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Aladdin, our lovely black-with-chocolate Burmese cat. The loveliest cat we have ever known. When my daughter was small he tried to win a superior place to her in the pecking order of the family but eventually he lost and stopped scratching her. He never scratched anyone else. Aladdin was an athlete of superb skill and to see him leap to a narrow window ledge, one inch even, and walk along it to the narrow opening and wriggle in was breathtaking. His standing leaps were incredible and I always knew that when I punished him for killing a special native bird, by getting very angry and throwing him out of the window onto the grass below, he was never in any danger of being hurt. When I returned from China in the middle of the year I didn’t expect to see him as he had some sort of cancer, but he had recovered and I spent some time with him. This time I was not surprised to meet a slight lethargic creature whose black fur had turned mainly brown and whose bones had little fat over them. He was taken to the vet on Friday and the vet recommended he be put to sleep, having a stomach cancer he was unlikely to ever recover from.

On Wednesday night I picked him up and sat with him, stroking him to constant purring. He allowed me to look straight into his eyes, something this and other cats never allow, and we communicated. I hoped the stories of cats’ telepathy were true and said my goodbyes to him. He chose me when we went to visit his litter by walking straight up to me, climbing up me and looking right into my eyes and I said good bye to him the same way because I knew I would not see him again. I was sitting at the table in Mum’s flat on Saturday morning and suddenly a twinge of pain and tears started in my eyes. I knew he was gone and a few minutes later my girl called me to let me know. This reminds me that no one and nothing is permanent in our lives but our pets, our friends, and our family are precious treasures we have for a while.

If I can have such a moment of knowledge when a cat dies how much more will I know it when a human that I love dies? The connections between us are strong and exist in a dimension that people can know but machines cannot.

My earliest memory? Well, in the womb. I suppose you don’t believe me so I will explain why it is that I say that. When I was a child I had dreams that made me feel afraid. There was no content in the dreams I was in a grey void and felt afraid. It wasn’t an even grey but a grey that was composed of millions of tiny dots switching on and off, sort of like sparkling but it was all dull. It felt creepy. I had the dream quite a few times in my childhood and always felt awful. Much later in life I was going through emotional upheavals and became inwardly focussed to try to sort things out. One evening I was in a sort of trance state, not asleep, and I came to be reliving my childhood bad dream. However, it was clearer and I felt the sensation of squeezing, of being squeezed. When I came out of trance I interpreted this as a memory of my birth. I experienced fear at my birth.

Does anyone else here have memories or feelings that they believe are birth memories? If so, please share them with us. I am wondering how my birth experience affected me. Did it predispose me to fear change? That seems unlikely as I am drawn to change to the extent that I don’t find it easy to settle in one place for more than a few years. I must think more about that.

I have such a complex inner life. Some people seem to find living quite a straightforward business but I never have. I am always weighing up the merits of this or that and trying to find deep inner meanings for things so I can choose the path that is just right. In the end for many life issues it is much better just to get on with it and do something. This is what the Existential philosophers taught. At their extreme one of them said things like it is not a question of whether to push someone in front of a car or not, it is a question of doing something instead of nothing. Abhorrent of course but there is a point there somewhere.

Strangely, whenever I get attracted to someone there is always another person around who I am also attracted to. If someone gets attracted to me it seems there is another who would also like to know me a lot better. Why is that? What lesson am I to learn? To accept one is to disappoint another. What does that say about life? One of my problems is I don’t want to hurt people.

Now I had a love in China who I thought was a true love and we believed in it and lived together for a few months. All that proved was that we were completely unsuited for each other so I took the reality path and broke it off. She doesn’t even come close to my inner idea of loving and the things one does when in love. After I broke it off she was devastated but I have to say I was devastated by her idea of what being together is. She missed me for a long time and I couldn’t help missing her, especially when I talked to her and she often said she wanted to try again. Part of me really wanted to try but it would have just led to more pain.

I’m usually very happy with good friendships with women but occasionally the need for romance asserts itself and if I don’t have anyone to romance loneliness sets in despite my many friends.

The last time my life seemed to be going nowhere that way I approached a really beautiful waitress with a nice personality and to my surprise she agreed to start meeting me out of working hours. Unfortunately she was much younger than I guessed and that led to dilemmas. A power imbalance. I don’t agree with power unbalanced relationships. There is no satisfaction with a partner that doesn’t have mettle so I didn’t try to take the relationship anywhere. In the end it seems she was playing some sort of game and taking advantage of my generosity so I cut the contact without causing any major hurt.

For a few years I had a friendship with as nice a person as you would ever meet. When we met she was a student, in a different city than me. We chanced to be in the same place at the same time and had a reason to get to know one another better. It was on the same friendship only basis as many of my other friendships in China and at that time I had not discovered my ‘true love’ was not right for me. The friendship deepened and we began to think of each other as family. After two years she finished her studies and we were so close she decided to come and share an apartment with me and work in the same city. I couldn’t believe her rapid transformation from a lovely young student in very ordinary casual clothes to a beautiful young woman with a definite eye for style and a quickly matured personality. Everyone I knew loved her and I began to notice that I missed her too much when we were apart.

