We’re never truly alone: A chapter from The Reason Everything Happens

That morning, these were things I needed to know. I really, really need to be reminded of the connections we have with others, even if we’ve never met them. Because that morning, I was having what we might describe as

a Robinson Crusoe moment.

It’s such a descriptive phrase, this, it distills a whole lot of feelings and emotions down into one line we can all relate to. I first heard it in an episode of Armando Ianucci’s peerless political satire The Thick Of It, where all hell breaks out in Whitehall after the Prime Minister resigns and candidates to replace him start scrambling for support at dead of night.

As spin doctors and aides run around with their hair on fire, trying to second-third-and-fourth-guess their rival camps, long-serving and long-suffering civil servants Glenn Cullen and Julius Nicholson find themselves in an empty committee room, listening to a cricket match from Australia and realising they’ve both become surplus to requirements.

“I’m feeling as up to date as the Gregorian calendar,” says Cullen, “I’m completely out of the loop.”

“Join the club,” sighs Nicholson, “I’m having a bit of a Robinson Crusoe moment myself.”

Ever had one of those? When you feel as isolated as a desert island castaway, even though you’re in the middle of a crowded office or bar or arena?

When it feels like everyone else is having fun except you?

When you’re convinced there’s a crucial meeting going on somewhere that you’re excluded from, that everyone but you got an invite to the hottest party in town?

Our mind’s little patch of sand and a single palm tree is not a nice to place to be, because for all that nearly all of us yearn for a little more time and space, the thought that we’re there against our will can have serious effects on our mood, our confidence, our self-esteem.

In the case of Julius Nicholson, not being part of the cabals deciding the country’s future provoked him to seek revenge – and risk his career – by leaking sensitive information to the media. In the case of Glenn Gullen, not being asked for his opinion, especially when many of those inside what he called The Loop were much younger thrusters, brought about a full-on panic attack in front of startled colleagues.

When something similar happens to me, which it still does more often than is comfortable, I neither lash out nor freak out, I quite simply begin to withdraw from the world. Feeling very sorry for myself. Feeling a little fearful. Fearing the worst. Worrying that no one likes me. Waiting for the tap on the shoulder from the boss to say that it’s Game Over. Worrying what the future holds, fretting about money. Disappearing down a rabbit-hole of What Ifs, manufacturing all sorts of negative scenarios.

I believe the trendy people call it

catastrophising.

I start beating myself up, deciding that being – or, at least, feeling – alone is all my own fault and it’s no more than I deserve, that I haven’t been a good enough friend to people, not a good enough dad or husband or brother or uncle, even that I’ve wasted my life. From there, despite the obvious thought that what any of us need in this situation is more human contact, the thought of answering the phone or returning calls makes me anxious. Even opening the mail’s a trial, because obviously every letter’s going to be rammed full of bad news. In short, no matter how much I encourage others to have The Conversation about their mental health, I clam up about mine.

Then come the physical symptoms; a little lump in the throat, a twist in the guts. Heavy bones. Tight skin. A literal pain in the neck.

Worryingly, I’d been having these episodes on and off since the turn of the year and it would be another two months before – guess what? – a simple conversation made me realise why such negative thoughts persist in popping their ugly heads above the parapet and, more importantly, what to do about it.

Sitting on a bench by the tram stop at Dick Greco Plaza that morning, though, two days of six into a visit to write a travel feature on Tampa itself before driving south to Fort Myers and Sanibel Island to report on the aftermath of Hurricane Ian, the long-term answers this realisation would give me seemed a million miles away as all those depleting emotions whirled and churned.

Yet as it turned out, the chance to make peace with myself wasn’t far away at all; no further, as it turned out, than a 15-minute shoogle on a lovingly-restored 1930s streetcar from Downtown Tampa to Ybor City.

 

EVERY cigar made at Julius Caeser Newman’s factory goes through a hundred pairs of hands.

The hands that choose the tobacco seeds. The hands that cultivate those seeds in greenhouses. The hands that take the seedlings from the greenhouse and transplant them into fields. The hands that pick the fully-grown leaves, the hands that hang them in a barn to dry and turn brown.

The hands that pack those dried leaves, the hands that load and unload the vans and planes and boats that take them from Central America to Tampa, the hands that load them onto vans heading for the factory itself. The hands that unpack the boxes, the hands that pile dried leaves up to ferment, the hands that separate those fermented leaves to be laid out on racks to air. The hands that rehydrate the leaves and hold them up, one by one, to be checked for colour and consistency.

