Last week I was lucky enough to see a performance of the Willie Russell play, Educating Rita, in the West End. For those who never saw the film with Julie Walters, it's about a young un-educated woman who enrols for an Open University degree in English. She is allocated a tutor in the form of the ageing, weary and alcoholic Frank and the play is essentially a latter-day Pygmalion story. Rita is 26, a hairdresser and a wife, and she can see her life disappearing down tracks that have been well-worn by her mother, her grandmother and just about every woman she knows. Her days at work are all the same, and increasingly tiresome, and her husband keeps asking her when they're going to have a baby. She wants more.
The reason the play captures the audience, apart from being very funny, is that there can be barely one of us who hasn't at some point dreamt of a different life. We spend the first part of our adult lives desperately seeking all the things we think we need for a successful and comfortable life - career, financial security, partner, children, a house, car, electrical appliances, and yes, insurance for every conceivable eventuality - and the next part wondering if this is all there is. Frank sees, in Rita, someone who is fresh, exciting and untrammelled by middle class and academic convention, and it is very painful for him to help her out of the ditch which she had dug for herself, only to give her access to the one he has dug for himself.
Adam Phillips, the well known writer and psychotherapist, wrote last weekend in the Guardian about the pursuit of happiness, and asks the question, does pursuing happiness actually make us unhappy? Or (my question), are we just not very good at knowing what makes us happy?
I bumped into a friend a few weeks back. 'How are things with you?' I said. He looked animated and excited. 'Well, not too good really,' he replied. My son is getting married this weekend and my sister-in-law committed suicide three days ago'.
So my friend is enlivened by a tragedy and the major challenge of going through with a wedding the following weekend, and Frank, who has achieved much in his career, has a partner, and is living a comfortable middle-class existence, is half dead. And yet, as human beings, we're constantly seeking comfort and either running away from trouble, or trying to resolve it as quickly as possible. How strange is that?
Try this:
1. In what parts of your life are you comfortable?
2. In what parts of your life do you feel stagnant or
stuck?
3. In what parts of your life are you living 'on the
edge', where everything is new or difficult and you
are regularly stretched and challenged?
4. What are the up and down sides of each part of
your life?
5. What does each part of your life demand from you?
6. If you were going to move out of your comfort zone
in one area of your life, which would it be and how
would you do it?