lxxxix

I’ve hung on to a lot of loss. Some moments in particular are still so clear that I can, for instance, summon up the image of my favourite toy as a toddler going down the plughole after a bath and see the exact hue of sea green bath and cheese yellow spaceman.

One of the losses I mourn the most for the fact of what I lost, not the consequences of the loss, was the contents of the plastic cardboard-backed art folder that I put down in the canteen of my upper secondary school and never remembered to pick up.

I have always wanted to draw, always. I instinctively reach for images anyway, my ideas are often defined by a single or series of snapshots. It has pained me for years and years that I couldn’t translate these vivid images into drawings that did them justice.

Unlike music and playing the guitar, drawing feels like something I should be able to do but can’t because my biomechanics won’t cooperate. I don’t feel or think in music, which is something I just know you need in order to play the way I want to, from my bones. But I feel and think in images, I play with ideas visually. Why can’t I draw them properly?

In my GCSE art class we had what I think must have been a TEFL or training teacher for a month or two, and after days watching me do nothing in the class he speared me with the question, “Why don’t you try?”. I could tell that he was asking because my self-defeating fecklessness was actually upsetting him.

Goaded or inspired by his challenge, I did try. I drew two pictures, the only complete drawings I have ever been proud of. One was an earnest attempt at surrealism that really did replicate what was in my head, what I wanted to see on the page. The other was a clean, sharp still-life that I had great fun embellishing.

Of course both were possible because I concentrated on them, I tried very hard to achieve something – instead of launching into something half-hoping that it would just work out without me knowing much about it, half-waiting for it all to be shit. Just like always.

These pictures made me so happy that I carried them around in the folder everywhere. And, of course, they were in the folder when I left it behind. When I lost it. I never saw them again. But shamefully I never tried again.

What was the point? I had lost the only proof of my effort, and I’d never remember what I was able to do, once, how I was able to surprise myself. With my best work lost I simply gave up. In my GCSE exam, my half-hearted attempt just wasn’t good enough and I threw it away, instead handing in a piece of paper covered in scribble with ‘Scribble’ written on it.

The pain of losing something I had really tried hard to achieve was far too much for me to bear, and any chance of me giving it another go, of me trying just as hard or harder again, was completely out of the question. Looking back now, I am astonished at my weakness.

Nowadays even though I carry notebooks everywhere I know that, as Steinbeck said, nothing good gets away. Some of my best ideas have sat within/outside of reach for years before I’ve got a hold of them. I don’t worry about forgetting great ideas anymore because the best ones never get away.

But back then I had no hope. I think I had looked to this man (though he might only have been 20 or so) who challenged me and felt that it was his challenge, his insistence that I try, that had made it possible for me to put such effort and achieve such results.

Part of coming to terms with being a writer, or to be more honest part of coming to terms with continuing to be a writer, has been to accept that everything that burns powerfully in my head can be expressed with the same power on the page, by me. I just have to try.

Why did I hang on to that loss? I used the sheer scale of the pain I felt in losing something I loved, something I had created, to convince myself that in creating it I had removed something from myself that could not be replaced. By losing it, I had lost a part of myself.

And the pain of losing was easier, irrationally, to cope with than the perceived pain of renewed effort. Last week I lost a very powerful blog post that I had taken a long time to work through and was heartened to feel a sense that it didn’t matter – the fact that I had written it once was proof that I could write it again. And, perhaps, better.

Last but not least it was an opportunity for guilt. If I had loved those pictures so much, how could I have possibly been so careless as to lose the folder I carried them in? I beat myself with this so much that hearing it from someone else was excruciating.

This though is finally the real reason that the memory still hangs around. As much as I hated myself, was furious with myself, for losing the folder – and as much as I seethed and recoiled when anyone else piled on the same judgement – by clinging to the guilt of my actions I was succeeding in avoiding the responsibility.

Not only did I lose something through my own carelessness, but then I gave up and failed to find it again. I may have talked to everyone I could in order to find the folder, to track it down, but I never once did the human thing and turned to myself. I looked for an external force to take away from me the responsibility to replace what I had lost.

Had I done so, had I expended the effort to replace the pictures that I had stupidly left behind in a moment of dumbness, I would have truly understood the cost of my loss. I would have also learned a hugely positive thing about myself – I could do it again.

lxxxviii

In my first year at secondary school (I was about 15) I sat in the canteen and tried to convince my friends of the fantastic benefits that being a-sexual would bring. I had a whole concept, a fantastical made up planet populated by repeating families of clones.