The hands that de-stem the central vein from each leaf. The hands that divide these de-stemmed leaves into piles for the rolling team to work with. The hands of those rollers, the hands of the wrappers, the hands of those who stock the constantly-humid rooms where each batch is left to age, the hands that retrieve the finished product, the hands that box them, the hands that load them, the hands that stock them onto shelves, the hands that hand them the customer.

The hands that hold them and light them and smoke them.

Just writing these words and reading them back relaxes me. The very thought of the process is almost hypnotic. All those stages, all that time, all that patience, all that anticipation. It’s the perfect, everyday, practical example of what happens when we connect and we communicate and we commit to even the most mundane of tasks.

Mundanity can be the bane of our lives. When routine becomes drudge, we can lose interest and energy. Jeez, not this again. Groundhog Day might be a thrill the first couple of times it comes around, but anyone who’s seen the movie gets a snapshot of what absolute repetition can do to the brain and the body.

Yet this same mundanity, the nuts and bolts and repetition and drudgery, is the basis of life. Breathing in and out, the beating of our hearts, one foot in front of another, the ticking of the clock; we only notice them when we can’t catch a breath, when our heart misfires, when our feet hurt, when the clock stops.

This is the essence of why I called my first book on mental health The Six Inches In Front Of Your Face, the fact that this is what life is. As you might know, it’s taken from a speech in the movie Any Given Sunday, where under-pressure American football coach Tony D’Amato, played by Al Pacino⁠1, is laying it on the line to his team about the importance of how crucial the game they’re about to play.

That what follows has since been used by countless real-life sports teams and businesses as motivation for vital fixtures or projects speaks volumes for the quality of the writing and the strength of the message. Hear that gravelly Pacino drawl as he barks at that locker room:

“You know, when you get old in life, things get taken from you. I mean, that’s…that’s part of life. But you only learn that once you start losing stuff. You find out life’s this game of inches. So is football. Because in either game, life or football, the margin for error is so small – I mean, one-half step too late or too early and you don’t quite make it. One half-second too slow, too fast, you don’t quite catch it. The inches we need are everywhere around it, they’re in every break of the game, every minute, every second.

“On this team, we fight for that inch. On this team, we tear each other and everyone around us to pieces for thay inch, because we know when we add up all those inches, that’s gonne make the fuckin’ difference between winnin’ and losin’, between livin’ and dying’!

“I’ll tell you this: In any fight, it’s the guy who willin’ to die who’s gonna win that inch. And I know if I’m gonna have any life any more, it’s because I’m willing’ to fight and die for that inch. Because that’s what livin’ is, the six inches in front of your face!

“Now, I can’t make you do it. You’ve got to look at the guy next to you, look into his eyes. You’re gonna see a guy, who will sacrifice himself for this team, because he knows when it comes down to it that you’re gonna do the same for him.

“That’s a team, gentlemen. And either we heal, now, as a team. Or we will die as individuals.

“That’s football, guys. That’s all it is.”

 

AND that, ladies and gentleman, is also life itself. It’s repetition, it’s the countless movements we make without consciously trying, the sights and sounds and tastes we understand without thinking, it’s our breath, our heartbeat, our footsteps and the ticking of the clock.

We can choose either be bored by this, to be ground down by it, or we can embrace it. We can understand it. We can come to use it to our benefit, even to love it.

Mundanity lies at the core of our mental health, a thought that really did open up my mind on that Friday morning visit to JC Newman’s cigar factory. Because although I didn’t know it as that tram rattled its way towards Ybor City, wandering around an old, brick-built warehouse with the whiff of tobacco in my nostrils was exactly what I needed to kickstart the process of making me feel better about my life.

To learn the history of a business and its part in a boom that at its peak saw 150 factories like it turn this part of Tampa into what is still known as Cigar City wasn’t just fascinating, it was invigorating.

Generations of the same families, the first of them immigrants fresh off the boat from Cuba, have worked for JC Newman. What really fascinated me, however, is the fact that those generations have all laid their hands on the same machinery, because – like the streetcar that took me there – every cog has been lovingly maintained and repaired since the 1930s; down in the bowels of the factory, next to where piles of tobacco leaves are dried and aired and re-hydrated, they even have a boneyard of cutting and rolling machines which are no longer fit for the shopfloor, but which are kept cleaned and oiled so their parts can be harvested.

