And so, it comes to this – my first post on Substack. Thank you for subscribing to my feed – I haven’t set up the payment method yet and not sure if I ever will. Fear of the tax people – not so much because I will ‘coin it in’ or a couple of £’s will take me into a new tax band but because I’m fearful of HMRC Tax Office. Always have been and probably always will be. I pin that to my upbringing being the 7th youngest of 8 children and a father who was quite authoritarian. Whether he wanted to be or was forced into that way-of-being is another matter. In addition to the fear of authority I’m lazy and can’t be bothered sorting all that lot out. If it were possible I’d pay any ‘subs’ money direct to a charity.
According to the Substack advice I should be posting a subscription box soon and/or a photograph or graphic. As I’m doing this on the fly those things will become apparent. I’m also advised to post at the same time at regular intervals like every week. Yeah but no. Sorry.
I started ‘writing writing’ when I began my post-graduate diploma in Counselling in 2005. I recall the dread of having to write 1000 words as part of the application process. I had left school with very few qualifications and little confidence. Despite that constant writing anxiety, I took the Master’s option of the PG diploma and having passed that with a Merit, I then self-funded an MSc in Research Methods (Distinction- whoo-hoo). Then on to a PhD. So, my writing is quite ‘cat sat on the mat’ with the academic thing of referencing others for fear of plagiarising someone by mistake. It was during the final phase of my PhD that I noticed how most mornings I had woken up with brilliant ideas and solutions. For the most part these ideas evaporate somewhere between getting out of bed and the landing. Somewhere in that short 3 metre journey the words slip away. I like to think there’s a club in the void beneath the floorboards – not a nightclub but something much more socially relaxed with leather armchairs, roaring fires, deep pile carpets with a tinkling stream of conversation in the background., ‘Yes, I surfaced to the consciousness just after a protracted fart. My raison d’être? Oh… something quite profound can’t quite remember specifically but I know he thought, “That’s a brilliant last line for the book.” He almost got past the landing when, when …. Well, well I just ended up here. It would have been nice to have been reproduced, to have a legacy, not to be just not quite being or not being ‘being not being’ – the place between becoming and unbecoming.’ In the fire and pipe-smoke half-formed lines of prose and poetry float and swirl. Wine coloured translucent ideas slosh unsteadily. The lonely pipe rack on the hearth generates faint tales of generation past and the dried lavender a hint of a once vibrant perfume.
It is a reasonable question to ask why my Substack is called ‘Doing being’? I’ll tell you. During my various degrees I noticed that if you can come up with a tidy phrase then you get cited willy nilly. And getting cited is good for metrics in academia and as Horace Sheffield (1979) wrote, ‘If you are not counted, you don’t really count.’ Consequently, the final paragraph reads (Hadley 2021: P.279),
‘A life lived is encapsulated in the ‘–’ between two numbers on memorials. During that ‘dash’ we are ‘doing being’ between our personal needs and navigating the messiness and chaos of the surrounding environment. I am legion (Grant, Judd and Naylor 1993): the sum of biological, cultural, economic, historical, physiological, psychological and sociological contexts. I am legion – like you, like everyone else. I am a mediated childless-by-circumstance man; I am a man who wanted to be a dad and did not become one. I hope you have enjoyed reading this book – even if it has annoyed, changed, challenged, disappointed, engaged, frustrated or moved you. It has me.’
I managed to reference Red Dwarf but that great, lovely, poignant ending just slipped away…
Importantly, for those times when you meet anyone - particularly philosophers who have a wild reputation for being first at the buffet and hogging the cheese and the good red wine - banging on about the meaning of life you have the answer and a reference. Similarly, you use the line, ‘Doing being - is it really an answer to existential pointlessness of life?’ to either impress folk or distract philosophers while you head off to the food and good wine.
So dear readers/subscriber’s, that is why it has taken me so long to actually post anything.
Hadley, R. A. (2021). How is a man supposed to be a man? Male childlessness - a Life Course Disrupted. Berghahn Books, New York.
Sheffield, H. 1979. ‘As I See It: If You Don’t Get Counted, You Don’t Really Count’, Michigan Chronicle, 24 February 1979.
Grant, R., Judd, J and D. Naylor. 1993. ‘Legion’, season 6, episode 2, Red Dwarf. Broadcast 14 October 1993. British Broadcasting Corporation, London.