(This post was originally published in my July 2022 newsletter. You can sign up HERE)
It’s the end of the world!
Not really.
But if you know me well, you’ll know that I don’t deal too well with cold weather.
Sure, I’ll sit under a fan in Summer or tolerate some aircon, but if anything, I come alive when the weather gets nice and warm.
So far, my experience with Cape Town’s winters hasn’t been as bad as the ones in my hometown. Pretoria winters are dreadful! Pis koud and bleak sunshine that fails to warm up anything. Landscapes so brown and dried out you could almost taste the veld fires. And that is basically how winter should be! Ancient festivals ‘celebrate’ and honour each season for its typical characteristics: in winter, everything dies back, and the land settles down in preparation for the warmer months.
Here in Cape Town, the opposite seems to be true: (almost) lush green landscapes in winter, and dull, dead, and burnt vistas in summer.
And then this year’s winter hit us! Double-you tee eff???
Side note: I don’t remember much of 2022’s Winter, which was when I wrote this article. But now it is 2024 and I am again asking WTF?
The Sins of the Mothers
Right now, I’m dealing with my Calamity Consciousness. It is something I inherited from my mom: anything and everything has the potential to end up a disaster!
“Don’t lick that knife, you’ll cut your tongue off”.
“Don’t stand on that chair! What do you think is going to happen if you fall? I don’t have a car to take you to the hospital!!!”
“Don’t walk barefoot in the mall! Have you ANY idea how many germs there are on those floors?!?”
Calamity Consciousness.
How does that fit in with the weather, you may ask? Easy: we’re all gonna DIE! Hell is busy freezing over. This is our punishment for something and some divine being is going to send brimstone and hellfire next because we all did something stupid.
Calamity Consciousness.
To add to my impending sense of doom, I also dreamed about patches of earth that were scorched and looked like lava surfacing in some neighbourhood. It spewed the occasional flames into the air, and gasses were poisoning my friend, slowly killing him.
A few days later I heard that a supervolcano in Europe is preparing to erupt.
Calamity Consciousness.
And don’t get me started on AI! Jeesh, the scenarios that are playing out in my head thanks to all the movies we’ve been watching over the past 30 years are enough to make another couple of movies.
Calamity Consciousness.
Do you also have it? I’m sure the best people do.
How do I deal with it? What do I do when it rears its ugly head?
I wish I could say “EASY!”, but I can’t. I did NOT, however, say “IMPOSSIBLE!”, so there’s that.
It depends on the scenario, I suppose?
Grabbing it by the balls!
When I catch my brain going off on a calamity tangent, I’ll stop and assess. When the thoughts take on the form of a person arguing or warning me not to do something, I will address the person firmly with something like “Shurrup!” I would not suggest doing that with your mother in reality, though. It has consequences.
When I find myself analysing or deliberating the calamity potential of a situation, I’ll employ a pattern interrupt. This is something you need to figure out for yourself but is typically something you can do to distract your mind from the train of thought: a random string of happy thoughts, counting backwards, conjuring cute pictures of bunnies, babies, bears… anything.
As soon as the thought process has been halted successfully and you feel a disconnect from it, I suggest rounding on it like a dragon about to toast its ass! Grab that calamitous train of thought in your talons, shake it about and ask it: whence dost thou cometh from? What purpose have ye? Whence doth thou headeth?
If the answers come back invalid, like say, for instance, you were licking a butter knife and the calamity thoughts warn you that you could amputate your tongue, you would probably find that it was something your mother tried to teach you to avoid licking other more dangerous knives. Say “Thanks my Subconscious Mom, but I know the difference now”, and move on.
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