Life's A Risky Business

I started on this subject before the invasion of Ukraine and it felt a little frivolous to continue considering the enormity of what is going on now within our European borders.

However, after some reflection, I’ve decided this idea may not be as disconnected as it first seemed. 

The life-threatening situation for the poor citizens of Ukraine clearly demonstrate the risks they face. 

Those brave people defying President Putin’s invasion and fighting for their liberty and their land are taking a real risk. There is a frightening and growing chance of either being injured or killed and, as borders close up, the opportunity to escape decreases. 

We who are safely distant are witnessing a real horror and risk. Some Ukrainians are leaving the safety of their home here and going back to fight for their country. Most of us, however, can only watch and hope. Or pray.

Our lives seem so much more comfortable than compared with the days before the invasion. Our growing worries about net zero costs and how we were going to pay the rising energy bills no longer seem so important. 

Even the necessity of finding tens of thousands of pounds to replace a boiler or car to achieve that same net zero goal is paling into insignificance as I wonder if President Putin is serious about nuclear weapon plans.

I’m hoping that what’s going on within my own inner world is not so different from others. I’m imagining we’re all considering putting our petty quarrels to one side as we contemplate and absorb the reality of what calamity our brave friends may be facing.

And yet, when I venture outside my inner world to the world outside, I get the feeling our authorities have not yet grasped what I understand as real risk. 

The rules around lockdown - remember that? How so last month it all seems - have been abandoned. Theoretically, we have no need of nose and mouth coverings or written instructions about how much distance we need to maintain between our individual selves. 

We can once again open our arms wide and explore the - safe - country around us. We can acknowledge the continuing risk of covid but hope that our vaccinations and boosters will make it less deadly and, in time, it may even disappear altogether.

My journey around London shows me how risk seems to be perceived. 

I’m warned to wear a mask on buses and tubes to “protect others” (a clever bit of psychology in case I’m not concerned about protecting me) and told to wash my hands for at least 20 seconds in case of germs. 

Careful not to trip up the escalators, “mind the gap” on the tube, keep your distance! Do this, Don’t do that. Travellers holding on to their mask habit avert their eyes from someone who is mask free. They look anxious, their eyes darting nervously from nose to mouth. Are these warnings helping us or are they making life just that bit more frightening?

Of course it makes sense. We have been locked away and scared for almost two years. We have discovered a new illness that was highly infectious and for which there was initially no cure. Who wouldn’t be scared? 

But it’s all so obvious too and, some would argue, these are decisions that any adult person would take. Germs pass through contact - wash your hands; cover your mouth if you’re coughing and sneezing and keep your distance. If you’re ill, keep away from others. We knew that before the pandemic so why, I wonder, does it all seem so threatening now.

From a personal point of view, I am concerned that this two-year period has left us as needy and insecure as small children. It’s as though we’ve had our own agency taken away and we’re having to learn to live again from scratch. We already know lockdown has had a damaging effect on children and young people but what about those of us who thought we had left our childhoods way behind us? This in-between stage at the wrong time of life is very unsettling. 

Part of the problem may be because politicians and those in authority like it when people do as they’re told. It makes it easier for them if we’re compliant. Rules are habit-forming. If we are forced to stick to them for long enough, they may become second nature for some people.

For others, this just brings up resentment. Take a look at a toddler who wants to do something for themselves as you try to help them. The chances are they will brush your hand away impatiently and continue on their own path. That is as it should be: they are on the path to growing up.

It seems that we presently have this  dichotomy between those poor people in Ukraine who have had their safety and security ripped away from them at a terrible and astonishing speed, while those of us lucky enough to be in the UK are almost reluctant to ease ourselves out of our own state-sponsored and comfortable cocoon.

May I politely suggest it’s time we took back control and acknowledged life is a risky business. However, as adults we are perfectly capable of making our own risk assessments. In order to get the best out of life, we need to live it as adults, weighing up the risks and taking our own decisions. Decision making may be hard but life’s more fun that way.  

Photo 1:  Max Kukurudziak on Unsplash

Photo 2:  Matt Artz on Unsplash

Photo 3:  Edward Howell on Unsplash

How To Say Sorry and Mean It

Sorry is a word that many of us find hard to say.

