Читать книгу What Makes Women Happy - Fay Weldon - Страница 15

Suffer a pang of remorse when in bed with your best friend’s boyfriend and act upon it by getting out of the bed, and you will have less sensual pleasure in the short term, but it is amazing how gratifying doing the right thing is. Your best friend may not see it quite like that, of course, concentrating only on the fact that you were in the bed in the first place.

But pray God she will never find out.

I mean that. Actually pray. Gather a few forces around you. The way to be happy, to forestall anxiety and guilt, is to be good.

The world being what it is, you may not know what praying is. (Look it up on the Internet and you can’t find a definition.) But this is how it goes. You sit down. You create a mental space around you. Shutting your eyes helps. Hands steepled together helps: you’re enclosing yourself within yourself, making a separation between yourself and what’s outside you. Which, you will find, if you develop the antennae, is a kind of breathing presence, the majesty of existence itself. You are part of it.

Pray for others, not yourself. (Praying for yourself is vulgar.) Hold your friends in your mind, household by household. Direct your thoughts towards them, wish them well, enfold them and surround them with goodwill. Family too, of course, but anxieties and practicalities are more likely to break through here. Attention wanders.

You can link what you’re doing with a known religion, the Father (‘Dear Holy Father’), the Son (‘Dear Lord Jesus’) or Holy Ghost (though very few pray to him because he is so hard to envisage), or any of the saints (‘Dear St Anthony, help me find my lost sentence’), or Pan, I suppose, if you’re a pantheist (‘Dear Lord Pan, help me find my lost virility’), or Mother Mary (‘Help me get pregnant’), but with all these what you are doing is using an intermediary to connect you. Prayer is easier than meditation, which encourages self-centredness and too great a sense of ‘Look at me, meditating!’ You seldom fall asleep when praying for others, as you do when meditating. You just stop when concentration fails.

Perfection is impossible to achieve, of course. But we can try, and angels will attend us, and we can take pleasure from the gentle air of their beating wings.

A Joke: Man Prays to God

‘Dear God, let me win the lottery!’ The voice is piercing, shrill and desperate, amongst all the others pleading to God for help. It goes on for week after week, Wednesday after Saturday after Wednesday: ‘Let me win the lottery!’

The Almighty does his best to ignore the voice, but finally he can’t stand it any more. He speaks like thunder from the clouds. ‘Okay,’ says God, ‘tell you what, I’ll meet you halfway. Buy a ticket.’