Five Rules For Living, Taken From Literature

Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell About It

It’s September, the academic new year if not the Gregorian one. It’s a nice time for fresh starts and new rules. Writing Fictional Therapy has made me reflect more than ever on the capacity of stories to inspire and guide us, perhaps more profoundly than any self-help book ever could. So, here are five rules for a happy life which literature has taught me over the years. I hope you like them. But if you want to really feel the truth of them, take them into your bones, then you will have to go away and read the texts in full. I promise it’ll be worth it.

(I was going to do ten rules but then I thought, who needs ten rules? Exhausting. So imagine that rules 5-10 are just ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself.’)

1. Discover the absurdity of life.

   ‘She had a lively, playful disposition, which delighted in anything ridiculous’ - Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

   Life is very funny, a lot of the time. So much funnier than we give it credit for. Sometimes it is at its funniest when it takes a long hard look at your plans and then stamps all over them. Long term Fictional Therapy readers will know the above is my favourite line from Pride and Prejudice, and Elizabeth one of my favourite characters, primarily because of her boundless capacity to find vexing situations funny rather than annoying. Some of my happiest memories are of days when things were going terribly wrong and everyone made the decision to laugh rather than cry. It is a miraculous gift to see the world in this way and you can teach yourself to do it. Rereading Pride and Prejudice is a good way to start.

2. Connect with people whenever you can.

   ‘Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon.’ - Howard’s End, E.M. Forster

   You think you do not want to say thank you to the bus driver. How could you? You don’t even have the energy to take your earphones out. But when you do it, you always feel better afterwards. Yes, even you, introverts. Psychologists have shown that we are all happier after talking to a stranger on our commute, even those of us who are certain beforehand that the encounter will leave us depleted. Of course, even more important is connecting with your friends, family and loved ones. I have never once regretted going to see a person I love.

   (Incidentally, although Forster uses ‘only connect’ as an epigraph to his novel about the importance of human relationships, when Margaret says it within the book she is actually talking about the importance of connection between different parts of the self, the ‘prose and the passion’, the ‘beast and the monk’. There’s an important lesson here too about allowing supposedly opposing elements of your own psyche exist in harmony.)

3. Accept the life you have.

   ‘He tried to picture himself living in an ideal world with the young woman from the dream. He sees Tereza walking past the open windows of their ideal house. She is alone and stops to look in at him with an infinitely sad expression in her eyes… He feels her pain in his own heart. And he knows that time and again he will abandon the house of his happiness, time and again abandon his paradise and the woman from his dream and betray the Es muss sein! of his love to go off with Tereza.’ - The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera

   Although there is much complicated pain in The Unbearable Lightness, I always find Tomas’ eventual realisation of the depth of his love for Tereza extremely beautiful. Tomas - a serial philanderer with a perennial belief that the grass is greener elsewhere - here realises that the idealised woman he yearns for could never mean as much to him as the woman he has; as the real, flawed relationship that has defined his life. We all of us tend to yearn for elusive dreams. I was listening to a podcast once in which the famous singer Self Esteem talked about her sadness at failing to become a chorus girl in musical theatre. You might think this is false modesty, but I don’t. Every single person in this world is plagued by a secret or not-so-secret dream of something they failed to accomplish: whether it was marrying before they turned 30, getting a book published at this or that age, or becoming a chorus girl a la Self Esteem. This failed ambition can impede our ability to enjoy the manifold pleasures of our real lives. But once you realise that this projection of a shadow, idealised self is a universal experience - just a way that humans have of punishing themselves - you begin to see the absurdity of it. (See point 1: absurdity everywhere.) You have to let go of the life you planned before you knew what living was, and embrace the one in front of you. The liberation that awaits you on the other side is worth the struggle.

4. Find perspective.

   ‘The world was so big! The sharpness of that knowledge went away almost as soon as I’d boarded the T, but it has returned over the years, and even now sometimes - I am older and my life is very different - I can feel again how amazed I was that morning.’

   - Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld

   I have a crystal clear memory of reading this passage for the first time as a teenager. It’s the last two lines of Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld’s coming of age novel about a teenage girl’s time at an exclusive Massachusetts boarding school called Ault. In the novel we are swept up - just as the protagonist Lee is - in the overwhelming intensity of boarding school life: first love, first betrayal, and complex, terrifying, ever-shifting social hierarchies. Like Lee, we can’t imagine anything could be as important as life at Ault. And then Lee leaves school, steps onto a crowded train platform, and we are suddenly reminded of the hugeness of the world that was outside all along. I wish I could give this book to every teenager who needs to be reminded that their small world is not everything: adults (okay, I) often need to remember this, too.

5. Pay attention.

   ‘So I have made a little moon-like hole/ with a thumbnail and through a blade of grass/ I watch the weather make the sea my soul’ - ‘Sea Sonnet’, Alice Oswald

   Paying attention is everything. It grounds us in the present moment. It opens us up to the feeling of awe. And it is the best way to show love. Alice Oswald’s poems - always attuned to the wonder of nature’s minutiae - remind me of that. In the lines above, the poem’s narrator is looking at the sea through the hole in a blade of grass. Think how carefully you need to be paying attention to do that! And Oswald is equally attune to the fine details of emotional landscapes. I would love any or all of you to read her first collection, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile. It is so calming, so wondrous, to see the world through her perceptive, attentive eyes. I will leave you with one of her poems.

   Wedding

   From time to time our love is like a sail
   and when the sail begins to alternate
   from tack to tack, it’s like a swallowtail
   and when the swallow flies it’s like a coat;
   and if the coat is yours, it has a tear
   like a wide mouth and when the mouth begins
   to draw the wind, it’s like a trumpeter
   and when the trumpet blows, it blows like millions …
   and this, my love, when millions come and go
   beyond the need of us, is like a trick;
   and when the trick begins, it’s like a toe
   tip-toeing on a rope, which is like luck;
   and when the luck begins, it’s like a wedding,
   which is like love, which is like everything.

Do you have a problem that needs Fictional Therapy? Write to me here.