Once upon a time there was an organisation for unhappy people called MIN. At first MIN was run by people who had qualifications in tranquilising unhappiness away. But the unhappy customers of MIN decided they were the real experts in unhappiness and so got rid of them.What they said, roughly speaking was,
"We know all about unhappiness....So you can sod off."
And the funny thing was that the experts in tranquilisers went away, though they muttered ever such nasty things to each other over their morning coffee. Since no one else heard these nasty things that did not matter very much.
Well very soon MIN was even more full of unhappy people.
They wrote lots of articles and leaflets about unhappiness and talked about it in meetings and on the telephone. People who were unhappy thought
"Cor blimey, an unhappiness organisation, this place was made just for me....I feel really at home here." It was a great success in the unhappiness world.
Mind you they were all still very unhappy.
It also attracted quite a few people who were slightly less unhappy when they could fight people who made others unhappy. What made these people feel slightly less unhappy was knowing that they were right. If you attacked people who made others unhappy you were attacking unhappiness so that must be right.
But it was still an unhappy organisation and it also attracted other people who were slightly less unhappy when they felt they were making unhappy people face up to how unpleasant things were and how you have to make hard choices. What made these people feel a bit less unhappy was knowing they were right. People are unhappy because it is a hard world, they would say, and you can't always run away from things. You need clear guidelines for what to do. Then everything would get better...in the happily ever after.
There were also unhappy people there who didn't know in advance what was right but they knew that they were right when other people were wrong and that was that. What made them slightly less unhappy was knowing other people were wrong.
Quite often the people that were wrong disagreed that they were wrong and then there was a quarrel...so that the slight reduction of unhappiness could sometimes be quite short lived.
Now every year the unhappy organisation would play a game when everyone was especially miserable. The idea of the game was to cheer people up.
"Goodness gracious how unhappy we are", someone would say.
"I agree, " someone else would say - and this was quite unusual.
"Whatever shall we do? Things can't go on like this."
"I know," said a clever unhappy person, cheering up slightly, "Let's talk about the unhappiness at the next meeting."
So the day of the meeting would come and all the miserable and slightly less miserable people would sit round in a circle and talk about the unhappiness.
One person would say to another one in the meeting "We are unhappy because you are wrong and I am right".
And the other person would reply, "I disagree. We are unhappy because I am right and you are wrong."
Then someone would say "Actually, I think we are unhappy because we don't have clear guidelines which everyone can agree on what is right and what is wrong. Also we should decide clear guidelines on who can decide what is right and wrong on anything."
This thought seemed the most sensible so everyone would wonder what to do next.
"I know," someone would say, "let's hold a meeting to work out the clear guidelines."
And everyone would breath a sigh of relief......
The day of the meeting would come.
But some people were unhappy because it was their day off or they had something else on. So they didn't come.
And some people didn't understand what the words 'clear guidelines' meant anyway. They still didn't at the end of the meeting. Also there were some that were unhappy because the guidelines had not decided that they had been right all along and someone else had been wrong. A half of these people left to be right (or wrong) somewhere else.
In a few weeks time everything was back to normal. The people who were right and the people who were wrong were having an argument about something else that no one had ever thought about before for which there were no clear guidelines. So they were happily being unhappy again. In any case a lot of other people had forgotten what the clear guidelines were and a lot of new unhappy people had come and replaced those that had left. They didn't know what had happened before anyway.
So in another year there would be a particularly miserable day and someone would suggest another meeting.
And they all lived unhappily ever after....except those that decided that being right or wrong was a silly game to get upset about and left. These people did not live happily ever after. But they were happy some of the time - which was good enough for them.
Brian Davey - Summer 1990
© BRIAN DAVEY