What used to matter was getting presents.
The occasion didn’t matter so much, it might have been the eye-boggling pile of gifts under a sparkling tree or simply the return of my oldest sister from University bearing Clarnico Mint Creams (which required an exclusive eating technique to keep them soft throughout the period of consumption). The gift was all, the anticipation was all – the disappointment where expectations were not met was devastating and taken personally.
Who would have thought that something so intense would simply fade? I think if I were never to receive another gift in my life, it wouldn’t worry me at all.
It isn’t that I no longer care about anything, I just care less about a whole lot of things that have shown themselves, over time, to be transient or unimportant. I used to care hugely when my hair started to remain in the bath after I had towelled myself dry or on the pillow when I had left the bed. This appeared to be a serious interruption to joy, peace and tranquility but I have now survived quite well for 35 years without it. People are still kind to me, my wife married me, I have never been laughed out of a room. I can remember the emotional torment of sitting beneath the cruel overhead lamps in hairdressers and seeing the increasingly desperate ways that the artistes attempted to prevent my widow’s peak from becoming as isolated as a low-lying Maldivian atoll. Eventually, the attempt was abandoned, I bought a Wahl electric cutter and dispensed with the entire underperforming crop.
I survived. No, I need to say more than that. I thrived and became a stronger me. It turned out that I’m me, with or without hair – but I didn’t know that until I knew it.
Today I care as much about being hairless as I care about not being brought Clarnico Mint Creams. I really don’t (but if you see any creams around I’d still be interested…).
As a coach, I often think when I’m listening to people’s stories, if there were one gift that you could give to everyone – one size fits all – it would be the gift of not caring what other people think about them. This is one of the most fundamental driving narratives – for some clear and conscious, for others often deeply buried or disguised in displacing stories – of the people that I have coached over 20 years. Protecting the child within us from criticism often leads us to project disapproval and judgement from others onto ourselves. We get ours in first and diminish our own worth to be a step ahead of others who would do it to us. Except that most of those ‘others’, to whom we attribute these judgements, aren’t thinking about us at all. They are too busy listening to their own internal loops to worry about us and whether our pants look a little tight at the waist or our eyes a little baggier than usual.
What if we could all just stop worrying about what everyone else might be thinking about us (but almost certainly isn’t)? What if we started caring for, accepting and loving the child that is within us? Don’t we deserve that? Wouldn’t it be kinder than the choices most of us make? Again, coaching has taught me that we are universally kinder to almost anyone else we ever meet than we are to ourselves. That is a choice we make and we can change it.
So what does really matter? Kindness matters. Kindness to everyone, including ourselves. Connection matters. Connection to other humans, to nature, to animals, to like minded people who will gift us some time from their day.
Eating Chinese New Year’s Eve dinner with my wife and her mother (curiously upside down on her iphone in deepest Mongkok, Hong Kong) – this matters. It connects us through cultural observation and it allows us to feel that we belong to something.
It isn’t my culture – and this once used to matter to me as well…but now, like having a mottled and naked pate which is as shiny as a polished billiard ball, it doesn’t matter to me at all. Now, I celebrate and embrace because doing so connects me to the people that I love and to all of the people who sit down to this dinner together across the world…that’s what really matters and that’s the bald truth.
Kung Hei Fat Choi.
