Tag: Sci fi

The Great Unread

I tried to read you. Couldn’t get through you. Did I even get past Chapter One?

For some reason we never hit it off, did we ‘Dune’?

It all began when someone I admired said they’d read you.

It was Holly Johnson from Frankie Goes to Hollywood. It was an answer to a question in one of those pop music magazine bio’s. There were questions like ‘What’s your favourite colour? What book are you reading at the moment?’ This would have been in the mid eighties.

So, I did the natural thing, I went out, saved my pocket money and blew a few weeks worth on Dune by Frank Herbert.

Anyway, couldn’t get through Dune, gave it away in the end. My motivations for having the book were all wrong. I just wanted it because Holly had read it. How shallow. How silly. How embarressing but looking back, in my defense, I was fourteen and smitten.

The same thing happened when I was about eighteen with ‘The Ragged Trousered Philanphropists’ by Robert Tressell. About five different people recommended it to me, including my dad. So I bought it and couldn’t get past Chapter One.

I discovered that a couple of other people I knew had tried reading ‘Dune’ but couldn’t get through it, and they were hard core fantasy/sci fi fans. So then, I didn’t feel quite so bad. Interestingly enough, some of those people were able to get through it easily enough on audiobook.

I’m not an audiobook type of person but I might just buy ‘Dune’ again and this time just buckle down and also read ‘The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists’ because I’m no longer a teenager, a lot of water has gone under the bridge and I’m not idolizing pop groups anymore.

When I start a book, I like to follow it through to the end, the ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish’ mentality but sometimes, just sometimes in life, there remains the great unread.

Limiting Belief

Your limiting belief may be skulking outside, just behind the door, in the dark. Some of them like the dark. That’s where they feels safe. Or, your limiting belief may be a right show off, does five minutes when the fridge door opens and a ten minute routine when your relatives come round, complete with top hat, cane and dickie bow. Doesn’t matter that it looks like a dick. It doesn’t care. It likes dickie bows. It likes looking like a dick.

Your limiting belief may even be inside you. A bit like that Alien movie with Sigourney Weaver and John Hurt. You’ve got this foreign body inside you, only it’s not the least bit pleasurable. And it doesn’t always wants to burst out of you, it likes the warmth too much.

Would it be difficult to ignore this mucus covered fiend waiting impatiently in your stomach? All it ever threatens to do is gut you like a fish, gore and intestines everywhere but it doesn’t really want to do that. Not really.

Because that would mean getting rid of it.

Its power lies in the anticipation, the fear. And like any other expert bluffer, the limiting belief often depends on us just pretending it’s nothing more than indigestion. And so it stays there, painfully repeating, but there is no heartburn remedy or decongestant available that can shift this.

‘The opportunities that we pass up (through limited belief) stop us taking risks that we don’t want to take. We simply say we can’t and we’re off the hook.’

The NLP Masters – Judy Bartkowiak

 

According to some schools of thought, you’re not supposed to blast your limiting belief into smithereens, you’re not supposed  to medicate it, or fight it using psychological warfare. No, none of these things. You are supposed to write a letter to it, as if, it were a person. Your mother, your father, an ex lover, an ex friend, maybe it’s all of these and none of these. Maybe our limiting belief is unique and we can’t cannot connect or relate it to anyone else. Limiting belief, you’re an alien, no, you’re a demon at the end of my bed. I believe you can read. I believe you learned your letters at limiting belief school. You’re clever. But it’s what you will do after you get the letter. That’s what’s important. What will you do then?

Maybe it doesn’t matter what it does. Maybe that’s the point. Hey, limiting belief, you can rip it up without reading it, you can mock it and laugh over it with friends, or you can sit and re read it time and time again crying into a glass of Chardonnay, or you may never open the letter at all. It may just go unopened into a drawer, because you’re afraid of what’s in it.

So that’s it guys, you have to write a letter to your limited belief, if you have one, whatever that may be.

Oh okay, I wouldn’t ask you to do anything I wouldn’t do myself. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours etc. Ahem.

Dear Limiting Belief, Please stay away and don’t ever come back. I am much happier without you. I’m more sociable for one thing. I’m like a completely different person. I don’t recognise myself. I can do so much without you and nothing is impossible. Everything is possible and then some. Don’t contact me ever again. X

 

I don’t know why I gave it a kiss. For old times sake I guess.