Great Expectations

"We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement" - George Eliot, Middlemarch, Chapter 79.

In other words, go not passively into your own future or it might end up a bit crappy.

I was recently given a book to read by an exceptionally good friend. It was neither Middlemarch nor the Charles Dickens classic of which I have plagiarised the title for this post. This excellent friend handed me this particular book with a number of disclaimers and even an invitation to throw it in the bin if I so chose. His wife distanced herself from the whole transaction which made the offering of this book all the more brave.

One of the pastoral carers I spoke to when I first found out I had cancer had counselled me that people would offer all kinds of help. She correctly forecasted that a large share of it would be amazing and overwhelming, and conversely some would be not just unhelpful but dispiriting, patronising or completely unrealistic. She suggested that I accept all help gracefully, then privately and metaphorically return anything from the latter categories to the universe, metaphysically speaking. "Accept then ignore" is probably a less airy-fairy way of putting it. In this case however, I accepted the book with a mind just slightly ajar rather than fully one way or the other, being partly closed due to the prior warnings attached to receipt of the book, and partly open because of my knowledge of and esteem for the giver.

Without going into stultifying detail (that's for later) the book is essentially a self-help/ motivational/ quasi-spiritual guide to having a successful life, using the philosophies embedded in various practices of martial arts as both its framework and marketing angle (its author is on the guest speaker circuit). I call it quasi-spiritual because while including elements of both eastern and western spiritual teachings, the book lost both its spirituality and its soul when in a chapter entitled "The Power of Self Image" the author related an anecdote about how he coined his professional pseudonym of "The Corporate Ninja" and finished with the sentence "A unique selling proposition was born". As a corporate defector I was again gratified at my escape and reminded of one of the reasons for it. (Apologies and respect to all friends enjoying rewarding corporate careers - it simply wasn't my path to take.)

Most (if not all) self-help or motivational publications are based around one premise - our expectations of and for ourselves. They offer an alternative to your present self, projecting positively towards who you can be, and what you can become. They also try to offer a pathway towards that projected future self by using visualisation techniques, workbooks and other exercises to give their methods a practical angle, to engender change that is both achievable and lasting. Theoretically, in so doing, one becomes an active participant in achieving one's expectations.

But what if our expectations are just plain nonsense? If you have not read Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, or it has been a while and you are, like me, a little rusty on the details at times, the novel is one of Dickens' most pessimistic stories. Like many other Dickens novels, it is filled with memorable and exaggerated characters, in particular the wealthy Miss Havisham, who having been jilted on her wedding day stops all her clocks, closes the curtains, leaves the wedding cake on the banquet table for the spiders and mice to live in and devour and remains incompletely dressed in her wedding finery (she had only one shoe on) for the rest of her life. The embodiment of rejection, her expectations shattered, she shuts down as we all want to when we are hit by personal catastrophe. This is sad enough, but the true ironic tragedy of the story centres on the main protagonist Pip, and the object of his affection, the hard hearted Estella.

In brief, and possibly with many oversimplifications and errors, Pip is an orphan being dragged up by his sister in reasonably meagre circumstances, and is apprenticed to a salt-of-the-earth type blacksmith. He meets and fancies Estella who has been adopted by the aforementioned Miss Havisham. Pip is not Estella's social equal (despite her parentage being questionable) and Estella is being raised by Miss Havisham to exact revenge for her bitter rejection on a new generation of unworthy male suitors. Pip is undeterred by his repeated rejection and the cruel barbs dished out by the beautiful Estella, and he believes it to be due to his lowly circumstances. Lo and behold, he is lucky enough, through an anonymous benefactor, to suddenly have thrust upon him 'great expectations'. He comes into a 'handsome property' and will be transformed into a gentleman with excellent prospects through the acquisition of appropriate means and education. Pip believes Miss Havisham to be this mysterious benefactor and is thrilled to think he has been chosen for Estella. Pip becomes a gentleman, then a wastrel and everything he believes Estella desires, arrogantly turning his back on his former friends and connections to reflect his raised status in life.

SPOILER ALERT: If I'm about to ruin the ending for you, stop reading now.

His expectations are false. Estella rejects his best advances. Miss Havisham is not his benefactor. His money came from an old convict, whom a young Pip had assisted to escape from a prison hulk under threat of terror and the thought of whom fills him with disgust. This same convict wishes Pip to consider him as family, but is in truth the father of Estella. Every one of his great expectations have amounted to nought, and Pip feels shamed by his victimhood at the hands of chance, fate, Miss Havisham and most painfully, Estella.

Here ends the summary (but not the story, you'll have to go re-read it), hopefully leading to some excellent and resounding points I am going to make, and tie neatly together with the afore-mentioned self help advice and George Eliot's quote. Here goes.

Astute followers (and those that can read dates) will know that I haven't posted on my blog in a little while. Another genuinely brilliant friend was concerned that I was too ill to write, and this was temporarily true, but she also shrewdly suggested that writer's block, and the weight of my own and others' expectations may have been a factor. It is true that I don't wish to bore, frustrate, insult or offend the sensibilities of anyone who is generous enough to read what I write. So I have hovered in a little anxiety over the expectations of my readers and waited until I felt I had something worthy to write. I am not sure whether you have great expectations or not, perhaps just enough interest to get you through and that is not only fine by me, but also miraculous. These expectations imagined or otherwise, can get rather weighty.

