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Self-service checkouts are turning us into a nation of shoplifters who steal almost £1.7 billion-worth of shopping a year: that was one newspaper’s interpretation of a report into scan-it-yourself tills, which were ‘just too tempting for one-in-five people, who admit they slip items they have not paid for into their bags’.1
Some people never seem to do anything wrong. It’s always someone else’s fault. Footballers seem especially good at this kind of body swerve. ‘Never touched him, ref,’ they maintain, all injured innocence. ‘He dived!’
But it’s all as old as the Garden of Eden. Take Adam and Eve and the Serpent. God catches Adam and accuses him of eating the forbidden fruit, he blames Eve, and then she blames the Serpent. Unfortunately, the Serpent, being limbless, had no fingers to point at someone else.
It’s the universal story of temptation. We are just minding our own business, all innocent-like, when some devious inveigler catches us off guard and tricks us into doing the wrong thing. It wasn’t me, it was them!
But is the self-service checkout possessed by a demon who makes us pocket the yoghurt? Is that what it means when it says ‘unexpected item in the bagging area?’ If we’re offered a smartphone that’s too cheap; if we’re offered the chance to cheat on our partner; if cooking the books looks tempting – and we crumble, whose responsibility is it?
Mostly we create our own temptation. We wrestle with demons of our own making. We play the blame game only to find we’re in a lose-lose situation.
If we’re always looking for someone else to blame, we’ll never consider owning up. Holding ourselves to account. And if we never face the music ourselves, we’ll never take control of our lives.
9
Stay Friends
Most of us have items of clothing that are old trusted friends. A thin T-shirt, washed soft and comfy; faded jeans that have shaped themselves to the contours of our body. They’re part of the fabric of our existence.
Old friends share some of the same characteristics of old clothes. In the best sense, they’re easy. Shared experiences and deep understanding means that an enormous amount can go unsaid. We settle into one another’s company like an old armchair. One phrase, or the mention of someone’s name, can set us off into uncontrolled laughter.
The poet Alden Nowlan1 plumbs the depths of this kind of friendship in ‘Great Things Have Happened’:
We were talking about the great things that have happened in our lifetimes; and I said, ‘Oh, I suppose the moon landing was the greatest thing that has happened in my time.’ But, of course, we were all lying. The truth is the moon landing didn’t mean one-tenth as much to me as one night in 1963 when we lived in a three-room flat...
... That night, the three of us, Claudine, Johnnie and me,
woke up at half-past four in the morning and ate cinnamon toast together...
... it was like the feeling
you get sometimes in a country you’ve never visited
before, when the bread doesn’t taste quite the same,
the butter is a small adventure, and they put paprika on the table instead of pepper, except that there was nobody in this country except the three of us, half-tipsy with the wonder
of being alive, and wholly enveloped in love.
Close companionship fosters intimacy. And shared intimacy gives us permission to be honest with one another. It allows us both to support and challenge one another, because we’re working from a position of mutual trust. There is no guile, no agenda. As the Hebrew proverb goes: ‘Wounds from a friend can be trusted, while an enemy multiplies kisses.’
We need our friends like we need oxygen. The older our friendship, the more we need to acknowledge it, and them – especially when the shadows lengthen. Because that’s when we need company. There’s a verse that is said to come from the novelist Albert Camus or from a Jewish folk song; either way it rings true:
Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Just walk beside me and be my friend.2
Helen Keller, the deaf-blind author and activist knew the value of this, saying, ‘I would rather walk with a friend in the dark, than alone in the light.’3 So did A. A. Milne’s Piglet, in The House at Pooh Corner:4
Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind.
‘Pooh!’ he whispered.
‘Yes, Piglet?’
‘Nothing,’ said Piglet, taking Pooh’s paw. ‘I just wanted to be sure of you.’
10
Fear Not.
Fear comes in all shapes and sizes. From whether you can get out of bed and face the day, to whether you can turn off the light and face the night. It’s at the heart of what it means to be human:
The fear of the unknown or of the known.
The fear of not being in control.
The fear of missing out, the fear of taking part.
The fear of loving, the fear of not loving.
The fear of losing love.
The fear of not being good enough.
The fear of someone else – at work or on the street.
The fear of illness, the fear of death.
The fear of never having lived.
We all have fears, however secretly we harbour them. However much we deny them. Maybe it’s some primal survival instinct, the suspicion that we’re never quite safe and secure.
Although we may never be able to banish all our fears, we can make sure they don’t banish us. We don’t have to be managed by fear and insecurity. Of all the phrases in all the books in the Bible, the most common one goes like this: ‘Have no fear.’
Or this: ‘Do Not Be Afraid.’
Fear not. But how?
The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh says: ‘The only way to ease our fear and be truly happy is to acknowledge our fear and look deeply at its source. Instead of trying to escape from our fear, we can invite it up to our awareness and look at it clearly and deeply.’1
Fear makes us defensive, turns us in on ourselves. It’s opposite is not courage, but love. Love accepts, includes, is symbolised by open arms.
‘There is no fear in love,’ said the early Christian writer John, ‘but perfect love casts out fear.’
