When Our Best Isn't Good Enough.

I have a lone neurosis. I call it, as people with neuroses often do, my ‘demon.’ I talked about him a lot last summer when he was horribly active and giving me a bad time.

He first made his appearance when I was nineteen, and I’ve no idea where he came from; I certainly didn’t invite him in. And he hasn’t aged with me. He’s as fit, strong and nasty now as he ever was. So this is what bugs me:

There have been situations in which I’ve had to explain him to people (certain individuals, that is) because his presence threatened to destroy something which I – and the individual concerned – held to be valuable. I’ve had to point out that he needed to accommodated, which actually meant that he needed to be kept quiet. The response I often received was:

‘No, I won’t accommodate him. You can beat this thing.’

‘Sorry, but I can’t. He’s too strong.’

‘Rubbish! Nothing is too strong. You can beat anything if you want to.’

Do you know what I would like to do with people who say ‘you can beat anything if you want to?’ I would like to drop them into the sea in the vicinity of a man-eating Great White, or leave them alone in the Canadian wilderness with a hungry grizzly bear, and say ‘OK, beat that.’ You might argue that the analogy is a bad one, since the shark and the bear are external things over which we have no control. I know, but it makes no difference. Sometimes there are internal things, too, over which we effectively have no control – or at least have never managed to find the means, in spite of all the effort so to do!

I’ve beaten a lot of things in my life, but the fact has to be faced that we can beat most things, but not necessarily all of them. However big and strong we are, there’s always something bigger and stronger. Many of us never encounter it, but those who do have only three options: submit, run away, or get torn to shreds. And getting torn to shreds doesn’t usually help much.