It would be easy – two clones would touch and choose to create a third, child clone. It was secure – there would never be an accidental clone. It would be a relief – there’d be no need for sex. It would be freedom – there’d be no need for girls.

My entire life has been coloured by my problem with girls. Women are a different matter. But my fear of girls, my longing, my need, my understanding (or misunderstanding), my distrust/mistrust, my disconnection, plagued me from childhood to adulthood.

A depressing amount of time during the three years following that bizarre conversation (throughout which, of course, my friends treated me like a crazy person) was influenced by the sort of iconic, can’t-eat-can’t-sleep schoolboy crush that sells unambitious teen novels.

The actual breath in my lungs was often owned and controlled by the modest, unthreatening young girl who was in my form class. There are memories of my inability to connect with her that sting even now, and which shaped the rest of my life.

I endlessly examined and re-examined the question she asked me at the end of one class, clawing for some truth, some hint, that I had missed or failed to interpret at the time. “Do you think it’s funny that M said he could see Uranus?”, K asked me, quietly. My flustered reply, “No…” didn’t result in anything but her returning to her desk. What did it mean?!

It’s embarrassing but undeniable that I tried to draw her once, while gazing over in her direction, but stopped because I felt that to create anything that wasn’t perfect and beautiful – like she was – would be an insult, would destroy my vision of her.

Looking back now, I can be pretty sure I know what this meant.

In a heartbeat I can relive with clarity one morning in our form room. I had missed assembly and went to wait for my class, where I found K had done the same. Silent, I sat at my desk. I think my desk was some distance behind hers. I kept my head down, every minute of silence a suffocation, a choking. I was terrified of her.

I was terrified of her. Because I knew that I was small, ugly, worthless in comparison to the boys who were her friends, and I knew that this meant that I did not exist in her world, that when I left the room I would be impossible to recall. That she did not think ever of me.

I was terrified of her because she had everything of mine. I was powerless. And she knew it, she must see it, she must know exactly the way I feel and it must disgust her, trouble her, upset her that someone like her could attract someone like me. Someone awful.

But I was terrified that she was also testing me, sending out codes about the way that she felt about me and I did not have the capacity to see them, let alone untangle them and even if I did understand them I would never, ever, believe that they were true.

After three years, K and I ended up in fewer classes together and though I always knew when she was in the same room as me, my breath (at least) was now my own. Until the next wrenching crush, and the next, and the next.

Throughout all of the terrible longing-distances I put myself through, it was my unsolvable self-doubt that swung me from a passionate and romantic hope that something was happening to the pain and despair of being so terribly wrong.

Not that I told any of my crushes about the depths or the realities of my feelings. I played the same game I felt I was suffering in reverse, attempting to send out codified hints and learn how to say everything without ever really saying anything, how to prevent making myself vulnerable to rejection while yearning for the relief of honest expression of feelings.

I feel a prize idiot now, writing this, knowing that I managed to convince myself that a) I had to play this game because everyone else was playing it, and b) That I was the only, the only, person who played the game in order to protect myself from rejection.

What a fucking idiot! What was I thinking? But I didn’t think, I didn’t see beyond everyone else’s cool, calm faces. I saw only the beauty and the sexuality that I yearned for and the calculating and confident eyes that saw straight through me, that skewered me.

I gave away all of my power without once ever realising that everyone else around me was doing the same thing. Except that because I’d solidified this idea that I was totally unlike anyone else, I maintained this voluntary evacuation of power while so many others learned how to protect themselves better, build themselves a way to take their power back.

To my great and undiminished shame, I hit rock bottom at the age of 23 in the queue for a bus outside of the University of Bath after a night out with friends. I hated women. They had everything. They used the power their beauty gave them to crush me, to hurt me.

I hated women. I really said that. In a ludicrous, pantomime muttering splurge I expressed all of the poison I was drowning in, all of the hideous suspicions and pathetic accusations I had surrounded myself with, strangled myself with, disempowered myself with.

Because only I had given all of my power away. It was mine to possess but I had thrown it out as soon as it had entered me, thrown it in the direction of a pretty girl who really didn’t want it, and who rejected it, and who I then hated for rejecting me.

