Overwork has heavy costs. Working longer hours is dangerous and ineffective. But poor management, the subconscious, workplace culture, and work volume, can each be a barrier to better workplace practices. Thankfully though, these barriers can be overcome.

Spending too much time at your desk? Don’t stand for it.

If You Work More, You Get Less Work Done

Why shouldn’t you work more than 40 hours a week? If you work in the private sector, I might posit that working more than you are paid to constitutes a de facto donation to your employer, and last time I checked, they didn’t have DGR status. But let’s say you are working with, for example, a development NGO. Every hour you don’t work is an hour that you aren’t helping to make the world a better place. So 50 hours a week is 10 extra hours helping to improve governance in Papua New Guinea. Right?

Wrong. If you work more than 40 hours a week, your per-hour productivity declines, as does your overall output. That is, if you work more hours, you will get less done. In fact, “five-day weeks of eight-hour days maximize long-term output in every industry that has been studied over the past century.” I shit you not.

Why is this so? One obvious thing: over the course of a workday you become physically and mentally fatigued and your output decreases. If you regularly work overtime, this physical and mental fatigue accumulates, affecting how well you work.

Two other things might be considered. Particularly when it comes to knowledge work, if you are willing to spend extra time at work, it is harder to decline work that is less valuable, so you spend less of your time effectively. As Timothy Ferriss writes in The 4-Hour Workweek, “Since we have 8 hours to fill, we fill 8 hours. If we had 15, we would fill 15.” Further, even for worthwhile tasks, if you have an unbound amount of time to spend, you will tend to procrastinate and work less efficiently. Ferriss describes this as “Parkinson’s Law”, which dictates that “a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion.” So, if your manager knows you will tend to work more hours, they’ll tend to give you extra work to fill those hours. You yourself will be an unwitting co-conspirator in this, working less efficiently because of the awareness that you will inevitably end up working overtime.

Another way in which overwork decreases total output is that it uses up the internal resources that enable you to work well. In Be Excellent at Anything: The Four Keys To Transforming the Way We Work and Live, Tony Schwartz describes how humans naturally need to “pulse” between work and renewal in other areas of their lives. Effective workers, Schwartz demonstrates, have a work routine that allows time out on a daily, weekly, monthly, and annual basis. Too, such workers experience renewal in other areas of their lives: emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual.

If you are working more than 40 hours a week, each extra hour is an hour away from something else that means something to you. Maybe you don’t have time to visit the gym, to make your partner dinner, to meditate, or to play a game of Capture the Flag with your friends. Each of us is a whole person, the person who goes to work each day is the same one who comes home. So if your work is adversely affecting you outside of work, it’s also adversely affecting you inside work. A poorer personal life leaves you deprived of the internal resources needed to work effectively.

But It’s Hard to Choose to Do Less Work

So we can see now what was clear to most managers and business people through much of the 20th century: if you make people work longer, less work will get done. Yet just knowing this isn’t enough. There are still various barriers between you and a sustainable – and productive – work life.

Your manager makes you less productive

Sometimes you can’t choose to work productively because your manager doesn’t give you a choice. Many modern managers are bad managers: they demand extra hours from their staff, completely oblivious to the adverse impact on staff output – let alone staff wellbeing. If you are in this situation, you have lamentably few options. You could actively stand up to your boss (we have unions for a reason!). You could passively stand up to your boss – let them say their piece, but still have the breaks that are your right. You could find a new manager, or a new job. Or you could grow gradually bitter and resentful. So if your manager is a deadbeat, you aren’t entirely screwed, but you aren’t in a great place.

When it comes to working less, what’s getting in your way?

The voices in your head want you to work more.

A primary barrier to a productive worklife is “projection”. First conceptualised by Freud (although possibly in a different context), projection is when you subconsciously reject a negative attribute of your own, defensively pushing it on to others. Or, as Trent Hamm puts it more concisely: “you’re putting your own thoughts into their heads”. Have you ever left work early, or told a coworker you couldn’t take on that extra project, only to then think to yourself how slack people must think you are? Feeling judged or lazy is a serious disincentive to working less.

In this situation, it’s important to recognise that these are your own thoughts. We can’t know what others think of us, and if we are concerned that our manager thinks we’re freeloading, that’s a conversation better brought out into the open. Rather, these thoughts reflect our own self-judgement and discomfort – given the dominant culture of overwork – with looking after our own selves adequately. Recognising these thoughts for what they are can help us to accept them without being controlled by them.

You want to work as much as everybody else does.

Workplace culture can also be a barrier to working less. Glen Ochre of The Groupwork Institute describes culture as “the way we really do things around here”, and this definition perfectly captures the potential problems. Even if it is explicitly OK to restrict one’s work to 40 hours a week, it is implicitly not OK to do so if everyone else in the office is working unpaid overtime. We’re all accustomed to discerning the difference between what people say and what they do, between what people say is acceptable and what actually is acceptable. The leaders in a workplace have great influence over its culture, and their behaviour – more so than any induction manual – indicates what is expected of others. The risk is thus that the leaders themselves work a great deal of unpaid overtime, and other staff feel compelled to do the same – because that’s the way people really do things.