Sometimes, it’s not so difficult. You bump into a person, say sorry and move on with the easy acceptance that it was your fault.

But it becomes a little more difficult to own up to one’s own errors when there might be repercussions and, the worse the repercussions, the trickier it is to say the word.

Let’s start with the need for an apology. Why do we need to do it?

Put simply, it’s part of our society’s rules to allow us to live reasonably well within our group. It is usually seen as a way of making good a situation that has gone wrong.

It feels as though it should be second nature. We are taught from almost the time we can speak that sometimes we have to say sorry. It’s effectively ingrained and that means our conscience will be giving us a strong clue when we should be apologising.  

So how is it that, almost from the time we learn of the need to own up to our errors, some of us also feel the need to wriggle out of that apologetic mode?

As with most things, it probably starts in childhood. Think of the child who has that naughty expression even when they’re innocent and they get the blame. Imagine that sense of indignation when it’s not your fault. If it goes on too long, you’re quite likely to wonder at the merits of apologies with a distorted view of your own.

And what about the angelic-looking child who looks as though butter wouldn’t melt in his/her mouth - and yet their behaviour is devilish? They don’t need to say sorry because they’re never blamed. When they grow up, they, too, may have a skewed idea of how polite society works.

Most of us are somewhere in the middle, occasionally being blamed for what we didn’t do but being able to set that off against the time when we “got away” with things of which we were guilty. An example of that might be going slightly over a 30-mile speed limit when driving and not being caught. Guilty but lucky. 

Many of us are also fortunate that our apologies tend to be private matters so, if we do feel humiliation, it will probably not last too long.

When sorry seems to be the hardest word

But what happens when you’re obliged to make an apology in public and it’s televised around the nation. How should you manage that? 

Let’s now turn to the political arena and the current PM’s quandaries.

In our culture - and this is different from other parts of the world - we require the person saying they’re sorry to look at us when they do so. 

It is important that we see each other’s eyes. On a primitive - instinctive - level, we need to feel that the person really is truly sorry. And then we can decide whether we are going to forgive and forget, accept it and bear a grudge or reject it completely. Generally, people tend to be forgiving so the first option seems the most likely to work.

But, and there is a very big but, all this depends on how contrite you really are. If you apologise because you must but you neither feel it nor mean it, then your potential friend or foe will pick up on those inner feelings and react accordingly. They will sense that your heart isn’t in it and they may be reluctant to forgive.

This leads us back to the PM. Putting aside the misinformation, confusion, possibly being economical with the truth and the fact that a great number of people in Britain obeyed the lockdown laws set by the Government over Covid, it was possible Boris might still be forgiven for disobeying those same laws, if he did.

However, his apology needed to be good and, in my opinion, it was not. The problem came from his clear discomfort as he addressed MPs in the House of Commons. It seemed to me that he was grudging. He is a usually clear speaker. He may - he often does - go off on a tangent but I can hear what he says. 

This time it was harder. 

The apologetic words were said but were somehow rushed over. There wasn’t a pause for us to digest them and to consider what we felt about them. It seemed like a take-it-or-leave -it moment. It was almost as if he were a little boy being made to say sorry when he really didn’t want to. It was not as though he was the man behind the laws and the one who had put us in lockdown. 

Lockdown was hard on everyone

Even so, this, too, might just have been forgiven if he had kept his eyes on the prize - to get the electorate onside. If he had only dropped his gaze, bowed his head a little longer when coming under fire from his opponents and left us convinced that he accepted he was to blame. 

This didn’t happen. 

Boris was too quick to brush over it and launch his own attack on someone else - to deflect, in other words. Attack was not the best form of defence, here, and he blew it. We were not convinced it was a heartfelt apology, despite the best efforts of his loyal supporters to insist that he really was contrite. 

And the moral of the story? 

Only apologise if you mean it. Be prepared to tolerate some form of admonishment and maybe even allow yourself to feel a bit awkward and accepting that you deserve it. If not, say nothing. A phoney apology only makes matters worse.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Photo by Caleb Woods on Unsplash

Photo by Rod Long on Unsplash