The bond between us deepened and strengthened and I soon told myself I was in love with her. She is very much younger than me so I thought it was hopeless and hoped I would be able to talk my way out of my feelings one day. Although I am quite good at controlling my feelings and changing them when necessary I couldn’t do it. I talked about it and she had nightmares but even that didn’t give me the power to relinquish. It was an open topic between us but I acknowledged it was never likely to be reciprocated. Sometimes it seemed she was really attracted to me but she always pulled back and gave herself and me reasons why it would be impossible. I saw that maybe something could happen, but that the relationship would have to be one that was open for her to leave and find a young man for a more usual life path. Then I got very sick and it was possible I would not survive. She helped as well as she could. I pulled myself through that and found my darling behaving as if she was struggling not to love me. I met another lovely young woman and we quickly became friends. BMW felt very uncomfortable with this. About a week later we were talking in a cafe and she suddenly told me that she wanted to be my girlfriend so now I am very happy. We live very harmoniously together and intend to try to make this cross-cultural, cross-generational relationship work for the long term. We both think it is a bit crazy but we are happy to be crazy together.

I now never miss my former ‘true love’, well not in the way that would draw me back. I remember many past loves in the same way. There is a small corner of the soul that is a remembrance room where I can appreciate again the loves I once had but it is a room of memory, not a place of desire. We, or I at least, never forget a deep love but it is over.

I’ve made respect a major strategy in my life. Doesn’t that sound cold and calculating? Well, no, it isn’t. It just means treating everyone as if they are good people worthy of respect and giving them the opportunity to live up to it. It’s another way of saying something that has been said a lot of times by a lot of amazing human beings, including nearly everyone in the class of the best people who ever lived; Messiahs, Gurus, saints, and other Holy people. So I’m not claiming anything unique about using respect as a strategy, just setting it down here in case it helps. For those who are on the point of dismissing me as a Hippy-dippy New Ager or Holy Fool, I thank you but deny I am a fool or that this idea does not fit your favoured religion of practicality. Here are some examples.

Once I was working in a government department and I was overpaid. I received a request to pay the sum back in one lump. I was familiar with the regulations, and having a brand new daughter was not in a position to pay it all at once, so I made a respectful call to the pay section and let them know I was happy to reimburse the amount but explained my circumstances and stated that the amount I nominated was ten dollars per pay. My request was granted immediately. A while after, a young woman joined my section and several months later she too received a letter saying she had been mistakenly overpaid. She immediately rang the pay section and began to harangue them about it being their mistake and how she did not intend to pay for their mistakes. Needless to say, she had to pay the whole sum in one lump.

Again, in a Chinese school I followed my policy of respecting the administration despite some difficulties with them that put me in a bad situation financially for a time. However, I did receive the concession from them of being given an airfare reimbursement well ahead of time. A colleague came to the end of his term of employment and acting on unwise advice was quite disrespectful and a little aggressive in his pursuit of the reimbursement and so prompted the administration to consider some problems he had caused. I believe the Chinese way is that if he had respected them they would have overlooked the problems. He never received the airfares.

In another situation I always behaved with respect towards an employer who broke the agreement we made about how much money I would receive. I continued to treat him with respect and respectfully showed him the e-mails he had sent me, giving me the high moral ground. If I had been aggressive he would have cheerfully blamed me for causing problems. That employer and I enjoyed good relations and when it suited me to leave and take better paying employment there was no attempt to enforce a contract that he had already broken.

All of my examples benefited me financially so respect proved eminently practical. It always does.

Here’s an interesting experience. I’ve got a Chinese friend who goes into sensory overload every time we go to the supermarket. She is from a poor farming family who scrimped and saved to put her through university. They didn’t have much money for shopping and when they got her to university she had to study instead of hitting the big city shops like the rich kids did. Now she’s got a foreigner as an uncle and a job of her own she can experience every Chinese woman’s dream – Shopping! – but when we go to the Supermarket and she wants to buy a bottle of shampoo she looks at the shelves and there a fifty kinds to choose from and she just stops dead and stares into space until I take her by the arm and move her out of the way of all the other customers trying to get past. It’s really quite amazing.

The most incredible case was when we went to shop for stuff for my birthday party. As I can’t read Chinese I was going to ask her advice on what was in the packets that looked interesting to me. After I asked about a few things and received no response whatever as she drifted on appearing to look at everything purposefully but picking nothing at all up I just started grabbing things that looked as if they might be good to eat and guided her to the checkout and paid. As we left the building she ‘woke up’ again and we laughed about it. ‘Supermarket mode’ is now a standard joke between us and she is improving. I explained the concept of sensory overload to her and she agrees it is just all too much because of her limited life experience of shopping.

What can you tell us about being overwhelmed by new circumstances?