The way people actually work is more significant than what they say.

Perhaps, though, this isn’t an option. It’s possible the manager practices sustainable work but it doesn’t seem that way – they might be first in, and last to leave, but duck out for two hours every afternoon for a nap in a park. Maybe everybody sees the manager working 6-day weeks, but nobody knows about the 5 week holiday they’re planning on taking in a month’s time. Here, the best option might simply be honest communication: talking to staff about what expectations actually are, while naming the implicit pressures that might exist. “Lots of people here do lots of work, but each one of them has found a balance that allows them to do their best possible work,” one might say. “It’s incumbent upon you to do the same – even if, and especially if, that means working fewer hours.” While few things are stronger than culture, open and ongoing discussion around workplace norms can give people permission to look after themselves as they need.

But there’s so much work to be done!

It’s 4:50pm and you’ve just emailed your colleague the minutes from your most recent meeting. You’ve completed your goals for that day and am about to head out to see a play (“The Importance of Being Earnest”) with a youth worker you met at a recent Equal Love rally. And then your manager comes up and asks if you could quickly handle some not-only-urgent-but-also-important task. Luckily, you hadn’t pre-booked tickets: you send an apologetic text and get straight back into work.

Even if you get it, even if you understand that finishing work on time is important, these sorts of moments can easily overwhelm you. It’s hard in the moment. And let’s face it – it’s hard to say “no” when we want people to like us.

But let’s face it – there’s always more work to do, and at some point you have to turn off for the day. Of course, it doesn’t make sense to turn off if you are in the middle of your best work, or if you desperately need to meet a deadline that’s one hour off. But the mere fact of there being more work doesn’t mean that you should do it now. And, in fact, if that deadline is tomorrow, or a week off, you’re probably more likely to meet it if you have a break in the meanwhile.

Katrina Shields, in In the Tiger’s Mouth, talks about “the urgency of now” – this moment can always seem like the most important moment, this action like the most important action. But is it? Asks Shields, “Do you believe that if you just work a little harder it will stem the flood of demands? Do you put life on hold until everything is cleared up? Unfortunately in most cases the demands are endless.”

Yes there’s a lot of work to be done. It can probably wait.

Work It Out

Work can be immensely rewarding. It’s possible to wake up energised by the thought of what you’ll achieve at work that day. It’s possible to glance at the clock, see that it’s 5pm, but decide you want to finish writing that paper you’re right in the middle of. This is all healthy.

What isn’t healthy, whether you love your work or not, is overwork.

So, if you want to do the best work you can, do less work. Centuries of research and experience point to a lesson that is pretty obvious even after just one 60-hour workweek: humans don’t work well if they work more than 40 hours a week. Yes, there are barriers to working less. There are bad managers, your sneaky subconscious, insidious workplace cultures – not to mention the deluge of emails in your inbox.

But you can do this. You can give yourself permission to chill. You owe it to your employer, you owe it to your clients, perhaps you owe it to the people of Papua New Guinea. Above all, you owe it to yourself. Work less. You’ll work better, and you’ll feel better.

There are obvious benefits to this situation: on my new salary, I need not experience want. My tastes are simple and my needs will be met. I’m a frugal guy and have learnt sometimes to accept and endure, in the interests of thrift, a nagging but submissive hunger or thirst. But this can suck a bit. Now I won’t have to endure. I will probably thus have a better time being out, doing things with friends. Money itself doesn’t cause this, but it means things can be that bit nicer, that (some!) unfulfilled desires can be banished. It’s the simple delightful difference made by dessert at the end of a lovely meal.

I’m also really looking forward to spending more money on people I care about. I don’t tend to express love with gifts, which is both an idiosyncrasy and an economic measure. But I’ve been trying it out recently and I enjoy it: a spontaneous, apt gift can be a wondrous thing to share. I won’t go out of my way to spend money on this, but now I’ll feel comfortable taking advantage of opportunities when they arise.

It’s nice being able to afford things that are worth it.

The obvious alternative? Save all this surplus income. Squirrel it away. Be the ant, not the grasshopper.

Silly me, I struggled with this concept. Hitherto I have saved pretty competently: I currently have a comfortable emergency fund that could tide me over for even a protracted period of unemployment (although I’d have to stop buying desserts when out!). But somehow I balked at the idea of saving even more money, of passing certain thresholds. I guess I asked myself: when is enough enough? Given that so many great causes need more money, could I ethically justify sitting on tens of thousands of dollars while more deserving parties had to go around, hat in hand?

As it happens, I now feel better about it all. I was lunching with a friend who revealed that she had more than $50,000 saved up. Jeepers! We discussed this and a great point came up: sustainable activism includes financial sustainability. This means looking after your finances, making sure that money (or a lack thereof) doesn’t come between you and the pursuit of social change. As activists we should look after our own selves: our health (physical and mental), our relationships, our spiritual growth, our learning. Also, our finances. Activists who can afford to financially support others are privileged and should offer such support. And they can also support activism by supporting themselves.