Sons replace fathers, daughters take over from mothers. Not a bolt or a nut is thrown away. Every bit of tobacco is used and re-used. There are boxes of cigars in there dating back to 1905 that are handled with the reverence of religious artefacts. Everything and everyone shares a story.

As I walk around with my head on a swivel, enveloped in the bitter, smoky aroma and the humidity and the heritage and the sheer magic of the place, it’s the first time in a couple of days when a pall of loneliness hasn’t hung over me. After all, how can you feel lonely when everything is connected in this way, when you’re at the heart of a place where so many hands have linked together to form a chain strong enough to span so many decades?

For me, visiting that factory was a wonderful reminder of how our lives are affected by so many more people than we will ever know, how we are touched each day – even if not always physically – by as many pairs of hands as it needs to take that tiny tobacco seed and turn it into a cigar.

What’s more, it reinforced the understanding that everything we do comes from the ground up. The basis of life is in our every footstep, our every breath, our every heartbeat. The greatest sporting victory starts before the team leaves the locker room. The finest cigar starts with a single seed. Repairing our mental health starts with us changing one single thought.

I can’t tell you how much better life felt to allow these thoughts and feelings and emotions in.

And the really good news? This therapy session was only just beginning.

 

IT’S getting properly warm as I say goodbye to a quite overwhelmingly enthusiatic and knowledgable guide called Corey, a young guy who appears to be on first-name terms not just with every worker but every single tobacco leaf, and blink back into the daylight.

I retrace my steps towards the streetcar stop, but it isn’t time to head back to base just yet. First, there’s lunch; not just any lunch, but lunch in a restaurant which can’t help but reinforce this feeling that everything and everyone in this town is connected across the generations.

It’s called The Columbia, it’s been the beating heart of its community since 1905 and it oozes legend from its ceramic floor tiles to the wedding-cake rosework of its ceilings.

The Columbia has been run by five generations of the Hernandez and Gonzmart families. The waiter who looks after me, Alfredo, has worked there for 36 years. Yet it seems he’s still just learning his trade, because he stops a dapper little fella who’s weaving through the tables and introduces Gary, who walked in as a 15-year-old tearaway begging for a job washing dishes and who 64 years later is the general manager.

The food and the service and the atmosphere at The Columbia all make you want to come back. Yet even if the actual dining experience had been average at best, I could have spent all day in there just wandering round and checking out the pictures on the walls, climbing the staircases to look down on its tables from all sorts of angles. Every corner hides a secret. Every door opens into a room where vows have been made and new-borns greeted and absent friends toasted. Sit on one of the stools lined up around the bar with its polished dark wood and giant half-moon mirrors and you could be sipping a cocktail any time in the last 118 years and counting.

All this, that is, once you make it over the most fascinating of thresholds. Because even the paving stones outside The Columbia offer a history lesson all of their own, they’re a peek into the lives and loves and losses that made Ybor City what it was and is and hopefully always will be.

The Paver Program was launched in 1990, a chance for locals to turn Seventh Avenue into their own everyday Walk Of Fame, a honeycomb of hexagonal messages that carry you back in time with every step. You, a stranger, instantly become part of so many lives just by strolling down a street you’d never seen before. You almost want to hover an inch above the ground out of respect, it feels somehow wrong to literally tread on all those treasured memories.

•Here is the corner where Steve Lester sold newspapers from 1925-35.

•Here is where posterity will recognise that Jonathan Eason, 1997-1994, was unforgettable.

•Here is where MC, RG and JW thank mom for a lifetime of love.

•Here is where Suki had it etched on a tablet of stone, with hearts either side of their names, that she loves Michael.

•Here is where Scott asked Diane: Will you marry me?

•Here is where, on Friday 13, 1996, Gina and Don fell in love.

Here, right here, every step is a connection with someone’s life, someone’s love, someone’s livelihood, with someone’s triumphs and tragedies, with the hopes and dreams and so many other emotions that interweave to make the world go round.

Moving from slab to slab, I wanted to know more about those emotions and the stories that triggered them. I wanted to know why Jonathan Eason’s life was so short and how losing him changed the future for those he’d left behind. I wanted to know if Suki and Michael and Gina and Don were still two couples in love. I wanted to know whether having shared their feelings in such a public spot had made them a foursome of friends. I wanted to know whether Diane said yes or no to Scott and where that answer had taken them. I wanted to flick a quarter to Steve Lester in return for a paper, to shoot the breeze with him, to hear what gossip he’d picked up on that day’s shift.

