I’m trying to teach myself to think in a better way. ‘Don’t think like that, think like this’. I tell myself. But that thought was wrong also you see and therein lies the problem! Therein lies the problem that won’t go away…

‘Every thought I think is wrong,’ I think frantically, working myself up into a state of flat-out panic. ‘What’s the right thing to do to fix the problem?’ ‘When there is a problem that is actually a very bad problem indeed, not like an ordinary problem, but like a really bad one, a frighteningly bad one in fact, then what’s the right thing to do?’ ‘What’s the right thing to do to fix it?’ These are just a few of the questions that are going through my head. You get the flavour, I’m sure. There’s no point in me going on and on about it like some kind of fool.

The facile remedies of this world, huh? Everyone’s an expert on everything and yet at the same time no one knows shit. They’re tripping up over themselves in their hurry to tell you what to do but at the same time they’re utterly clueless. Full of advice they are but if you were foolish enough to actually take it then you’d be in far worse trouble than you were when you started. That’s the problem with experts – you’ll soon find yourself face-to-face with new problems that make the old ones look like a walk in the park! Those old problems will seem like paradise in comparison – you’ll wish you could get back to them! You will be pure nostalgic about them…

I’m trying to teach myself a better way of existing in the world, a better way of being in the world, but somehow I don’t think I’m doing that well. A better way of existing in the world, a better way to be – what could be better than that? What could be better? Unfortunately I don’t think I’m doing particularly well in this quest however. I’m not doing very well at all.

I’m trying to teach myself a better way of teaching myself. Don’t teach yourself like that, teach yourself like this,’ I tell myself sternly, in full pedagogic mode. But this way of teaching myself – this way of teaching myself a better way of teaching myself – is also wrong, and therein lies the problem! Me finding the problem was the problem; me stating that me finding the problem is the problem is the problem. And therein lies the problem, I crow gloatingly, thereby sinking myself without a trace. Only a hole remains in the spot where only moments before I had been standing. A smoking hole in the ground. ‘And therein lies the problem,’ I say sadly, but no one hears me. No one hears me because I’m down at the bottom of the hole.

‘Do all roads lead to this place?’ I ask myself. ‘Whatever choices we make, whatever roads we take, do we always end up in this place? This place where problems gather darkly like storm clouds on the horizon, stacking up one on top of the other like layer upon layer of ominous purple cumulonimbus. ‘The place of problems,’ I tell myself, ‘that’s where I am now. I’m in the place of problems’. Fear takes root in me when I think this – a terrible, terrible fear, the type of fear that is like a revelation. I call this ‘the negative revelation’ – it would be good if it weren’t so bad. It would be right if it wasn’t so wrong…

When this fear takes hold of you it’s as if you’ve only just woken up out of some foolish kind of sleep. You’ve been fitfully dozing away the hours and days and years of your life. You didn’t know anything. You didn’t know anything and yet you thought that you did. Your somehow thought that you did. You automatically assumed it. Then comes the moment of awakening as if someone just turned the light on to show you your true situation and you wonder how you could have dozed so stupidly. Now that you’re face-to-face with the terror there will of course be no more dozing; there can never be any more dozing. You have remembered the true memory of Fear and it is as if you had never forgotten it.

‘Is it a big problem when there is a problem?’ I ask myself, my mind turning against me with a vengeance. ‘Is it wrong to be wrong?’ ‘Is it a problem if you think that something is a problem when it isn’t?’ ‘Is it a mistake to make a mistake?’ ‘Is it a mistake to think that a mistake is a mistake when it isn’t?’ ‘Is it wrong to be thinking in this way?’ These are all the thoughts I have as I hide away in my poor hole, the poor hole I absurdly call ‘my life’.