Somewhere between All or Nothing
Sometimes it’s the instant hit version, shovelling down an entire bucket of double chocolate fudgie-goopey ice-cream and then claiming to be allergic to the evil frozen stuff when it’s next offered, or there’s the variety of being wholly, madly in love over dinner, and then ‘screw you, I hate you’ before bed. Those are just two in a wild range that sweeps across everything from pulling all-nighters on a deadline and then being unable to function for the rest of the week, to Hoovering up enough coke to fell a horse, and then swearing off every kind of stimulant forever, even green tea and goji berry sweetened cough drops.
‘All or Nothing’ is both exhausting and contrary to everything human about us. We are all a mix of ‘All’ and ‘Nothing’ moments. On a grey Monday it is very human to feel unmoved by what needs to be done, to want to extend a bacchanalian week-end mood by carrying on with the boozing and lassitude, or to just shut down and close out the world. Both seem convincing ideas.
And yet by Thursday the world can seem to have changed colour entirely. Everyone and everything has become suffused with possibility and beauty, even the over-flowing street bins can seem to be bathed in a poignant light when on Monday those same bins represented just a disgusting, stinking re-iteration of the fact that all will rot, decay and die, particularly us.
All the time we are fluctuating between versions of Monday and Thursday, some of us at high speed, some more slowly. The high-speeders tend towards the ‘All or Nothing’ view. On a Monday this crowd may well see the slower movers as being lucky, or indeed gifted with the steadier flow of their internal mercury. By Thursday this more febrile lot may well see the previously envied and steadier crowd as being frankly dull.
To believe in ‘All or Nothing’ as a way of being in the world is to decide that we can only exist in extremes.
What a very limiting choice.
If this same view is applied to our psychological well-being it means existing between the polarities of mania and despair. This is how ‘All or Nothing’ translates when it comes to our state of mind. ‘All’ is the wild state, the hyper state, when every mental process is in overdrive, when all seems possible, and yes, you really believe that you can write an essay on Islam and Peril of Disempowerment, at the same time as updating your Facebook page, Tweeting on next season’s fur trims for dog coats, and talking to your best friend on the phone about their collapsing relationship. ‘Nothing’ is the fog of despair that comes after the all-ness of ‘All’, plunging everything over a cliff into nothingness.
And what about the vast expanse of the human condition that exists between these two?
This is where the possibility of mental safety lies—the understanding that our most extreme habits require an ‘All’ response, and that there are whole swathes of our lives that, contrary to the Monday ‘f*** it’ mode, need very little attention, beyond perhaps a little fine-tuning at certain more vulnerable times.
And how this works…
Let me try and rinse this down.
I know my own mental balance depends on a clear-cut daily routine, and that the extremes of my nature and accrued life damage will kick in if I don’t stick to it. So I do, knowing that if I don’t the fallout will be my fault, and that I just have to police myself with authoritarian attention, rather than blame anyone or anything else for how bad I feel if I don’t get the right amount of sleep, exercise, focus, and good food. In contrast I have no problem with time-keeping, so I do not need to be draconian about this. I can relax and actually just enjoy the fact that I am good about being on time, and if someone else runs late I have the luxury of having time in hand, to read something I want to catch up on, to work through an idea I have not had time to think about carefully, or actually just to sit and stare because I have time.
Then there is a whole range of other human elements that fluctuate all the time: energy levels, concentration, attention to detail, patience, on the list goes. Sometimes they all need policing, and at other times they just seem to flow without any extra attention. This fluctuation, this grey area, is not comfortable for many of us. We seem to prefer the black and white of ‘All or Nothing’, even if this limits us.
But to be able to separate out, very clearly, what we need to guard against with a ‘take no prisoners’ approach, and what we can go easy on opens up infinite possibility. If we can learn to recognise that there is a balance between the extremes, and that we need to apply different levels of control across our own range of weaknesses and strengths, then we give ourselves the chance to flourish, whether in a Monday ‘f*** it’ frame of mind, or a Thursday ‘beautiful world’ mood.