And you know what? For all that I wrote way back at the start of this book about not believing in that whole ‘everything happens for a reason’ waffle, this experience came pretty close to proving me wrong. On a trip that was proving less of the liberating adventure I’d hoped for than it was a test of character, being booked in to visit that cigar factory then treading those most special of paving stones before walking through The Columbia’s doors kind of felt like it was meant to be.

Or maybe that’s just what we convince ourselves when days and situations start to turn from not-so-good to a whole lot better. Maybe that’s just how we choose to view what is, in truth, coincidence. Maybe there are simply times when it’s good for us to believe that someone way above our spiritual pay-grade’s making decisions on our behalf because…ah, bollocks, who knows.

In truth, all we can know for sure is what we know. And all I know for sure is that those four or five hours on that crisp, sunny late February morning, midway down the west coast of Florida, reaffirmed to me that it doesn’t always take a conventional session in a counsellor’s office to help relax our minds, to open up our thought processes, to reset the way we view the world around us.

Sometimes, all we need is to focus on what’s in front of us, above us, all around us.

Sometimes, it’s not enough to look at it all, we really need to see it.

Sometimes, it’s about not just listening to what’s being said, but really hearing it.

Sometimes, even the lowest mood can change if we consciously switch on and tune in to all the little pieces that click together to create the jigsaw of everyday life.

Sometimes it really is all about The Six Inches In Front Of Our Face.

Everything we do, every we say, every footstep we take, they all impact on others as well as on ourselves. Every little bit of good we pass on to someone else finds its way to someone else again if the receipient’s mind is as open as our own, just as the ripples from every little bit of bad we do will spread negativity down the line if the recipient is in the same bad place as we are.

Every choice we make is affected by a choice someone else makes; how they behave, what they say to us, how they look at us, their clothes, their hair, their smell.

I wanted to be a writer because it turned out my primary school headmaster wrote for a local newspaper in his spare time and he told me I could do the same one day. I teach indoor cycling because I used to go to other people’s classes and thought they could be done better. I try to help other with their mental health because the help others tried to give me didn’t get to the root of the problem.

Everything we need to know is contained in the stories of everyone we every meet, even the ones we never meet. Everywhere we go, no matter what problems we’re struggling with, someone within touching distance has the answer because they’ve gone through the same.

This is what I mean about none of us ever truly being alone.

The inescapable truth that, right at this moment, someone out there is searching for the same answers we think no one else can help with.

 

THE Hawaiians have a word for it: Ho’oponopono.

In their belief system, everyone we meet leaves a connection, like the gossamer threads of a spider’s web. Some of these connections lead us in a good direction, some down a bad path, others hold us back; and we, in turn, have all these same influences on everyone around us.

After a while, their culture says, there are so many threads attached to us that we need a clean-up, like tidying a laptop’s hard-drive when it starts to slow down.

There are two ways to make this happen. The first, very common among Hawaiian and other South Pacific communities, is a group therapy session, often involving family members whose relationships are under stress. An elder will gather everyone together and invite them to work through their issues, to let them go, to forgive or to repent. If something remains unresolved, the elder might then call in a respected outsider as a sort of appeal court. Once they find a way to cut off the past, they join in a ceremonial feast that allows them to unite and move forward.

Then, there’s the Ho’oponopono ritual, which we can do with the help of just one other person – or even on our own, though it’s better to have someone leading us – when we feel like there are decisions to be made over who and what we allow to influence us.

At the end of the course when a bunch of us became Master Practitioners in NLP, our coach Brian took on the role of elder as he invited each of us to make those decisions within the privacy of our own heads.

He adapted the family ritual into a beautiful ceremony where we were invited to see ourselves in a private box high up in a theatre, looking down onto an empty stage.⁠2 We closed our eyes and, as soft background music helped us drift into a light hypnotic state, we heard Brian’s soothing voice invite us to ask everyone we know onto the stage, group by group; your closest loved ones and family, then your inner circle of friends, then maybe colleagues and acquaintences, then neighbours and friends of friends and so on. Circles within circles of the people who were in our head at that moment, whether or not we’d consci0usly chosen to send them an invite.

As each group in turn stood there, we then offered them the Ho’oponopono affirmation:

I’m sorry. Please Forgive Me. Thank You. I Love You.