The friend of a friend who invited us all to the night out never spoke to me again. I’m glad, because he was right not to. If it would have been psychically possible I would have never spoken to myself again either. I was a disgrace. I was a mess.

It’s been many years and much, much, much talking since then but there is still a hoary dinosaur lurking deep inside me that fears pretty, lithe, outwardly-confident girls (girls, remember, women are something else) because I can feel its feeble urge to dissolve the control I have won over my own power and give it away.

But every day I have the love and support of my wife. Every day I feel the wholeness and peace that our marriage formed in me after decades of staggering through a stunted emotional wasteland. Every day I aspire to live honestly and with the understanding that a man is responsible for everything he does.

#OpenMinday – A mature individualism @diane1859 @shepleygreen

What is Open Minday?

“To many in both politics and business, the triumph of the self is the ultimate expression of democracy, where power has finally moved to the people.”
Promo for The Century of the Self, Adam Curtis

Even if this belief is challenged by Curtis’ documentary, which illustrates how Freudian psychology has been employed by business and politics to control the masses through the illusion of individual power, the power of the individual is still formidable.

In the West we live in a culture which cultivates and rewards individualism. Though only a specific kind – survivalists are a joke and people outside of conventional society are suspicious, but we all act as consumers in order to get through the day.

That’s not to say we are all driven by consumerism, but if we want to eat, sleep under a roof, create something or enjoy something we have to accept our role as consumers or seek out an alternative – confining us to the crowd outside of conventional acceptance.

A great many people are very good at making our individualist society pay for them, but this is more a testament to the ingenuity of human beings than proof that individualism is a natural human instinct. The rage expressed against the 1% who are particularly good at manipulating the system only highlights how non-human individualism actually is.

Individualism, especially consumerism, is focused on ‘want’ and not gratitude or the urge to contribute towards something external, something ‘not you’. It’s a one-way path, where the world passes into the individual and remains there. Individualism hoards energy.

But for me this is only the first stage of a cycle, the childhood of individualism. The possibility of a return path from individual to the world is occasionally hinted at – those people whose ‘want’ actually drives them to positively contribute, even if they remain essentially selfish regardless of achievement.

If the first stage focuses on the things which travel along that path – the gain which being an individual brings – then the second stage begins when the end point of the path, your own self, finally becomes the focus. In this adolescence of individualism, the questions “Who am I?”, “Why do I want these things?” or “What do I really want?” are unavoidable.

They are huge and alarming questions. I have never felt that anyone taught me to answer them, and my developing self-awareness was so hamstrung by guilt and shame that I was trapped in this stage for almost my entire conscious life. Until I at last discovered that I’d had the capacity to provide the answers myself all along.

By accepting my self I could begin completing the cycle and discover how to return the energy which passed from the world into me back out into the world, and in a way I feel contributes something – the maturity of individualism. My method is this blog, my future writing career. My method is in my contributing to discussion, ideas, thought.

But I’m only a writer, that’s only my method. What’s your method of returning to the world? Look around you and you’ll see a hundred other people, each with their own innate method. But how many of us have discovered what that is?

At a weekend away last year I met a group of people I’ve become hugely interested in, particularly one guy who told me about his business in making furniture and how he was building his own house with his girlfriend, at the same time as a full-time tutor post.

He got up early to use his workshop, taught a full day, then returned home after working into the evening. The more we talked the more obvious it was that he had passed all the way along the cycle far earlier than I had. He had found his method.

Neither of us are exactly changing the world but we are both contributing to it. And, although both of our aims would be to make enough of a living out of our methods that we didn’t have to do anything else, there’s a difference between us and business.

Principally it’s in that simple word, ‘enough’. Consumerism, that one-way strain of individualism, has no understanding or place for the word enough because it suggests that there could possibly be an end to ‘want’, which is only possible if consumerism ends.

As I drew out the other week, the modern structure of business is also unfamiliar with the word enough. The desire to make a living out of your individual method only breaks the flow back into the world if you allow it to forget about ‘enough’ and focus on ‘more’.

I see a future where a vast gulf opens up – between child-like or adolescent individualists (businesses) driving for ‘more’ and mature individualists driven by getting ‘enough’. The businesses will only ever get bigger, because mid-size or smaller companies will be either consumed by corporations or will fail to support the drive for ‘more’, and die away.

