How To Control Your Life

Part 21

7 min readApr 2, 2015

When you walk through the average office you see desks and on the desks there are, amongst the computer screens, keyboards and other office paraphernalia, soft toys, mouse mats emblazoned with cartoon characters, pens and pencils with toys stuck on their tops, fluffy miniature soft toys, pencil sharpeners and erasers in primary and fluorescent colours, wind-up toys, coffee mugs emblazoned with funny slogans, cartons of food and drink in more primary and fluorescent colours, and sweets. Children’s sweets.

Have you seen the latest Haribou advert on television? Office workers in suits having a meeting in a boardroom, discussing the merits of a gummy children’s sweet in children’s voices.

We all know and love Haribou; adults and children alike are drawn to the brightly coloured packets, and the fact that Haribou sweets appeal to both has been played upon in different media outlets over the years
Food Marketing Agency website, April 2015

When you’re young you’re attracted, like a magpie, to brightly-coloured things, and to very sweet things. You’re attracted to fluffy things, and soft things, and tactile things. Life is one hectic adventure after another, with scrumptious food and drinks, and then carefree sleep until the next day brings more adventures and everything all over again. When you’re an adolescent things become tinged with darker and more stained colours, and life becomes moodier and more layered. The adult world is less comforting, more to be confronted. Other people become challenges and the excitement is frisson-charged. When you’re adolescent life is so intense and multi-layered that you need to chill out, tune out, and sleep a lot.

When you’re finally adult the world is subtly nuanced and the whole palette of colours is revealed. People fall into types and characters and show predictabilities as well as unforeseen layers. A part of the world, this country, this county, this town, this street, this house, is yours - at least to control. You’ve arrived.

You’re only young once, but you can be immature forever.
Provenance unknown

There’s a difference - a vast and yawning difference - between childlike and childish.

Childlike is good:

Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.
G.K. Chesterton, The Illustrated London News 1908–1910
The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.
Albert Einstein, The world as I see it (essay, 1931)
The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us. When the world seems familiar, when one has got used to existence, one has become an adult
Eugene Ionesco, Present Past/Past Present: A Personal Memoir

Childish (other than in a child of course…) is not so good. Nor is adolescence - not when you’re an adult.

Ask a handful of people when they realised they were adult and the answers are varied (and often entertaining).

“When my mother stopped washing my clothes for me”

“The day after I got married”

“When I took out a mortgage”

“When our first grandchild was born”

For Alfred Adler, however, maturity was more a question of self-mastery, and for Abraham Maslow one of realising, achieving, your full potential. But Elisabeth Kübler-Ross said: “We need to teach the next generation of children from day one that they are responsible for their lives”.

Ay, there’s the rub: being responsible for your life.

When your mother stops washing your clothes for you, or you sign a legal document binding you to paying a large amount of your salary each month for a very long time so that you can own a home of your own, you have taken a step towards becoming responsible for your own life. You’ve stepped out from behind your protectors, the adults, to take on the world as an adult yourself.

This means a whole host of things, not least that you have to get yourself out of bed in the mornings, get your own breakfast, and get yourself to work on time. More than that, you have to motivate yourself to make decisions about your life (what should you eat for that breakfast, what work should you do, what type of home should you live in, where should you live…). This is all fun at first, although daunting, but then the reality turns round and bites you: this is for ever.

This is the bit where some people get very stuck. Or they retreat. Having a home is fun, just like having a play house, and choosing things for it and decorating it is interesting and fun too. But working out the bills and scheduling payments, finding people to come and mend things and then paying them for doing that, and housework, housework, housework - all this sort of thing isn’t so much fun, particularly not when there’s all this and work too. So it’s on the phone to the parents, or it’s wait till the red-ink letters pile up inside the front door, or it’s have a tantrum on Facebook and lots of sympathy while someone else sorts out the mess.

Or perhaps it becomes a halfway house. The bills are paid - but some of them are late because when a bill arrives it doesn’t have to be paid straight away, so just put it on the desk and pay it nearer the time. Things get mended, but only when they’re so badly broken down that it’s an emergency. And housework gets done when there are people coming - or perhaps not even always then because it’s been left a bit late and they’re going to be here in fifteen minutes and things are well beyond a fifteen-minute-whizz-round à la Mary Poppins.

Well beyond. The accretion of limescale on basin, bath, loo and sink needs some serious lavishing of limescale remover, and the mould and grime growth in the dark corners wants rubber-gloved hard scrubbing. The carpets need more cleaning than the clogged vacuum cleaner can handle and the kitchen floor is at down-on-your-knees point. Every cupboard, drawer and wardrobe needs serious reorganising. And clutter - clutter is taking over every surface at every level throughout the house.

“I think the state of your house reflects the state of your mind”, said Jasmine Harman on BBC 1's Britain’s Compulsive Shoppers, and - at what might perhaps be called the other end of the spectrum - S. McMains and S. Kastner wrote, in the abstract of their paper Interactions of top-down and bottom-up mechanisms in human visual cortex published in the Journal of Neuroscience (2011 Jan 12;31(2):587–97): “Multiple stimuli present in the visual field at the same time compete for neural representation by mutually suppressing their evoked activity throughout visual cortex, providing a neural correlate for the limited processing capacity of the visual system” which, being rendered into the vernacular, means that clutter clogs your brain.

It’s one of the reasons we hate it so much when our home is out of control: we know it means that, underneath it all, our minds - we - are out of control.

It means, perhaps, that we didn’t quite make it that full way into adulthood. The façade is there, it looks OK, but is it just a Potemkin house? It can’t last, can it, if it’s not genuine? People are going to find us out. One day it’s all going to come crashing down because right now we’re just juggling, trying to keep the balls in the air by doing things at the very last minute, hiding things under the bed, the sofa, bundling them into the (already bursting) cupboards and drawers. It’s out of control and we’re just putting on an act, playing at being adult and all sorted out - but underneath we’re still children.

So we tinker round the edges, and do some more cosmetic cover-ups. Because taking all the furniture in the main room outside and washing the paintwork, dry-cleaning the curtains, shampooing the upholstery, steam-cleaning the carpets, sorting all the magazines, DVDs, catalogues, unpaid bills, broken remote controls, etc. littered around the room, and then working out how it can all be put back so that it doesn’t degenerate again immediately is just too much - but spending the day at the shops buying some nice things to tart up the room and give it a ‘lift’ isn’t.

And when we get back to work on Monday morning, we can console the unsatisfied, slightly guilty and shamefaced child in us with some brightly-coloured gummy sweets while we sit at our workstations comforted by the gay presence of brightly-coloured pencils, cartoon mouse mats and funny coffee mugs.

It’s so much easier than taking control.

That disgusting sweetmeat on which you have been gorging yourself in, I may say, a manner wholly unsuited to your age and position, is smothered in white arsenic.
Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers

Twitter: @MaryonJeane

How To Control Your Life

Part 21

Written by Maryon Jeane