Slough

Are we the architects of our own destruction? Hell yeah. Well, to a certain extent. I mean, pretty obviously there are lots of scenarios where we are just going along minding our own beeswax and then a bolt from the blue comes down and kapow, there we are, lying on the ground with smoke coming out of our feet.
But all too often, when we look, really look at stuff that happens to us we can see the strings that lead back to our own hands. We are our own puppet-masters.

Some freak blogging accident just caused that part to spontaneously publish. Odd.

I have a picture in my mind of my friends and random commentators covering faces and going 'NOooooo, not Sartre again...' Maybe later.

I have been thinking about John Bunyon. Not something I've done in possibly thirty plus years, if not forty. I think we had to read 'The Pilgrim's Progress' at Primary school, although I think it was probably a Noddy, illustrated version. Why? Why would anyone one want to make small children read such a drab tome? No idea, still who can forget the Slough of Despond?
Every morning when I take Ben to work I go past a slough. I think we would call this a marsh, marshes. Slough is an ugly word in my opinion, so appropriate really. In these parts I have heard it pronounced 'slew' which to me sounds less ugly but more silly. Imagine Bunyon's Pilgrim being stuck in the slew of despond, he'd be out of it in a trice.

From time to time, I myself get stuck in such a slew. When that happens I think Bunyon would have us meditate on Christ's life and then we feel better. Sometimes that works for me, very much depends on the day really, chocolate is faster, but can also get me stuck faster because then I go spiralling downwards thinking about how I have no self-control and so on.

Everyone has their own strategies for getting out, and here's where Jean-Paul - not Giovanni-Paulo or whatever the last Pope's name was - but M. Sartre, really does help. I find it useful to sort out what I myself have caused or can have some control over and what I can't and then how I deal with the things I don't have control over, my limitations. Yeah, that sounds trite doesn't it. It is less simple than that. Puppets are difficult creatures to control and we are way more complicated monsters than they.

It's very easy to get the strings tangled up, get more bogged down. Women for example, have times when they are goddesses, pure and simple, and times when we are the same as the rest of the mortals, so we have to know whether the slough is of our own causing AND whether we are at a goddess time or a mortal time. You know what they say are the three most important things about saving yourself, introspection, introspection, introspection.

How much of my slough have I caused? Well, quite a lot really. Going to a different country is a big leap into darkness, however much you feel you know a place. How I deal with it inside my own head is down to me too. But without a shadow of a doubt, there are things that I have no control over. However, in my slough, well, let's call it my marsh, there are beautiful things, birds, plants, new things to look at and learn about. The sky is the most beautiful azure. And I can see other people walking about as though there were no marsh, so here am I, trousers rolled up to my knees, paddling about and I can see that there are paths through it. Sometimes the people stop and talk to me, they are interesting people, good people. And as the days pass in the marsh, the sky and the people and the flora and fauna keep me sane and I can move around, it's just ..well, swampy. Surely you have those dreams where your movement is like moving through jelly or something more restrictive than air?