The further the corporations get from individuals, the more the mature individualist  groups will be free to express their methods and strive for quality that businesses focused only on wanting more are unable to match. And yet this new mature, mirror-like individualism will still be contributing to the world through the pursuit of individual goals.

If your method creates a product – writing, building, crafting – then it can be easy. But where I see the need for Government is in enabling a change to the shape of our culture so that individuals whose method isn’t so straightforward a match to retail-style society (ie, caring, teaching, healing) can fulfil their individual goals of having ‘enough’ too.

But my point right now is a request for everybody to ask what method exists within themselves, to strive for a mature individualism where that method is expressed in return for ‘enough’. Finding my method taught me that ‘enough’ is less than I thought I needed.

I’ve tried to open your mind this Open Minday, but if you’re interested in expanding your thoughts about society, economy or capitalism then @diane1859 @shepleygreen are the perfect place to start.

#OpenMinday – Spanking, and parenting @RealDoctorStu @KateKatharina @lizfraser1 @cherrymum1972 @NigelNelson

What is Open Minday?

I loathe TV soaps. But despite this, I can’t ignore the fact that one scene in Coronation Street, of a man smacking a child, is enough to trigger debate about a worthwhile topic in an admirable variety of places.

But whether it’s right to smack your child or not isn’t worth taking much time to think about. Not least because there’s already a huge amount of informed and intelligent writing about it, and my feeling is that any further debate is repetitive, and basically redundant.

What’s more constructive is asking what ‘right’ actually means. The problem is that both sides are so polarised, as @RealDoctorStu neatly illustrates by putting the two arguments side by side, and both truly believe they are right and have evidence to back this up.

I was smacked as a child. For me there is a serious difference between smacking and child abuse. I was smacked, I wasn’t abused. Does that sound depressingly like the repeated, eerily similar phrases every smackee seems to use? The ‘it never did me any harm’, or ‘I deserved it’ or ‘I knew I had done something wrong’? Then let me clear this up.

I was smacked because my parents had finally lost their temper, or their patience, or I had pushed them so far in the arms race of parent-child relations that they had (to them) nowhere else to go but the nuclear option. I wasn’t smacked because they were drunk, bored, or motivated simply to cause me pain and suffering. That’s where I draw the line.

We know that the abuse of children isn’t right. But even in attempting to agree on abuse, not everyone is ready to come along quietly. I don’t know how anyone can see @KateKatharina‘s shocking example of a US judge subjecting his daughter to an experience of inexcusable, pre-meditated abuse of trust and parental responsibility and not recognise it as abuse, as being wrong. But, still, some maintain he was justified.

The line of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ has to be decided personally. Writer @Lizfraser1 shares her discomfort with the idea of parents hitting their kids, but contrasts smacking with hitting. In the Corrie clip she points out the character’s rage as a crucial marker that his actions are more worrisome than the light physical, irregular, discipline she gives her own children.

Parents will, with a slight raising of the hands, confess to smacking. But they’re keen to qualify this as ‘occasional taps’, used ‘once in a while’. Like Liz Fraser, they acknowledge there is a fine line, stressing that smacking has to be ‘used effectively’.

That’s totally at odds with my feelings. I see smacking as the momentary lapses, the times when the parent felt they were left with no other choice, and abuse as the controlled, conscious violence. But parents who do smack see the line into abuse crossed by those who lack the ability to control their level of violence, who lose control and then abuse.

I’m more worried about the parents who consciously smack their children without being angry, impatient or at the end of their tether. Smacking, for me, is the last resort. For these parents it seems to be a vital tool in their disciplinary armoury.

Again, the question of whether it’s right or not to smack your child is defunct, dead in the water. The interesting question to ask is why would you smack your child?

Smacking is seen as discipline, and both arguments question the efficiency of this. For my own part, I will say that I didn’t benefit from smacking, it certainly never taught me anything, it definitely didn’t bring me closer to my parents and I hope that I will never lose my cool enough to do it to my children.

Will my children suffer because of this? Am I buying into a ‘myth’ that smacking isn’t effective? Nothing from my own life fits with the idea that smacking is essential to enforce reason, or to set up a deterrant that otherwise can’t be explained. I am not the self-aware, self-critical and intellectual person I am because I was smacked.

