Taking the Bull by the Horns

From Friday’s Daily Telegraph. The last of the aurochs died in Poland, in 1627

I’m writing this post in pen and ink† while my computer’s still at the mender’s, being restored from the wrecking job I did on its data. An ignorant computer user could never have ruined it so thoroughly, but I’ve proved the old adage, that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. The more you know, the more thoroughly you can screw things up. The mender, having no idea of my complex file structures, managed to overwrite all my emails, passwords, and browser settings plus most of my installed software, leaving me with a clean machine, as if I’d just bought a new one, with what he thought were my “important files” pasted in afterwards.

Now I know how it feels when your baby has been kidnapped, possibly never to be seen again. You go through the stages of grief, starting with “Denial”. So you get up in the night and try to wrest something out of the dark pit of final loss; and even make a little progress, till you move on to the next stage, “Anger”. One must keep in mind that Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, who set up this scheme in her book On Death and Dying, regretted it being taken dogmatically, but it seems to be a helpful model for many of us.

A death is final but a kidnapping leaves you with hope. You can feel angry with your kidnapper, but you can’t afford to hate him. You depend on him too much, you can only appeal to his humanity or send the ransom money. One finds that anger and hate, even when suppressed, hurt one as much as they hurt their target. At least it’s the case for me. A pain in my chest stopped me sleeping, I’ll call it anger but since some of it was directed against my own stupid self, there was nothing I could do. Years ago, freshly recovered from a chronic illness, then afterwards trained to help others recover too, I learned to treat every emotion as a messenger calling us to action. Thus the body floods us with specific chemicals, spurring our brain to the commission of deeds, not always pleasant ones. It is difficult to behave impeccably in such circumstances. But we have certain choices, to be made with all the intelligence we can muster, to channel our emotions into the most appropriate action, starting with where we are now.