What we were asking was for everyone in our lives to accept us for who and what we were, for all our faults as well as all our qualities. At the same time, we were allowing ourselves to decide which of them we accepted for who and what they were, which of them we needed despite their faults and who we chose to lose despite their qualities.

The belief was that, as our conscious minds relaxed to the music and to Brian’s gentle invitations, our unconscious would take over and choose whether to keep each individual person in our life or let them go, those we let go leaving the stage one by one until only those who brought true positivity and happiness remained.

Once it was over and we emerged from that beautiful, floaty state of half-sleep, it dawned on me that there were at least two people who’d been let go that I’d never have consciously removed from my life, just as there was more than one who had stayed despite us not getting along.

The ties I’d cut weren’t just in the moment, either. We didn’t all return to full conciousness laughing about how the previous 20 minutes been some sort of dream that didn’t count in real life. Far from it, in my case at least, as the ones I didn’t expect to leave the stage have stayed at arm’s length to this day; and while this left me with an initial feeling of guilt, the realisation soon dawned – bringing us back to my colleague Lorna Dougan’s point from way earlier – that sometimes those who tell us what we’d like to hear aren’t as helpful as those who tell us what we should be hearing.

Externally, we may group those in our lifes through the conventional channels of family, close friends, friends of friends and so on. But what Ho’oponopono does is internalise these conventions and allow us to make what our unconscious mind genuinely believes to be healthy decisions. We’re running the people in our lives through that filter of Priorities, Values, Mental Health – who do we need most, who fits in with the kind of person we want to be, who helps us become stronger?

There’s a sadness in cutting someone from your life with whom you’ve had good times. There can be awkwardness as you manoeuvre through social situations they’ll also be involved in. But, in my case at least, all this has been heavily outweighed by the sheer relief of not being burdened by the toxicity and the negativity they lumbered me with.

On the other hand, however, there’s something really nice about realising the person you thought was a dick because they didn’t always laugh at your jokes or agree with views or want to do things your way might actually have had a point and that it’s OK to be around them.

I’m thinking right now of a work colleague who used to really get my back up big style – as I did theirs – but who I’m now able to understand is actually really like me; though the thought that I went so long not liking them becaause they were so like me is maybe a subject for another therapy session.

This understanding has only been able to happen since Ho’oponopono, when they were one of those my unconsci0us unexpectedly invited to remain on the stage and after which time I genuinely saw them differently; in an absolutely real sense, because the next time we were in the same room my reaction to them changed from its previous tensing of the body and grinding of the teeth to something very neutral, a bit like C two chapters ago when she began to better understand her boss.

Since then, we’ve had a conversation on a trip abroad when both us said sorry, both of us took responsibility and both of us agreed that the other isn’t a dick after all. The relief that comes with this, the feeling of no longer having to duck and dive to avoid each other is huge, the loss of that reflex which used to make you pshyically cringe every time they spoke is a very pleasant thing indeed.

As with so much in this book, the basis of the Ho’oponopono ritual lies in granting ourselves the

permission

to make changes. Once we re-emerge from the lovely, warm, meditative place it carries us to, there’s nothing to stop us keeping the groups who surround us exactly the way they’ve been; but now we know that we can deal with them on our own terms.

 

NOW, fast forward from that late February morning in Tampa to one in Glasgow towards the end of April.

We’re sitting upstairs in a cafe round the corner from the house, Sonia and I, having breakfast and chatting. Except that I’m not saying much. It’s been that way for a few days now.

I’m back in Robinson Crusoe mode again.

It’s not something I’ve wanted to admit to her, not just about this latest bout of Castaway Syndrome, but the fact that it’s been happening a lot lately. This is partly because she’s such an empathetic person that she physically absorbs the moods of others and that’s not something I want her to experience right now. Mostly, though, I’ve clammed up because four of five episodes before 2023’s halfway done not only feels unhealthy, it’s downright worrying and I’m trying figure it all out myself before talking about it.

How’s that worked out in the past, Bill?

Sonia’s good at getting me to open up, though. To be fair, she’s good at getting anyone to open up, without even trying. People just talk to her, they tell her their life stories. We can go to a dinner with a table of people I’ve known for years but she’s never met before and by the time I’ve been to the bar and back she knows where they’re all going on holiday that summer, whose marriage is in trouble, whose kid’s playing a gig the next night and how the band’s bass player has two French Bulldogs called Cantona and Camembert.