Take the children out of the question for a moment and everything is much clearer. Those campaigning for a ban on smacking seek to define all physical discipline as abuse, while those against… are they seeking anything other than a protection of the parent, a protection of parents struggling to make the best decisions they can?

We all struggle when called to justify decisions we’ve made that skirt the line between acceptable and unacceptable – because in making these decisions we’ve had to define that line ourselves. And often enough we’ve had to make these decisions sooner than we might have liked, without really thinking, without really considering.

My instinct is that I will never smack my children, but my experience tells me that it’s only in knife-edge moments where the decision to smack is made – if it’s even a decision, more a kneejerk reaction to powerlessness. I know that if I have the time to think about smacking I’ll not do it, and I trust that I will always make the effort to make the time to think.

Because it’s not only the child who is smacked that can be affected. In @cherrymum1972‘s example, the act of smacking (a cuff around the ear) is enough to undermine the safety of a child’s classroom. If the argument for smacking is that children can’t understand reason, isn’t that a reason to protect them from violence that they, in turn, can’t understand?

Again – why smack your child? And again, if the answer is thoughtful, considered discipline, then what lies behind the reaction from so many ‘normal’ people (as normal as commenters writing such things can be assumed to be) who seem to be only a few steps away from yelling “stick the boot in!”, or the classic “I was offended – that he didn’t hit her harder!”.

I wish I was exaggerating, but it’s chilling that there are commenters that stand by smacking with theories like “The worst thing that ever happened to…the world in general is the single mother” or MPs who celebrate the “short sharp shock” and crow that “growing up undisciplined is much worse than being smacked as a child”.

I don’t believe that any of these unfortunate people honestly trust anyone else, least of all their own children or the children of others. There is a sense that children are born as untamed chaos that needs to be forcefully pressed into routine, that they are irrational beings without reason who need to ‘learn the rules’ or be moulded into a routine.

How can you trust something you believe to be so chaotic to develop sensibly, to grow up into a ‘normal’ person? Sadly the eventual rebellion against repression, the pushing back of the child which finally comes when they’re strong enough, when they’ve had enough, only proves to these people that they were right. Not that they might have been wrong.

Children are trustworthy, and I look forward to proving this belief. We will trust our children, trust them to be human. We won’t need to smack them because we won’t force a routine onto them that they will chaotically refuse, and so we won’t create a situation for ourselves where going nuclear is the only option. We will shape our world around them.

And what harm will it do? Can’t we teach them right from wrong without hammering it home? Can’t we allow them, in the years when we have no right to expect them to understand ‘rational’ routines, to have what they need, when they ask for it? Can’t we trust them not to be tarnished, damaged by this beyond further teaching?

It’s easy to be scared as a parent. It was one of my first reactions – scared that my child wouldn’t love me, that the fact I would be unable to do anything but love them without question would give them a power over me that they could abuse.

But that’s my shit to deal with, not my child’s. It’s up to me to overcome this, not to attempt to avoid the outcome that I fear by forcing my child into a shape I can deal with, a shape that my otherwise rational life can handle without too much stress.

I like to think of children as comets, not moons. Moons are locked into orbits around the gravity of larger bodies. Comets are influenced by gravity but preserve their own wider, unpredictable orbits. I trust my children to be comets, to streak away into amazing places but to eventually come back. I trust my children to love me.

lxxxvii

There’s something hot and heavy about a final draft. I was editing a ghost story I’d written before Christmas, in the final few hours of a week’s work, juggling the things I needed to finish in the office with putting the final touches to the story.

It was something I was going to read out at a friend’s party, so there was already a sensation of performance attached to the words, but I found that the closer I got to the end, the ruddier my cheeks were getting, the hotter my blood.

As I played around with the last few paragraphs, making sure that the reveal was set up just right, that the words were sinister enough, that the image I was painting was perfectly chilling, I was intensely aware that if I looked like I felt I would have a job of explaining why finishing a ghost story was behind it all.

My forehead was blazing, I could barely sit still. The prospect of completing a piece of work in a way which tied everything together properly, which hit all the right notes, was exhilerating. It felt amazing, exciting. It was arousing.

But not as that might sound. It wasn’t particularly sexual, it was more emotional, more about being voluntarily vulnerable. I was laying myself bare, because in order to read this and achieve anything I’d have to be utterly serious, totally committed.