So I am pumped for the new job. There’s excitement about so much of it: the role, the responsibility, the employer, my future colleagues. Too, there is excitement about the salary. It’s going to be good to be able to pay for the cherry on the experiential cake when eating or going out, to surprise my friends with material symbols of love. It’s also going to be good, to save, to add to my sense of security, so that, whatever cruel fortuna sends my way, I’ll have a little somethin’ somethin’ to help me meet it.

Sadly, Holly knew from my blog my penchant for highlighting books and forbade such behaviour. So I had to digest it with naught but a couple of post-it flags and a faint pencil. Incredibly, despite these barriers, I still managed to get something out of it.

In the Tiger’s Mouth is a foundation-stone for healthy activism. It’s a fantastic seminal read that could guide the practice of a new activist or help to renew that of an old hand. What most distinguishes it is its emphasis on three elements not often considered in other campaigning texts: self-awareness, collaboration, and self-care.

Self-awareness in the tiger’s mouth

Shields dedicates a chapter to the benefits of self-awareness for activists: “Insight into how our motives, reactions, and perceptions may distort and sabotage the best of campaigns is crucial if we wish to be effective.” Shields loves activists and activism, yet doesn’t ship from scrutinising their motivations, encouraging her audience to look within in an effort to be more effective. She resists the temptation to give activists a blank cheque because of their good intentions, nor is she too critical: she simply acknowledges that activists face the same subconscious drivers as others do.

Accepting this as the case, and the limitations of a book as a means to begin such introspection, Shields writes, “In making a commitment to sustained social responsibility and action, it is important for us to untangle our unconscious personal motivations and psychological issues from our conscious purposes.” She talks about projections, distortions of reality whereby we project our past on to the current situation, or our inner world onto the outer world. Giving examples of ineffective campaigning, Shields points out how the subconscious is at play, driving people in the wrong direction as they bump up against their own ‘stuff’.

What motivates your activism?

Listening in the tiger’s mouth

Earl Koile, Listening As A Way Of Becoming:

Demanding clarity about thoughts and feelings before sharing them can be a real problem…What I need is to share my jumbled-up inner dialogue with someone who can hear, and in listening, can help me to hear myself. With help, I may find release from the captivity of my own words and touch delicate, frightening, or otherwise eclipsed feelings within me.

Shields bears beautiful witness to the transformative power of high-quality listening. She portrays it as a way for activists to look after themselves, to support one another, and to find common ground with putative opponents. “High quality listening”, she writes, “is potentially empowering for both the listener and the speaker.”

Koile’s quotation shows one way that high-quality listening can aid social action: by enabling a speaker to sort out their own ideas. When facing tricky decisions, or emotional complexities, it’s hard to figure it all out in your own head. One tends to best ‘think out loud’, which can go OK with a poor listener, but can be profoundly helpful when a talented listener plays their role appropriately: practising empathy, reflecting, and asking a small number of apt questions. The listener is a sounding board who should avoid giving advice, whose function is simply to help the speaker to make their own sense of their situation. Ultimately, the speaker knows their situation best, they just need somebody to help them sort through it.

I’ve experienced the benefits of high-quality listening myself thanks to some generous and skilled friends. Late last year I was facing a number of decisions about what to do in 2013, tossing up between a range of work and study options. I was discussing this with a friend and they listened astonishingly well: reflecting my sentiments, letting silences bloom, noticing. This helped me to figure out my situation, and also brought me closer to the friend. Such joy!

In a similar fashion, listening can enable activists to build connection with ostensible opponents. The purpose here is still partly to help somebody understand their own ideas, but also for the listener to understand the speaker’s position. Again, reflective listening and empathy are crucial here. In some cases this can help previous opponents to find common ground; even where that is not possible, it builds respect and greater willingness to engage with one another. It can be hard to realise that your opponents also have valid interests and needs, but it’s a realisation that deepens your own humanity and can make you more effective in your work.

Self-care in the tiger’s mouth

Part III of In the Tiger’s Mouth is “Preventing Burnout”. With the same practical folk wisdom that characterised Parts I & II, Shields writes honestly and immediately about the tragedy of burnout: “a stress-related disease producing a major life crisis from which [the sufferer] may never fully recover.”

Shields has been around the scene for a while and writes about burnout with a deep appreciation of how it is caused. She probes the reader, referring to her previous chapter on self-awareness, to help you better understand the forces driving you – and potentially driving you too fast. Piercing the ‘urgency of the moment’ mentality, she asks, “Do you believe that if you just work a little harder it will stem the flood of demands? Do you put life on hold until everything is cleared up? Unfortunately in most cases the demands are endless.” She is realistic about the limits we face. While she acknowledges the compulsion to push oneself harder, the pull that a needy cause can exert, she addresses the reader with a materteral (‘auntly’) fondness: “ask yourself whether you are aiming to be extraordinary in your work or are prepared to be more ordinary and relatively happy and healthy.”

