."
Jerry Seinfeld sums this up as the difference between morning guy and night guy. Morning guy makes good intentions and then night guy goes out on the town knowing that morning guy has to deal with the consequences.
Jonathan Haidt compares the mind to a rider on an elephant. The rider can coax the elephant, but not control it. By understanding your nature you can work with it and not get upset when it doesn't do as it’s told.
All you need is love
Of course, The Beatles got there first with All You Need is Love, long before the mindless, anti-depressant fuelled positivity of the Blair years. Love is vague enough that we can invest it with whatever positive associations we want. Even so, I find my heart opening up when I think of the line.
So, what do you need?
Where does all this wisdom come from? Excellent & thought-provoking post!