The prospect of how people might react to something I was so serious about, something which was a whole exposure of my ability and person and ambition as a writer, was giving me flushes, making it hard to sit still. It was exciting me.

Now. Without going into too much detail, I know this feeling pretty well. A few months into my first job I had an unbelievable email… thing… with a girl (married) from the same company. It went nowhere but at the time the possibilities, the exhileration of something happening which was so unlike ‘real’ life, was intoxicating.

I’ve also sent more than my fair share of conversations online or via text which were entirely, honestly and shamelessly… exposed. The longer the exchanges went on, the higher the temperature of my cheekbones seemed to soar. It was addictive.

Often, I can forget quite how passionate a person I am. Then, suddenly, like while editing this story, it can burn to the surface and I do, say or think things which a few moments ago even would not have even flitted into my mind. It takes no time at all for it to arrive.

But once it does, there’s a stark contrast between the things which drive it on and the rest of the world, the rest of life, which is now just a colourless backdrop. It stays with me, and I was wired for the whole of the drive home that evening, story printed and ready.

Why should writing have the same effect on me that being so… unabashed does? Is it the writing that’s the thing, given that in all the situations which take me to this place I’m creating words, expressing something, reaching for something impactful.

I’m sure that the idea of performing the words at a later date made a big impact, anticipating as I was that experience. But then, if you follow (and without me needing to go into detail) the same could be wholeheartedly said of the other experience too.

Should I write all my pieces with the intention of reading them out? Will that passion take me to places that otherwise unmoved writing might not? Or is it the connection with what I’m writing that can light such heat in my creative heart?

Or, alternatively, is it the illicitness, the taboo nature of what I’m doing even right now (feeling just a little of that face-warming glow) as I write for myself in an environment when I should be doing something entirely different, entirely not for myself?

I have what the internet tells me is ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response), where sometimes my whole scalp will tingle at some trigger – an interesting accent, light breeze, or even right now, just writing about having it.

I don’t remember if I’ve ever had ASMR while writing (not about ASMR), but it’s obvious to me that writing itself is rooted so deeply inside of me that my passion must be entwined with my expressive impluses.

It’s no surprise then, that when I’m most in touch with my creative instinct, when I’m trying my hardest to express something with clarity and impact, that I should be excited, aroused even, by my efforts.

Will it be the same for all my final drafts? I hope so. But what I really hope is that the writing which leaves my face red, burning and almost blisteringly stimulated, has even an ounce of the same effect on anyone who reads it.

The etiquette of eating shit

In life, sooner or later, you’re going to have to eat shit. And it really ought to be your own.

This is one of the first lessons we should teach our children. Okay. Maybe one of the second lessons, after the differences between literal and figurative expression.

You can’t create or destroy other people’s shit, only your own. But that doesn’t stop people trying to make you eat their shit. Because they refuse to eat it themselves, and because once we’re presented with our own shit, the first thing we want to do is get rid of it.

So shit passes from person to person, each of us trying to offload it as quickly as possible before we have to suffer the indignity of handling shit. You shit on me, simultaneously highlighting how much of my own shit I’m carrying around. And I shovel it off to someone else when I just can’t cope being buried in shit any more.

We watch in fascination as others are made to eat their own shit, or even better the shit that someone else has left for them to deal with. We anticipate shit coming our way and instinctively palm off as much of the shit we’re currently handling to try to make room.

Some of us create more shit than others, some of us can sit in shit longer than others, some of us manage to avoid even coming into contact with our own shit, let alone anyone else’s shit. But shit always sticks somewhere. Someone, eventually, has to eat shit.

Shit is ugly. Shovelling shit on others is just passing on ugliness, like the spouse who beats their partner or the worker who feels powerless in their dead-end job but powerful when firing both barrels of their aggression into other people’s lives.

Parents spoonfeed their own shit to their children. Children spend their lives humbly trying to eat shit they feel responsible for, but which they can never properly stomach because it’s shit that rightfully belongs to their parents.

People actively eat shit that isn’t their own to protect others from having to eat their own shit, feeling that they’re making a positive difference but ignoring the fact that until you accept you have to eat your own shit you’re always going to keep on creating shit.

