Beverley has gone to take the first part of her 'Advanced Diving' qualification this morning, diving in an old flooded quarry near Carnforth. She had a strange experience yesterday. She found a self hypnosis tape in the library on 'Dieting'. She lay on the bed, plugged in the headphones and started to listen. The next thing she can remember was the voice on the tape saying 'wake up!'. She looked at the clock and 45 minutes had passed. Had she really been hypnotised and had it worked? She was telling me all this as she tucked into a selection of 6 cheeses last night, so maybe not. I am trying a similar tape today on, 'How to cope before treatment or surgery', hoping that I don't respond in the operating room when someone says, 'wake up!' 

Why is life so hard? What is the meaning of life? I was asked those two questions yesterday. Well the meaning of life, I haven’t got a clue! Maybe humans are the vehicle used to transform material on the planet into machines, which eventually populate the Universe. I’m sure I saw a film like that once! Or are humans just a freak species who mutated enough to have the intelligence to suffer the stress posed by questions like this? I doubt that many sheep woke up this morning and said "Baaaa!", followed by the fleeting thought, ‘Should I eat more grass or consider the meaning of life?’

As for, ‘Why is life so hard?’, of course it’s not; not if you live in most European countries. Through war, my Father experienced the very worse that humans could inflict upon each other. When he was in a Hospice just before he died and a patient in the bed opposite was groaning that he didn’t want to die. My Father shouted at him, “Be quiet will you, you are all born and die in luxury in this country”. He was right. From the start, we have access to excellent medical treatment, health facilities, food and clean water. We are then educated, made to feel mainly safe in a comfortable society and pampered throughout life, eventually, ‘dying in luxury’.

Because we expect that as a normal level of service, many of us spend most of our lives not happy because we are constantly craving more; never realising that the fulfilment, which always appears to be just out of reach, is there within our minds!

In many distant countries, you would be lucky to make it until 5 years old and if you did, you might be disabled or your mother may have died giving birth to you. Regular food or clean water would be unlikely and when you became sick you just had to be lucky to get better. You would get no education and probably die before you were 30 years old, either from starvation, disease or in conflict, through torture or execution. Either way, you would not get any pain relief and be unlikely to die in a clean bed with your family and friends around you. The answer is to make sure that all our young people experience a third world country at sometime in their early lives. Not just by going on holiday there, but perhaps to live there in basic accommodation and help to build a hospital or even work in one. Then you might think back to that Monty Python sketch, The Four Yorkshiremen....”you were lucky, I used to live in, Ohhhh we used to DREAM of livin’ in a corridor! Woulda’ been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woken up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us!