I haven’t experienced burnout myself. My experience of it is second-hand, watching peers go too hard, for too long, stop enjoying what they do, feel overwhelmed. I’m glad that I’ve had the resources, inner and outer, to keep myself safe from such an outcome. While Shields’ above definition of burnout seems hyperbolic, it is warranted to adequately recognise how big and irrevocable the phenomenon can be. Burnout harms individuals, undermines organisations, and suggests a certain irony – to be advocating greater sustainability and compassion while failing to show the same towards one’s own self. It’s a terrible thing that goes on. Thus, In the Tiger’s Mouth does social activists a service. By focusing on burn out, Shields emphasises its notability as a barrier to effective activism. Her writing about burnout’s symptoms and causes, as well as ways of responding, is a helpful instrument in avoiding or beginning to recover from it.

Concluding in the tiger’s mouth

The rather odd title of Shields’ book stems from a drawing given to her by “a gentle Buddhist monk from Thailand”. A picture of a rampant tiger, it was captioned, “The best place for meditation is in the tiger’s mouth.” With this title Shields attests to the challenges, the global threats facing us as a species, as well as the unique challenges encountered by those of us who organise in the face of such threats. On the frontlines of social action, we can’t escape the tiger’s mouth…but we can get better at inhabiting it.

In the Tiger’s Mouth is a beautiful book, the practical effectiveness of which is belied by its translucent, almost meditative tone. It teaches us how to better know ourselves, how to better know others, how to better look after ourselves and thus, ultimately, how to better look after humanity.

A single quotation from the book perhaps sums it up best, so let me end with these words of Ann Herbert:

Large change doesn’t come from clever quick fixes from smart tense people, but from long conversations and silences among people who know different things and need to learn different things.

Yes, the state of the world calls for many extraordinary people. It also calls for – perhaps a little less loudly – billions of ordinary people, involved in activism, relatively happy and healthy. Even in the tiger’s mouth, one can thrive.

In literature on management, leadership, or self-improvement, there’s often an emphasis on goal-setting and planning. Stephen Covey, in his quintessential guide The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, urges us to “begin with the end in mind”. He writes, “To begin with the end in mind means to start with a clear understanding of your destination. It means to know where you’re going so that you better understand where you are now and so that the steps you take are always in the right direction.” (emphasis added) In The 4-Hour Workweek, Timothy Ferriss is perhaps less incorrigible, but he still encourages the reader to undertake “dreamlining”, applying timelines to dreams to make them a reality.

I myself largely bought in to this approach. I identified specific areas of my life and set a vision for where I would be in three years. I then worked backwards, creating intermediate goals to propel me onwards. Each week I undertook tasks related to each goal area. I had an ‘accountability partner’, and we would discuss our goals and support each other to achieve them. I was on track. Supposedly.

The problem with this approach is that it is a doomed effort at prediction. Foremost, you are attempting to predict what will make you happy in the future. If I hypothetically aim, by 2015, to be running a small business employing more than 15 staff, I am basing this on the prediction that such will make me happy. Secondly, from the moment you begin to map out intermediate steps towards any goal, you are hypothesising about causes: what will cause the desired effect? Again, this is predictive: let us hypothesise that cause A will result in effect B. And thus it is speculative. While there may be plenty of inductive evidence from the examples of others, it is naïve to think that simply following the trail blazed by another will be sufficient to land you in their place. So this approach depends upon a misguided confidence in one’s ability both to see the future and to plan based upon supposed causal relationships. I think of the mentality that underlies this approach as the ‘prediction and planning’ paradigm.

In my case, my plans were dashed to pieces. The reason I recently moved to Canberra is because I got the opportunity to volunteer on a potentially history-making election campaign that could stop Tony Abbott from controlling both houses of Australian Parliament. After a challenging week of introspection I jumped at this opportunity, resigning from my full-time job in Melbourne, saying goodbye to my friends, packing my life into a car boot, and hitting the road. To some extent the choice to do this was easier because my goal-setting efforts had highlighted to me certain priorities in my life, with strengthening Australia’s progressive movement ranking more highly than security or wealth. Still though, this sudden change in my fortunes demonstrated to me the contradictions inherent in rigid life-planning.

It’s both convenient and awkward how easily my things fit in my small car.

Based upon my experience, this paradigm takes into account the unpredictable twistings of fate. I at least have consistently found myself unable to predict where my life might take me. I was surprised to find myself studying Engineering, but I never thought I’d drop out of university. When I went to the AYCC’s Power Shift in 2009, I never suspected I’d move to Melbourne and end up as part of the AYCC’s Senior Leadership Team. A brief internship at Adelaide Uni unexpectedly landed me a job with a waste consultancy. I didn’t anticipate how last year’s decision to study a Management Diploma would change my life, nor the changes that could be wrought on my life merely by attending a facilitation conference. But there you have it.

There are, however, two frameworks that have been of use through all these twists and turns.

The first is that I’ve always made an effort to know and be guided by my own principles. Principles, in the words of the Groupwork Institute of Australia, are “guiding statements that help to ensure our practice reflects our values.” While a life-plan can be like a soiled map – you know where you want to get to but aren’t that sure of the way – principles are a compass, helping you to make, at any given turn, the right decision.

For example, when considering a move to Canberra, I had both doubts about whether it was good for my career and worries about how it would impact me financially. I wasn’t sure if the move would help me to make progress towards my life goals. Yet I shortly realised the shallowness of such concerns. Reflecting upon my principles I realised that being part of a team stopping Tony Abbott was more important to me than those other considerations. Your principles don’t help you to get where you want, but they help you to be who you want to be. They make sure that, wherever you get to, you got there the right way.