Some people actively shovel their shit onto others because they can’t accept they must eat it. Others then shovel shit elsewhere because everyone is shovelling shit onto them. And some refuse to eat their own shit because, well, no one else is eating shit are they?

Because shit makes us unhappy. And having to eat our own shit means we have to be unhappy and self-aware, which has the capacity to make you incredibly unhappy. Especially when those who can’t accept eating their own shit will only ever sneer and point disgustedly at the shit-eating, without any ability to see the shit-free existance beyond.

But until you come to terms with eating your own shit you’ll be forever shovelling or dodging or sitting in shit. Until you start eating your own shit you won’t ever know which shit is yours, and which shit is someone else’s. But once you start, when you can identify your own shit and accept that it’s up to you to consume it, you start creating less shit.

Eventually, once you’ve started eating your own shit and stopped creating so much more shit, you’ll be left with no shit at all. And you’ll be able to recognise your shit before you’ve even created it, controlling your shit so you never have to eat shit ever again.

As parents we should have already eaten our own shit so that we’re in a position to eat our children’s shit, until they become capable of recognising their shit and eating it themselves. Your shit can massively and negatively affect other people. It’s your responsibility to eat all of it so it doesn’t hurt the people you love, or anyone else for that matter.

Shit throwing is most obvious on the roads. I’ve been forced to change lanes because of a mistake and the person behind has beeped me because I’ve slowed down, at the same time as the driver zooming up my left has scowled and refused to let me in.

Then I’ve got frustrated at feeling like I’ve backed down or been humiliated or whatever and I’ve lost my temper and found myself swearing at both of them. All of us just passing shit around, all of us covered in it, all of us trying to get someone else to eat our own shit.

Yet the power to stop it is in all of us. If I eat my own shit in this situation – I’ve made a mistake – then I’m empowered and immune to the other shit. The beeper attempts to shovel their shit on me. The scowler follows suit. But if I get frustrated with all this aggression I eat that shit too, and none of the rest of the shit will stick anymore.

Except now the other drivers both find the shit they tried to shovel onto me being returned straight back to them. Now they’ve got to eat their own shit – that they’re impatient and aggressive – or attempt to instantly shovel this shit in another direction.

But imagine if all of us had already taken on the responsibility of eating our own shit a long time ago. I’d recognise my mistake and accept it. The beeper wouldn’t touch their horn because they’d be calmer. The scowler would just let me in and we’d all be happier.

It’s true that when you start accepting your own shit and face the fact that you’ve got to eat it, you begin realising how much shit you’ve got and how long you’ve been ignoring it, hiding it from yourself or attempting to offload it elsewhere.

But stick with it. Don’t give up on eating your own shit. Do it properly and it takes you out of the whole shit parade itself.

Sooner or later, you’re going to have to eat shit. Do you want to keep on living in a world of shit? Or do you want to stop having to dodge all that other shit by accepting that if you really have to eat shit, it has to be your own.

#OpenMinday – Three Men and a Baby and the capacity of all men @TheRealNimoy @_TomSelleck @TedDanson1947

The song over the opening titles of Three Men and a Baby (“Boys will be boys, bad boys, bad boys, nothing but trouble”) hints that you’re about to watch a film about overgrown boys struggling to grow up and face responsibility. This couldn’t be more inaccurate.

Admittedly, the song hasn’t even finished before Ted Danson and Tom Selleck have charmed an impressive number of women back to the penthouse apartment they share with (sorry, Steve) the less successful, but just-as-confirmed bachelor, Steve Guttenberg.

But this is just the set up, the Pledge. Don’t let it fool you. Because in actual fact Three Men and a Baby is one of the most sensitive and affirming films about fatherhood you’ll ever see. It’s practically a homage to the capacity and capability of each and every man.

Let’s skip through the thin layer of plot (mistaken packages, gangsters, police) because, heck, the film does so itself in order to bring the titular men and the baby into the foreground. The fathers/baby relationship isn’t a backdrop for a plot, it is the plot.

The inspirational Turn arrives sometime after Peter (Selleck) and Michael (Guttenberg) have discovered Jack’s (Danson) baby daughter Mary outside their door. And it’s as surprising as the discovery that the film is directed by cultural polymath Leonard Nimoy.

In the first moments of Mary’s arrival in bonnet and basket, everything we could suspect is confirmed. The two men are furious with Jack’s easy-going attitude toward the baby and horrified at the prospect of having to take care of it on their own.

