Loneliness

For those of us that are fortunate enough not to be lonely it is perhaps timely for us to remember those that are. These people live in Oughterard and throughout Connemara, and don’t stop there, they are everywhere and in every corner of this beautiful planet. They have no significant other in their lives because of feckless children, bereavement, depression, or were on a path where they never got around to having a partner in their lives because of shyness or believing that someone was going to get a share in their land. In the end the lonely persons were to be the only ones on that patch of green, a single person living a life now of regret.

There are a myriad of other reasons why this is so as well and scribes have spoken about it for centuries and will continue to do so as I do now. To be truly lonely can be comparable to the loneliness of a polar bear adrift in a vast soulless ocean where it is only him or her alone and always will be.  

It can be destroying in any countryside even more so for any person who is without the benefit or the distraction of a busy city life, and where the beautiful scenery is just not enough anymore; it can also lead to early illness and an earlier death. You may have noticed these almost forgotten people from time to time where ‘All the lonely people where do they all come from’ was so poignantly observed in the Beatle’s song Eleanor Rigby. They are all hidden in plain sight.

Sometimes you might notice them in the check out line of a supermarket, complaining enough just to make conversation. It is often the curmudgeon at the bar giving harsh voice about the young or how it was better in their day. What they are really hoping for, awkwardly so, is the wish that they are interesting enough to you that you will hang around long enough to at least listen a while and see beyond the fact that they talk just a little too much.

It is sometimes supposed that they seem to drink too much when is in fact the only company or friend that they have, as long as they can afford it. What can anyone, other that observe that loneliness is more than a state of mind, do about it? A lot.

If we just take one and preferably two hours a week to visit a person on their own, it will not make a whole lot of difference to our week but mean everything to who you choose to visit. It is as simple as that. You won’t have to try too hard to find out where they are. Even just a few phone calls every week to a person that feels they don't even exist anymore takes a lot less effort and time. For the person on their own to be relevant is to breathe itself and encourages the wish to continue to do so.

If you don't have a lonely person in your life perhaps it is time to find at least one. The local community centre is a good place too start, or the local retirement home, or ask a friend do they know somebody that needs somebody.  Someone always does.

Barry Clifford

Ancient Viking Laws For Living

Be not a braggart for if any work done be praise-worthy, others will sing your praises for you

The unwise man is awake all night worries over and again. When morning rises he is restless still, his burden as before.

Go you must. No guest shall stay in one place forever. Love will be lost if you sit too long at a friend’s fire.

Be your friend’s true friend. Return gift for gift. Repay laughter with laughter again, but repay betrayal with treachery

Moderately wise a man should be, not too crafty or clever. A learned man’s heart whose learning is too deep seldom sings with joy 

A farm of your own is better, even if small for everyone’s someone at home. Though he has two goats and a coarsely roofed house it is still better than begging.

A lying tongue had bereft him of living and life, and all without reason or right

Deceit sleeps with greed

Even three words of quarreling you shouldn’t have with an inferior

The coward thinks he will live forever if he keeps away from fighting; but old age won’t grant him a truce even if the spears do. 

Tell never an evil man if misfortunes thee befall

Wake early if you want another man’s life or land. No lamb for the lazy wolf, no battle won in bed.

John Waters said

                                                                   John Waters (left)

On social welfare recipients:

“There should be no question, in a free and fair society, of the forced redistribution of earned income to assist those who are, for whatever reason, negative contributors to society.

Imagine how you would feel if, instead of having to subsidise your work- free neighbour, you had to accept direct responsibility by talking him into your home and catering to all his needs. How long would you tolerate him hanging around your sitting room, eating your corn-flakes, and flicking around your Sky package?”

On Paedophlilia:

“They (the media) don’t regard paedophilia as a serious matter at all. If clerical abuse did not exist in the church, I greatly suspect that we would by now have a campaign to legalise paedophillia from these quarters (the media).

Was it the case that the thrust for acceptance of paedophilia was stymied only by the emergence of the clerical abuse scandals in the Church, which the left saw as an opportunity to destroy the authority of the Church?”

On closing the Irish embassy in the Vatican because of their cover up of the sexual abuse of children:

“An opportunistic act of neurotic bigotry by militant atheists seeking to impose their myopic beliefs on the rest of us. The closure of the Irish Embassy in the Vatican is further evidence that we are now governed by the most bigoted, anti- religious administration in the history of the State.”

On secular education:

“ A ‘secular’ education sets out to produce citizens, consumers and functionaries rather than human beings animated with affection and curiosity. No longer will our children be told that they are Christ’s chosen ones, but instead the accidental offspring of the pointless oozing of primordial slime, units of meat and bone, existing for random junctures by bread and rules in a pointless, meaningless, and indifferent universe.”

They call this ‘rationalisism,’ but have no idea where it will lead. Like chimpanzees with hammers poised over the engine of a Ferrari F12 Berlinetta, they gibber their stunted nonsense and set enthusiastically to work.”

Can anyone take this man serious bar himself; he even calls himself a journalist. Finally the Irish Times realised that he was not a journalist either and got rid of the self professed bard. Phew! Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty I am free at last. 

By Barry Clifford

Life's looking glass

“All blame is a waste of time. No matter how much fault you find with another, and regardless of how much you blame him/her, it will not change you. The only thing blame does is to keep the focus off you when you are looking for external reasons to explain your unhappiness or frustration. You may succeed in making another feel guilty about something by blaming him, but you won’t succeed in changing whatever it is about you that is making you unhappy. “

“ If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”

“ Simply put, you believe that things or people make you unhappy, but this is not accurate. You make yourself unhappy.”

“ In interactions with others, instead of trying to be right, why don’t we try to be kind?”

 “Wisdom is avoiding all thoughts that weaken you.”

“ It is impossible to be angry and laugh at the same time. Anger and laughter are mutually exclusive and you have the power to choose either.”

The child in you, like all children, loves to laugh, to be around people who can laugh at themselves and life. Children instinctively know that the more laughter we have in our lives the better.”

W W Dyer