She doesn’t pry. She’s not nosey. She isn’t a gossip. She just has…actually, I don’t know what it is; her face, her smile, a twinkle in her eye, a scent, a vibe? All I know is that every haircut she does should cost twice as much because of the counselling she offers her clients while the scissors snip and the colour develops, that every conversation she has seems to morph into a c0nfessi0nal.

We share a theory that her hairdressing clients relax and let go of some pretty deep thoughts because they’re talking to the face in a mirror, not to the actual person whose reflection it is, which may hold water or may more likely be complete cobblers. After all, she doesn’t carry her full-length salon mirror with her to nights out or to the shops or when she’s walking the dog, yet in each of these scenarios I’ve witnessed strangers unburden their souls within ten minutes of meeting her.

So here we are, coffee steaming and food just arriving, when she asks me why I’m feeling rubbish. There’s no use me messing about by telling her it’s not true, because she knows the signs, she sees and feels me pulling away from her and from everything around us. She’s clocked the change in my tone, the drag of my feet on the carpet. She knows. I know she knows. She knows I know she knows.

And so, falteringly, I start to talk. It’s all the same stuff that was washing around my head in Tampa. It’s feeling isolated, it’s the thought that everyone but me is having fun, that my work’s becoming irrelevant and no one really likes me and blahdy blahdy blah.

I tell her how I’ve been trying to sort cover for a spin class this coming Sunday but can’t get a Yes from anyone. I’ve emailed the club where I’m supposed to be working and can’t get a reply. The reason I can’t do the class is that I need to work at the Rangers-Celtic cup semi-final, but I’d rather be anywhere else on earth than there. Every time this pair play, I have daymares about being alone amomgst a huge, baying crowd; no, not just alone, but with everybody else glaring at me, judging me, hating me.

Sonia puts her hand on mine and tells me, very gently, that none of this is true. I tell her she’s right, but that truth isn’t the issue here. No, the issue is why I allow myself to believe that it’s true, especially when so much of my life is spent telling others exactly this about their own limiting beliefs. What I really need is to get to the root of what’s bugging me, to know what the catalyst is for all these painfully negative thoughts, because only then can I start feeling better and stop being such a pain in the arse.

She gets right to it with one question:

“Bobo,⁠ what it is that you’re not doing this year that you’ve always done before?”

I don’t know. Right then, I genuinely don’t know.

So she tells me.

“You don’t have a really big challenge to look forward to.”

And in that instant comes the beautiful light bulb moment of realisation that I live to see in others.

Because my wonderful wife is absolutely bang on. Every since we met in 2011, I’ve either being preparing for or coming down from some huge charity event or overseas work adventure of real-life trauma.

• 2011: My mum passes away, I give in to mental health issues and go climbing volcanoes in Ecuador for the British Heart Foundation.
• 2012: Turn 50, trek the Great Wall of China for Marie Curie Cancer Care.
• 2013 & 2014: London Marathon for Macmillan Cancer Support.
• 2015: We get engaged, I cycle across Vietnam and Cambodia for Macmillan, Sonia has emergency surgery for sepsis in his right knee.
• 2016: Where do we start? The Australian Open tennis, our wedding, the Euros in France, the Olympics in Rio, the Ryder Cup in Minnesota.
• 2017: Austalian Open, take the kids to New York for their sixteenth and thirtieth, London Marathon.
• 2018: Great Wall again, this time for Macmillan, World Cup in Russia, cornea transplant.
• 2019: Cycle across the Pyrenees for Macmillan, second eye op.
• 2020: Knee op, Covid pandemic, first NLP qualification, we get our dog Sherlock.
• 2021: Covid pandemic, second NLP qualification.
• 2022: Second knee op, climb Mount Kilimanjaro.
• 2023? Nothing. Nada. Zip. Hee-haw. A void.

 

BINGO, la mia bellissima. Nail hit on head.

At the end of September, 13 of my buddies from the fundraising group my pal Des McKeown and I set up 20 years ago in aid of Macmillan Cancer Support are off to cycle the Italian Alps, but for the first time in my life I’ve accepted that some things are outwith my pay grade and have left them to it.

Trouble is, accepting your limitations doesn’t make missing out any less of a pain. Yes, trying to drag myself and a bike up and down a week of climbs culminating in the the 48 hairpin bends of the 9,045ft Stelvio Pass – would have broken me, but the nearer their departure date looms, the thought of not being part of it all breaks me too.