Michael has no idea why she’s crying and exhausts himself acting like a clown to try to get her to stop. Peter goes cross-eyed when faced with the sheer scale of baby stuff he needs to buy and the bewildering advice offered by the first woman he asks.

The idea of the situation being abnormal is rammed home by the many mothers with prams and toddlers in every credible frame. The helpful woman, though certainly helpful, does look to be enjoying Peter’s discomfort and lack of knowledge.

Then the two desperate men attempt to change Mary’s dirty nappy and jerry-rig a replacement with one six months too large, which immediately falls off, giving Mary the opportunity to wee onto the sofa Peter is holding her over.

But think about it. Neither man freaked out at the idea of changing Mary or refused to deal with the dirty nappy. Peter doesn’t lose his temper even though the sofa’s covered in piss, and a few moments later Michael’s cleaning the sofa. The stereotype is wavering.

It’s obvious that Peter is rich, and so just blindly buying a haul of baby stuff would have been a worry-free task. But he doesn’t just buy ‘stuff’. He’s been to several shops, picked out stacks of equipment for every possible need the baby might have, and then spends the time figuring out what it’s all for.

Look back and you see that, despite the initial complaining (and Peter closing the door on her for comic effect) Mary is the focus for both men from the very instant they bring her into the house. The sofa they change her on doesn’t matter, nor does the carpet under the dirty nappy. Her needs are already at the centre of their world.

Michael’s character might still require him to play the fool every now and then, but neither of the men struggle with the responsibilities of looking after a baby. They meet the challenge, they come through, and they get on with what’s next. Peter even risks arrest to put Mary’s welfare first. Mary isn’t their baby but they are already good fathers.

Michael sums up this positive attitude when Jack comes home. He and Peter drop Mary on Jack and leave him to it, their return to the bachelor lifestyle illustrated by the midnight game of pool they both immediately get stuck into. Peter has concerns, but Michael just replies, no, let’s let him figure it out for himself.

Later we see how Peter, Micheal and Jack fall in love with Mary, and the film handles this in a really touching way that never makes light of the relationship. The script, the directing, the acting, they all take fatherhood, whatever the definition, seriously.

But what really resonated with me was what Michael says. Not only is Jack on his own (unlike the two other men) he’s also portrayed as the least responsible, yet he still gets on with it and figures it all out for himself. There’s even greater weight to the positivity of this when it’s repeated by Jack’s mother. It’ll do you good, she tells him.

This isn’t because she wants him to suffer, or to go through the sleepless nights and worrying. It’s because she trusts him, she believes in him, she knows he can do it and she knows that all he needs to do is commit to figuring that out for himself, and he’ll be fine. He’ll be better than fine. He’ll be a real father. And he is.

There are other shining moments, too. Michael’s finest comes in the final reel, with Mary returned to her mother and the way to the airport. All trace of the clownish manboy is now gone, and he reminds the mother that Mary likes to sleep 20 minutes after she’s been fed.

He doesn’t say that Mary must sleep, or Mary always sleeps. He tells her that Mary likes to sleep. This is a world away from when he didn’t even know how to begin understanding why Mary wouldn’t stop crying. Now he doesn’t just understand her, he builds his own life around that understanding.

Then, in the taxi rushing to the airport they talk to the driver who seems to be about to tell them that things get worse. Kids are hard, he tells them, but immediately gushes about how every father’s heart must melt when treated to their child’s smile. These are fantastic examples for any parent, whatever gender.

The film transcends gender roles in a way that is amazing for any film, let alone a big-name Hollywood film that came out 25 years ago. And yet, maybe it’s not that amazing, given the era. Maybe we’ve just gone backwards a little since then.

The Prestige of this magic film is when Mary’s mother agrees to stay in New York. It’s cheesy but it proves that the men haven’t just lived a great anecdote or survived a brief episode. Their world has changed and they’re ecstatic about it. Each one has become more of a man, more of a person than they were at the start of the movie.

Three Men and a Baby has a message for every father, every mother, every man and every woman, and it’s not about ‘facing up’ or ‘growing up’ or any hackneyed overcoming of stereotype. It’s about trust, it’s about believing in your own capacity to do anything. And, of course, it’s about how each and every man has the capacity to be the perfect father.