Sometimes having a map is no help at all.

This preparedness also exists in your skills, and, yes, your financial resources. Particularly nowadays, where the prospect of a decade-long “career” with the one employer is decreasingly likely, it’s advantageous to build a range of transferable skills that can be of use in any situation. Trent Hamm argues this in The Simple Dollar, pointing to skills in communication, time-management, information management, leadership and creativity as skills that “make it possible to maximise any opportunitythat comes your way….” In the same book he argues that one should save scrupulously – potentially having an emergency fund equivalent to several year’s salary – not only to deal with unanticipated blows but also to provide the freedom to pursue one’s dreams free of money-worry. Fortunately I read his book around the time I began my last Melbourne job, and had been saving about 60% of my total income, giving me much more security when I moved to Canberra and gave up that salary. So building a diversely-applicable skillset and a sound financial foundation presents you with more opportunities and prepares you to take them.

In conclusion, few of us can accurately predict what will make us happy in the future, or what it will take to achieve that state. Rather, one’s best bet is to know and live by one’s own principles, which ensures that your decisions reflect your values and develop you into the person you want to be. In addition, one ought to be prepared to take opportunities. Be willing to face risk and the potential for loss, hone transferrable skills, and save meticulously when you have the chance.

My own transition from the goal-setting paradigm to the philosophy of principles and preparedness began when I read Man’s Search for Meaning, just a few weeks before I left Melbourne. In it, Viktor Frankl posits that life will offer each one of us a purpose, and all one has to do is be ready to rise to that purpose. Says he,

Don’t aim at success – the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run – in the long run, I say! – success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it!

Success cannot be pursued, it must ensue. Listen to what your conscience commands, and carry it out.

Even before your intelligence begins to make sense of it, there’s something instinctive that is repulsed by what you see: gross violence by one human against another. For me, as it went on, shockwaves rippled through my mind…this is not only upsetting, it’s disturbing. The footage challenges how we think of Australia as a safe, tolerant country, where powers are held in check. The moment when the police officer throws the handcuffed man into the ground, you almost have to pause and give yourself a second to take it all in. This is Australia. These are officers of the law. And police brutality shouldn’t happen here.

In a way the range of reactions are predictable: some decry it as an abuse of power and ask for a public investigation; others defend the actions of the police in the midst of a chaotic situation. In following days more footage comes to light, showing the man – 18-year-old Jamie Jackson – manically struggling against police prior to the events of the initial video.

What does it mean?

When I first watched the video, it struck me how bad the situation was for all involved. From the first frame the situation is unstable. The police are in the middle of a large, hostile crowd, albeit restrained. It’s dark, there is yelling, screaming, abuse. It’s a very stressful situation, certainly for Jackson, certainly too for the horrified spectators, certainly too for the police officers.

Around the 1:00 mark, something snaps in one of the officers. There’s a sickening thud. Jackson is hurled into the ground, a police boot pushed between his shoulder blades. “Stay on the ground” orders the officer. The look in the officer’s face is a bit dazed. He probably knows he crossed the line. In the hurly-burly of abuse, screams, and disarray, he momentarily acted out of anger and disgraced both himself and his profession. He probably regrets it now. He probably wishes too that people had more empathy for his situation, for what pushed him to that point.

The parade was March 2nd. The video went onto YouTube on the 4th. Between the 5th and the 6th it received 1,000,000 views. On the 6th, GetUp emails a petition to its members. It’s on the radio, it’s on the news feeds. The shit has truly hit the fan.

In the rush to claim ideological ground, to identify and stand with either the oppressor or the oppressed, salient points easily get lost. Fortunately, most of those standing with Jackson seem to have a fairly straight and reasonable message:

• The use of force shown in the video wasn’t reasonable and constitutes police brutality. This is true regardless of what Jackson might have done to warrant his arrest.
• The police force has a long way to go in terms of how it works with minority groups. This includes the LGBTIQ community, as well as Aborigines, young people, and those with a mental illness.
• The oversight systems within the police force – internal investigations etc. – are inadequate. They are seen as injust, and this undermines the integrity of the police force as a whole.

We can add to this a message that most agree on and that Jackson’s ostensible opponents insist is relevant: that all police offers have an incredibly demanding job and that the vast majority of them do it very well. As GetUp made clear in their 6 March email:[quote]The overwhelming majority of police officers in NSW do a commendable job; we respect their dedication and patience in one of the hardest jobs in our community. In the 35 years since the original Mardi Gras police have gone from shutting it down to marching in the parade as part of the community. For the most part, this Mardi Gras showed off the best in our community, and our police.[/quote]Clearly we need a better system for investigating complaints against police. Too often police are investigating their own colleagues and, as David Shoebridge catalogues, letting them off with barely a slap on the wrist. The best way of exonerating honest police officers, and holding accountable brutal ones, is to provide an independent framework that is trusted by the public.

