On ice

Frozen. Of course I get bored. Though I have three conditional yesses to my three media projects, two won't happen for months and the third has no time attached to it. I'm delighted they are on the system, but they are set up for a time in the future and I can't use them right now. So what do I do (no, not smoke dope...), I read about what to do. Nick Roach reflects my wisdom (ie proves some of the insights I have here and elsewhere may actually be sensible by saying them himself), within a couple of days my latest insight 'I don't have to be right on everything as long as I'm happy' or put the other way round 'I can be wrong and happy' turned up in my book, 'What God wants', about number ten in the 'Conversations with God' series.

So one more up to the guru (my forum name), and he also gave a formula which feels right to me, of using positive imagination. This means feeling as if you'd got what you wanted already. Not only does he say it makes you feel better (at least it takes your mind off anxiety issues) but actually attracts these events into your life!.
Well, coincidences have shown me (including my last three insights being repeated by teachers within a day or so) there appears to be a control out there beyond the chaos of random life we assume is all there is. I can only profit from this change of attitude as the previous one was the one that was taking me on a one way trip to a lifetime of medication, especially with none of those very events happening to possibly drag me out of the lowest mental states.

I had to be right for every exam and essay I ever wrote, at work in all its forms, and of course it continued into my ordinary leisure time as it was required the rest of it. Now I have let it go. I needn't correct people every time they misquote a fact. I needn't help each individual heading for possible disaster in their social or family life as a matter of duty. I needn't give opinions based on fact and logic to people who can do nothing about it either way. And all the rest. The boundary has been drawn at work and the rest is now anarchy. Which leads me nicely on to my second influence of the weekend. Why I was a hippy. I just saw the David Frost programme for the first time when the hippies took over, from about 1971. I instantly remembered why, at about the age of 8 or 9, had I totally taken on the hippy ways and values (can you imagine a ten year old shopping around all the boutiques to get the latest clothes? It was what we had to do back then!). Well, the values these guys offered, anarchy, freedom, sod the rules, long hair, free love, the lot (except the drugs...) was just how I felt at the time. I had the hair (when allowed to for very long), the clothes and most of all the attitudes. I ran campaigns at school to change the rules, told people not to do what they were told, challeneged more or less everything I didn't agree with as it appeared (quite correctly in many cases) to be restricting my freedom for no good reason.

I haven't changed, just learnt. Learnt how to communicate and express these ideas better. The views, they are identical. That reminded me, and regardless of the age, if you were part of any movement and can remember it, your age was irrelevant. I was a hippy child, but a hippy no less. My au pairs friends were sometimes hippies, we went to some parties with them, the people on TV and in the streets were hippies, and in the papers. The girls I knew (not the boys, I went to prep school...) often dressed as hippies as I did when I could get hold of them. That culture in what was, at times, swinging London was very real for at least three years from about 1967 onwards. I remember seeing an article about hair in the Observer magazine, with men with hair beyond their shoulders, and deciding 'that's for me'. Once I could get away with it, for most of the next 20 years that was the case, till the damn stuff began to leave me. Now I look like your local trainspotter or even worse village idiot, but inside I've got the long hair, beard and flowery clothes I would have had had it been 1968 again and I was the same age as now. But scratch the surface and now I know it's still in there somewhere. I wish there were a few more though, it's lonely being stuck in the past...