For the sad people like me who read stuff over the Christmas holidays instead of drinking too much and playing board games, then here are three blogs starting tonight, tomorrow and Boxing Day with a little bit of Christmas-time philosophy of things that I've been thinking about over the past few months and years.
The first one is the concept of kindness.
The first thing that springs to mind when I think about this subject is the album by Frank Turner titled Be More Kind.
A very, very simple instruction, a very, very difficult practice to carry out on a day-to-day basis, particularly in a world where we are encouraged to shout at each other at all times, in a world where we're encouraged to criticise and to change and to alter people's views based on a very short view of history and a very little amount of information.
So this little blog about kindness centres around the lesson I learned from John Gibson, whom I've written about many times in this blog and who anyone who is associated with The Campbell Clinic and Campbell Academy will know about from his charity The Canmore Trust dedicated to his late son Cameron who took his own life in 2019.
Some time ago, John was kind enough to record a podcast interview with me, which has not yet been used (just not enough hours in the day to record, edit and publish the podcast), which is one of the best pieces of work I have never done.
This podcast episode is called 'Call the Liar', and it is (at least, I think) an incredible story about someone who blatantly lied and cheated. We have all the evidence and information related to that, and then the punch line in the podcast is what we should do when we find out the person has lied and how we should call them out.
In his interview in the podcast, I asked John what to do with this person, what to do with the person who had blatantly tried to cheat and lie to the little boys in the football team just to get the points, and John's perspective was (as always) quite extraordinary.
In effect, John said that what we should do with people like this is be kind because (and I'm extrapolating a little bit here) we never really understand the circumstances in which people act.
This kind of philosophy, this kind of approach extends into the other two parts of this blog for Christmas Day and Boxing Day, but in essence, if you have the opportunity to stop, take a step back, count to 10 and apply just a tiny, little bit more kindness to almost every circumstance and almost every outcome is better.
The problem is that we are so quick to anger, so fast to criticism, and so arrogant in our self-centred view of the world that we just act in a reflex fashion.
For me, the first person who actually taught me this type of approach was David Servan-Schreiber in his extraordinary book, Healing Without Freud of Prozac, which is now out of print but which we managed to get copies of this year to give as a gift to people who responded to a blog. It wasn't directly related to kindness that Schreiber taught me this trick; it was related to conflict resolution.
I was always fast to anger, always quick to react; I have a very quick tongue and generally quite a quick mind, so when someone bites at me, I can bite back quicker and harder and faster and deeper, but Servan-Schreiber taught me that the answer is to stop, to remove yourself from the situation and to count to 10.
I have used this trick on so many occasions now in so many difficult conversations and in so many different ways that it has been an enormously helpful skill to try and develop.
The thing about this time of year is that it's easy to be kind on Christmas Eve and even Christmas Day, a little bit less on Boxing Day when things start to wear off and then really bad when we get to the sixth of January when everyone goes back to work, and we have the Domestic Violence Spike Day in the United Kingdom because Christmas didn't fix the problems, it didn't cure the ills didn't seal the relationships back together.
What we need to understand is that the way we feel on Christmas Eve is possible to take forward into the rest of the year (Just like the lesson from A Christmas Carol).
It starts with the metaphor you get in most Christmas movies: just be kind; it's easy when you hang it on a hook like that.
Just be 5% more kind.
Why don't we all do that and see what it looks like?
Blog Post Number - 4031
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