While police may currently complain of “trial by social media”, the sad reality is that the public isn’t likely to see a trial by other means. That’s why things have to change. And that’s why the repercussions of this incident are yet to be felt: it’s not until we see the pathetic results of whatever internal police investigation that we will see the true extent of this injustice, and the dire need for a different system.

Many will be scarred by the incidents of the Sydney Mardi Gras 2013. Jamie Jackson may never see a police officer without an experience of reflexive fear. The onlookers have doubtless lost faith in the police; relationships between the LGBTIQ community and the police force probably might need a little more work. Sadly, there’s no way of absolutely preventing these sorts of things. Even the best police force couldn’t weed out every bad apple, and even good apples can – in extreme circumstances – act rotten.

What can be prevented is impunity. It can be ensured that police officers who are accused of breaking the law face appropriate investigation and the potential for punishment. Until then, “trial by social media”, imperfect, partial, and based on hearsay, is one of the few options we have.

Experiencing MONA’s Art

MONA contains a bricolage of artworks. The contents ramble and scramble and amble along as one and somehow it works, especially as you come to recognise Walsh’s apparent whimsy. MONA contains old art and, consistent with its full name (the Museum of Old and New Art), new art. Some things are revolting. Others chilling. Others are touching. Let’s explore this mixed bag.

Cloaca Professional, 2010, Wim Delvoye

Untitled (Stool for Guard), 2007, Taiyo Kimura

So I crouched down and considered what was going on. The work is manipulative. It deceptively provokes empathy which then, without a genuine subject to empathise towards, is dissipated like a wave’s energy against a cliff-face. But I like this. For those who have such a reaction, it’s a reminder that they have that empathy, and that there are genuine subjects for it out there. For those who don’t – or who miss the discreet work altogether – it’s an interrogation of their putative sensitivity. One John Armstrong gave this work as an example of his argument that MONA offers darkness but no light. I don’t know about that. I myself considered using the poor girl as a stool, but felt I had to draw the line somewhere.

Candle Describing a Sphere, 2006, Jason Shulman

To sum up: MONA’s art covers the range. There’s something in there to make you feel every sort of emotion, have every sort of reaction. Yes it can be scary, or degrading, or offensive. And it can be uplifting, or profound, or awesome. That is not only art my friend – that is life.

The Artful Experience of MONA

The experience of MONA itself is artful (as in “The Artful Dodger” not like the Louvre). Like conception, it begins with the O.

The O. Every visitor to MONA gets a digital field guide, not unlike The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (ok, maybe a bit unlike). It can tell where you are in the gallery, and you read about works by interacting with the O’s touchscreen. By this means you get the basics: who, what, when. Then a bit of (I quote) “art wank”, the sort of stuff that learned people write on little placards that go next to otherwise impenetrable works by the likes of Rothko. You also (coming back to Walsh’s idiosyncracy) get what is called “gonzo”, contributions written by Walsh himself, or Elizabeth Mead (MONA’s curator…I think), or sometimes each of them. When you finish your tour, the O emails you a link enabling you to relive your tour anytime you please. This is a gift, enabling you to return to works that took your fancy or that you wanted to learn more about. It has also been sensationally handy in facilitating my writing about my own visit.

The O kindly recorded my journey through MONA in its pink-on-black glory.

And this is what it is.

The O, with its “gonzo” commentary, the layout, the architecture: MONA is setup not just to induct you into a single artwork, not just to induct you into the gallery, but to bring you into Walsh’s worldview. You are Sophie in Sophie’s World and Walsh is Albert Knag – he has created this world and you are to inhabit it. It’s awesome, penetrating this man’s empire, coming to know him by his pithy comments. And it’s scary, realising that your whole experience – the architecture, the lighting, the work, even how you arrived at the place – has been contrived.

This is what I mean when I say performance art. Make no mistake about it, MONA is Walsh’s performing. In entering MONA you enter Walsh’s masque. And let’s be fair – it is a phenomenally good performance. Like any great work, Walsh’s magnum opus aggrandises its creator, but does so by offering its consumers a consummate experience not to be rivalled.

MONA.

The 5 Love Languages opens with an argument that the feeling of being “in love” is comparatively shortlived. The average duration for the “in love” feeling is, we are told, two years. As this feeling fades one encounters frustrations and grievances previously unnoticed or considered unimportant. This shift requires one to begin working at communicating love by making a concerted effort to convey love in a lover’s primary love language. This is a second sort of love, writes Chapman, which [quote]“requires effort and discipline. It is the choice to expend energy to benefit the other person, knowing that if his or her life is enriched by your effort, you too will find a sense of satisfaction.”[/quote] Chapman thus establishes a dichotomy between being “in love”, “not an act of the will or a conscious choice”, and “real love”, a willful commitment to benefit another. This contrast facilitates his subsequent exposition of the love languages, the how of living out and expressing his “real love”.

The 5 Love Languages is a useful model

The 5 Love Languages‘ model allows you to determine your partner’s love language and endeavour to express your love in the way most intelligible to them. Expressing your love in your own language (if it’s not your lover’s language) is like trying to find a bus station in Tanzania using English. You’re much better off matching your language to the language of your audience. So you gotta know their language. Similarly, it helps to know your own so you can make sure to have your emotional needs met.