In the past, I had great expectations for myself. I had excellent prospects. Great husband, amusing dog, crafty cat, wonderful immediate and extended family, firm friends, comfortable house and rewarding career. Then I had a miscarriage, got Meniere's Disease and ended up with cancer. My future prospects became somewhat harder to determine and just a little bleaker. This is not another pity party, so please bear with me: my expectations changed regarding what might be ahead of me. Then towards the end of summer my health improved, my balance improved and I had a sense I was on my way back. I expected this would continue, but chemo put not so much a spanner in the works, but the whole damn Sidchrome set. I expected to get better when most people expect to get a little worse on chemo. Like Pip, my expectations were a little bit of nonsense. I had it a bit backwards.

In recent months I have heard many courageous cancer stories, and I am ashamed to admit that at times I have felt a little aggrieved when a cancer survivor has conquered Everest or done something amazing and inspiring. My nauseated self has been pissed off that these people are making me look bad. I have felt crappy and horrible and suffered some debilitating and at times scary side effects and symptoms. Is it the expectation that in surviving cancer you have to conquer the world? I just want to be able to walk my dog.*

My expectations are not so great as to include dragging my bony arse up Everest, nor even to expect to have a child one day when I recover from everything, but this is not to say that I have ceased to have expectations. Having expectations is like goal setting, or having some vision of where you'd like to be headed. Cue the self-help books.

I accepted the book written by the ninja person because firstly it was given to me by someone who I greatly respect and who was genuinely trying to help in any way possible, and that is never to be taken lightly. I also accepted it because with something approaching an open mind you sometimes find one thing that is worthy of your notice. I have been studying, reading and collecting snippets of a range of eastern and western philosophies since before I studied it at university (as well as chemistry, as you may recall) but am no expert in any of it. I like what resonates with me and that's all there is to it. (N.B. I wouldn't mind a little kudos as the following was found on page 236 out of a 244-page book, so I slogged through a fair bit to get there - this is the kind of commitment I can show when asked by a friend). Anyway, what I found was this one thing, in a chapter called "The Book of the Air, or the Book of the Void" from The Five Rings, a treatise on strategy and philosophy by Miyamoto Musashi, Samurai swordsman. I like the title. But what I most liked was this, and it is by no means new, likely predating 1645 in which it was purportedly written down this way.
There is no beginning or end, only cycles.
There are no successes or failures, only cycles.

It is also not confined to eastern philosophy: Alpha and Omega, anyone? To everything there is a season.

As with many philosophical thoughts, they often prompt memories or feelings from other times. This one put me in mind not only of the bible references above, but of a phrase I have collected from a favourite author, Jeanette Winterson, that "no emotion is the final one". No state of being, whether emotional, physical, intellectual or metaphysical, has any permanency. We are constantly changing, through experience, time and circumstances, so when we are down, we come out of it; when we grieve, time takes away the sting; when we are happy, it can fade to nothing; even a steady contentment requires constant maintenance for it to linger for any space of time. And then it passes. Nothing is static in human life and our experience of it. There are only cycles.

Just like in the self-help and motivational books, one can choose to be an active participant in achieving one's expectations, being an agent of change as a part of the cycle. Kate Flint provides the introduction to my edition of Great Expectations, and she remarks that the novel "calls into question how one may understand the processes of history... And the extent to which it is possible to play an active part in the shaping of one's own, or society's future". She, along with George Eliot at the top of this post, points to our ability to participate actively in creating our possible selves, in contrast to Pip, swept along passively by the forces at work in his life, and watching his expectations decay and rot like Miss Havisham's wedding cake. (Incidentally, both Pip’s first name and surname (Pirrip) are palindromes – where they end, they can also begin again. Pip should have known about cycles). I don't like to rely too much on the future as you may know, but mindlessly (with "dull consent") being buffeted by circumstances "into insipid misdoing” is not my plan either. Thankyou Ms George Eliot.

My expectations are simple, and at the very grave risk of over-quoting, and in a total clash of cultural references, they can best be summed up by the lyric found in Rolling Stone's 12th Most Annoying Song and Number 35 on AOL Radio's 100 Worst Songs Ever, "Tubthumping" recorded by the band Chumbawamba: I get knocked down, then I get up again. That's my great expectation of myself. It just happens to occur on a fairly regular basis lately, coinciding on a micro level with fortnightly chemotherapy treatments. Get knocked down, then get up again.

Look at that - it's a cycle. And best of all, nothing is permanent: this too shall pass. Hooray!

Credits
Thank you to my friends who are mentioned in this post – and as ever to all my friends, but those of you who are mentioned know who you are, and you're ace.
Charles Dickens, author, Great Expectations and 14 other major works of the Victorian era
George Eliot, author of Middlemarch and around 5 other Victorian era novels
Jeanette Winterson, author of Oranges are Not the Only Fruit and other contemporary novels and essays
Kate Flint, Professor of English, Fellow of Linacre College, Oxford
Ron Lee (The Corporate Ninja), author of What Shintaro Taught Me - not a plug, in case you hadn't worked that out
Miyamoto Musashi, author of The Five Rings (the Samurai, not the protein drink, not a plug)
Wikipedia's Chumbawumba and Tubthumping entries


*Interestingly, being able to walk my dog is pretty much dictated by my Meniere's, not the cancer. BTW, where is the "rah rah" for Meniere's sufferers? How did you find out about it? And did you know chemo can make it worse? Should I write a post about it? And, BTW, the first 9 of the 12 kilos I have lost was due to Meniere's, not cancer. And, BTW, sometimes it's the Meniere's that keeps me on the couch, not chemo, and not cancer, in case my previous sentences hadn't led you to working that out.)