I’ll write about this double-edged sword of achievement and agony in the chapter after next, which takes us up the world’s highest free-standing mountain in clouds of red dust and a blizzard of sweary words. For now, though, let’s stay in that cafe at the end of April, where we’re having this breakthrough and Sonia is giving my character to me straight.

“You need targets, Bobo,”⁠ she says. “You need the purpose those challenges give you, so not having one this year has left a big hole in your life.”

As soon as she said those words, the light bulb was so bright we were gonna need shades.

In an instant, I got what the problem was. The pattern of my life, one of building up some something huge then managing the descent down the other side, had fuelled me for a decade and more. Then, it had been time to change that pattern, to allow my body and mind to recover for a while, for me not to need external stimulus to make life worthwhile. Trouble was, that pattern was so ingrained that instead of recovering, I’d begun to regress. Instead of relaxing, I was becoming more tense.

Yet again, this is where The Conversation is so important. By opening up, or in this case by being opened up, I’d been able to understand what was happening to me and from there to manage it. As soon as Sonia hit the nail on the head with her thing about me needing purpose, life began to feel better.

By the end of the afternoon, I had accepted that not going up those Italian hairpin bends was absolute the right thing to, I’d buried myself in driving this book forward and, most importantly, was a better person for Sonia and Sherlock to be around.

A few hours earlier, life’s problems had seemed too complicated to even start trying to explain to anyone. But as on that crisp, sunny morning in Tampa and as so often in all our lives, the reality was that the answers are never far away.

All we need to do is reach out for them.

So many of us have that ‘thing’ messing with our heads.

It can be a bad memory that haunts us, a trauma that changed the way we see the world – but usually, it’s just a story we tell ourselves that we struggle to let go of.
I’m not good enough. I’m not smart enough. I don’t deserve love, happiness, a better job.

It’s just the way I am.
That song, Liontamer, gets it bang on. The longer we hang on to these stories, the more they can poison us, even destroy us.

That’s what my new book, The Reason Everything Happens, wants us to fight against. It encourages us to questions our internal stories, to revisit bad memories and traumas and see them for what they all are: Nothing more than thoughts.
Strip away all the bull***t and that’s all any of these poisonous things are; thoughts, not facts.

Politics, religion, the class system, football rivalries, so many external influences which we’re told divide us, yet none of them are real, just one person’s thoughts pitted against another’s.

The teacher who told us we’d never amount to anything wasn’t telling the truth, just projecting their own prejudice. The parent who gave in to the belief that we had to know our place was only repeating the story their parents passed down.

In The Reason Everything Happens, I invite us to question these thoughts with two little words:

WHO SAYS?
Who says we’re not good enough? Who says we don’t deserve the things we yearn for? Who says how we vote or pray or which team we support has to divide us?
From experience, both personal and from working with others on their mental health, these stories don’t often stand up to much scrutiny from these two little words. And deep down, I think most of us know they won’t.

We’re maybe just a little bit scared to say them.

As the song says, though, the truth lies within us. Until we accept and embrace that truth about ourselves, it’s so much more difficult for us to understand the world around us. And until we’re able to understand the world around us, it’s so much more difficult to become the person we’re capable of being.

When I coach stronger mental health, which I’ve been doing for the past three years after a lot of DIY work on my own mind, I don’t promise answers. My job is to lead you towards your own answers, because only you know what those answers are – and often, we DO know, we either just don’t know we know or don’t want to admit it.

In the same way, this book doesn’t have all the answers, but it pokes us to ask the questions that lead towards them. It questions the difference between social media’s idea of what happiness looks like and what it actually is. It questions the current fads of self-labelling – yes, including labelling ourselves with mental health issues – of being triggered and of feigning offence.

It looks at practical ways of quietening our minds when we feel overwhelmed, it urges us to only try and control what’s controllable, it reminds us that we don’t always need a docto or a therapist to make us feel better.
It even tells us very bluntly at one point not to be a dick.

So, why is it called what it’s called? Simply because of my belief that rather than us being at the mercy of some huge, universal plan, The Reason Everything Happens is that we make it happen through everything we say and do and believe.
It’s up to us to take responsibility for these words and actions, which means working to let go of the past, of bad memories, of traumas, of our stories.
Or, to quote the recently-departed actor Matthew Perry, it’s about realising that:
“I am enough, I was always enough.

I was just the only one who couldn’t see it”.

Let’s start realising the same about ourselves.
Not tomorrow, but today. Right now.