And what are these five languages?

• Words of Affirmation. This means encouragement (“you’ll be great”) and compliments (“you are great”). If this is your primary language, you’ll find slurs or insults particularly hurtful.
• Quality Time – “giving someone your undivided attention”. This can include doing an activity together, or “quality conversation”, in which “two individuals are sharing their experiences, thoughts, feelings, and desires in a friendly, uninterrupted context.” Here, inattentiveness, interrupting, or rushed encounters might be hurtful.
• Receiving Gifts. This could be material gifts or the gift of one’s presence in a time of need – either is a symbol of love. An absence of gifts or one’s lover might be painful in this language.
• Acts of Service – “doing things you know your spouse [sic] would like you to do”. Mainly this means chores, errands, or simple tasks. If you feel unloved particularly when your partner doesn’t do the dishes or pick you up from the airport, this could be your language.
• Physical Touch – “Running the hand through the hair, giving a back rub, holding hands, embracing sexual intercourse”. This is an emotional need, not simply sexual. If your lover doesn’t spontaneously display physical affection, in this language they are expressing a lack of feeling.

If none has jumped out at you as your own love language, or if you aren’t quite sure, Chapman gives a few ideas on how to figure out your own (or somebody else’s…) love language. Consider:

• How do you express love? People tend to express love in their own primary love language. If you think about the ways that you’ve tried to indicate affection, they are a hint to your primary love language.
• What makes you feel most loved? Consider what has made you feel truly loved, what things people have done or said that warmed you to the core.
• What makes you feel least loved? Chapman also gives examples where people have known they feel truly awful because, for example, their spouse spends no time with them, or belittles them, or doesn’t touch them. If you can think about times you’ve felt unloved, these also point to what your primary love language is – it’s also the most powerful language for expressing unlove.

Would you rather presents? Or presence?

My Love Languages

The 5 Love Languages includes a test to find out your own love languages (you can do it yourself online). So now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for: my score, in ranked order. (12 is the maximum for any one language, there are 30 points to be allocated)

• Quality Time: 12
• Physical Touch: 9
• Words of Affirmation: 5
• Acts of Service: 4
• Receiving Gifts: 0

This makes sense.

Even before I’d done the test, encountering the concept and then reading the book made it clear to me how much I value quality time, in particular “quality conversation”. Quality time is my primary love language: what makes me feel most loved is having deep, committed, quality conversations. And this is how I like to express my love: by listening, by giving others the opportunity to have such conversations. It’s also a lack of quality time that makes me feel underloved: when people don’t seem to want to spend time with me, or offer divided attention (such as checking their Facebook notifications f.f.s.). Curiously, but maybe not coincidentally, most of the times I’ve felt intense love for someone it has arisen out of a specific episode (typically overnight at some sort of sleepover) of intense, mutual conversation.

Knowing this also helps me to understand other things about myself. For example I am challenged when somebody I’m conversing with answers a trivial phone call or breaks the conversation to check Facebook etc.. I myself would avoid such behaviours. But now I get it – as quality time is my primary love language, doing such a thing would be hateful. So it makes me feel snubbed. For those for whom quality time isn’t their primary language, they don’t see what all the fuss is about.

In this picture I am being ironic.

Lost in Translation

The 5 Love Languages joins a mere handful of books that have significantly influenced how I experience relationships. Its simple model for thinking about how we communicate love and how we interpret love from others is useful and elegant. While any and every model has its limitations, this one is an excellent way of making sense of your emotional needs and improving your ability to meet the needs of others. Do read it.

Find out your own love language by doing the online quiz. If you do, please comment with – if not your results – at least some thoughts about them!

The game can take a while to warm up to – I wouldn’t recommend it for people new to games other than Monopoly! But really, it’s quite easy to learn and get in to and has lots of layers of depth, making it possible to have a fun game as a novice while still having chances to play at more and more sophisticated levels. This is the sign of a good game.

I’ve played two games and enjoyed them and I look forward to playing many more. However, I’ve found the online version of rules, courtesy of Richard Bartle, rather dense and unhelpful for beginners. In the hope that many people will decide to give this game a go, I’ve tried to achieve better simplicity with the rules.

So give Spellcaster a whirl! Here is all you need:

• PDF: The Rules of Spellcaster (and .doc for editing)
• PDF: The Spell Reference Sheet
• PDF: A sheet for tracking games (although you can simply use blank paper)

I was going to write the rules up below but, holy crap, it’d be too much work. Just read the pdf.

Looks fun, hey?

No time like the present

The present situation of each lover – their ‘life circumstances’ or ‘context’ – significantly affects the prospects of an affaire. It’s simple: do the situations/circumstances/contexts of the lovers facilitate the growth of a bond? Or are they a barrier? It is easier for love to take hold when two people go to the same school, or work at the same place, or live in the same suburb. It’s easier if they are at the same ‘life stage’: they might both study or both work, they might both be new to the same city, they might both have just graduated. Why might this be the case? Firstly, a relationship is easier to conduct when circumstances make it easier to spend time together. A second factor is that similar situations results in shared experiences. These shared experiences make it easier to relate to one another. Easier relating aids shallow conversation, but also deeper conversation, as a greater understanding of a lover’s context – due to one’s own familiarity with the context – would make it easier to empathise or offer support. For these two reasons, one influence upon the success of a new love is how present situations overlap between potential lovers.

I think this can be seen by the way that one partner’s graduation might affect a relatively young relationship. The lover that is in the workforce while their partner is in uni, or in uni while their partner is in high school, loses from that relationship their partner’s ability to relate to their own experience. The newly-graduated lover’s horizons expand, and they need someone with similar horizons – which may not be the same person who met their needs previously! Another example: I once dated somebody living in a sharehouse at a time when I had never lived in a home other than my parents’. Not only did I lack an understanding of her sharehouse context, I also (I realise now) lacked an understanding of sharehouse culture, which meant that I was less sensitive to her housemates’ and her needs in relation to this. Bummer.

What the future holds

The future of each potential lover is also significant: what they envision as their future. When two lives intersect, each of those lives already has a certain trajectory. There may exist plans to travel, to study, to work a certain profession. Ultimately, we each have our own plan to be a certain person. If these two plans are too unaligned, it’s hard for a love to last. If two people aren’t headed in the same destination, the progression of time itself will inevitably separate them. Why? If people have unaligned life plans, a love has to have incredible pull in order to sway their life goals towards alignment. This can happen. People can decide to live in a different country, to pursue a different career. But because this demands a trade-off, the love has to be exceptional to warrant this. More often, people decide the love is worth less to them than their pre-existing life goal. Thus the goals of each lover, each lover’s future, affects how a relationship unfolds.

In Lois Lowry’s Anastasia Krupnik (I’m referencing teen fiction here, not ‘literature’), Anastasia’s mum Katherine tells her a story about a time she was in love with a young lawyer. The two of them went on a spur-of-the-moment trip together and, after a romantic dinner, read each other’s fortunes. He told Katherine she would be a good painter, and, in her words, “that he could see me ten years in the future, and I would be barefoot, with a smudge of paint on my ankle and another on my nose”. She then tells his fortune as a “very successful lawyer”, being important, smartly dressed, up-and-coming, and with a big house. Says Katherine, “Then we looked at each other and I started to cry.” And really, that’s it. This is very honest. Two people can readily enough fall in love, but when they do each of them already has an idea of what they want to happen in their life. If the love compromises that, or jeopardises it, it has to be very special to sustain itself. Normally, it isn’t.

Past the point of no return

Thirdly, the past has huge power over an individual’s ability to craft a lasting relationship. Your past experiences of relationships affect how you engage with a new relationship. This influences what you ask for, what you fear, what you hide, what you offer. This is due partly an awareness of what has or hasn’t worked in past relationships and, most likely, a tendency to overcorrect in a new relationship. It’s also the more subconscious ‘stuff’ which we carry with us from past relationships, including non-romantic ones. While I spoke earlier about present “situation” as what is external, your past is immanent in your present internally, in you, on the inside. You carry your past with you into every relationship, and every relationship is affected by it.

I’ve seen this. I’ve been the naïve lad determined not to repeat the mistakes of a past relationship, and making the opposite ones. I’ve been the man baffled by his lover’s fear of intimacy, gradually discerning its roots in her past. I’ve seen friends whose relationships have been shaped by traumatic events in their lives, who seek from each new relationship something they’ve been missing for so long. And you know, it’s sometimes even small things, like realising that a particular lover’s mannerism came directly from their mother, or father. Sometimes, however, these small things make all the difference. The big things often do. Each one of us is the aggregation of each past experience, thought, feeling, memory. We can’t help but bring it into our present, and into our relationships.

Your past never leaves you.

Lasting love: a perfect storm?

Two caveats: I don’t think people have to have a lot in common for a relationship as lovers to endure. While studying at the same campus might facilitate a romance, so too might the spicy variety of having different situations. It’s not unheard of for lawyers and painters to conduct perfectly fulfilling relationships. The three factors I’ve identified aren’t the only factors. And they don’t act one-dimensionally. When I talk about commonality, I’m not talking about having ‘things’ in common. I’m not talking about whether or not people like the same bands, or have the same opinion of Andrew Bolt. I simply think it is more likely for things to work out when more of these stars align.

Secondly, I’ve very deliberately avoided making a value judgement about relationship longevity. A long relationship might be a failure by other measures, a brief one an utter triumph. We want relationships to continue, of course – but there are cases where a relationship shouldn’t continue, at least in its current form. So, sometimes things won’t last, or endure, or work out. And sometimes that’s the right thing.

Still, it is a magical thing when it all works out. It’s rare, and correspondingly precious, for a fleeting spark to result in an enduring flame. It’s rare because there are so many variables. Each person has a unique present, a different context, dictating their daily doings as well as the dominant experiences for them in the present moment. Each person has a unique path into the future, ideas of where they will go, which needs to be considered when investing in a growing love. Finally, each person has a unique past, a distinctive set of defining experiences, influencing how they are in relationships. These three forces interact through a relationship. Often, because of some point of discontinuity, it isn’t to be. In rare cases, one way or another, it is.