June 2003

A Buddhist monk once said to me, 'You can have the first thing in your life, but maybe not the second or the third.'

This is a compact message of sacrifice and desire, and at odds with our modern- world discontent of 'You can have it all' (SUB TEXT ' so why haven't you?)

No one can have it all, but in the West most of us feel we haven't got enough. Enough of what? Money top of the list, I'd guess, but also sex, opportunity, work, holidays, time, happiness. The statistics of Western discontent are truly shock and awe - more than fifty percent of people are dissatisfied with their lives, teenagers are bored and angry, older people feel cheated of their pensions, now that the stock market has collapsed, and few have found the place in the sun that the post-war world promised.

I am wary of pundits who say it's all getting worse and that people used to be happier/saner/kinder/moral/law-abiding etc, because we know that when society is tight knit, with a strong Church and State, ills and sorrows are often hidden. Sure, most marriages lasted for life, but how many of them were happy, even in the broadest sense?

So let's not get dewy-eyed for the past, but let's think about what the Buddhist monk meant.

People with driving ambition tend to get what they want because they are so focused on whatever it is in their sights. Then those people often find that the rest of life has eluded them. When I spoke at length to the monk, he warned me of driving ambition, because for him, it lacked balance. When we talked about the artistic life, he admitted there was no other way but to do it whole heartedly, but his answer was to do it not for oneself, but as a channel for a greater force. He believed that whenever we work for a greater power - and that doesn't mean God in any traditional sense - we are freed from the draining effects of our ambition.

I'm not sure I agree with him, but I do know that finding a way to live in this world is difficult, not least because a consumer society like ours is predicated on lack. At it's most basic, we buy things because we want them or we need them - but for us, consuming has reached critical proportions, and we buy things continually. This always needing, always wanting, can only breed discontent, which then translates itself into every aspect of our personal lives.

If the first thing in our lives was not material - if we cared about living richly and well, which might mean very simply, how would that affect us?
Is it even possible in a world where house prices in Britain and the USA cities are often 6 times the average income?

I'm thinking about all this because it is important. What we teach our children will map how they manage the world to come. The feeling of helplessness we have in a democracy that clearly doesn't work, makes us passive in the face of global problems as well as our own local problems.

What power have we when our leaders lie to us and go and bomb another country because they want to? No wonder we pick up the credit card and go shopping - at least when we buy things we feel we are exercising choice and control.

Last month I said that my friends had tried to get off the treadmill a little bit by doing something that was nuts economically, and absolutely about quality of life. Such decisions are important personally, but I believe they have a wider impact too, because the choices we make are cumulative.

They decided that the first thing they wanted was contentment. They wanted less stress, less rat-like running about round the money heap, more time with the kids, and a set of values for the kids where money wasn't top of the pile.

Investing in life is always a bit tricky because the returns aren't immediate or obvious. When I went into a school to talk to some teenagers last week, I asked them what they wanted and the overwhelming answer was fame and/or money.

When I asked if they would give up other things for fame and money, they looked surprised, and one boy said that with fame and money you could buy everything you wanted anyway, plus getting sex for free. Everybody laughed, and in a way his optimism is fine, but underneath that there is a real problem.

Well, I am still writing my book, and I don't know if anybody will want to publish it, because I never pre-sell. That was a decision I made when I started out in 1985. I made it because I wanted to keep the thing I love best out of the market place. The saddest thing about writing film scripts is the clause 'Work for Hire', which is what you are deemed to be doing.

Well, I don't want to do work for hire, I want to do it from the core of me, and if it doesn't pay the bills, I'll still do it, but words are what I love, and yes, they are the first thing in my life.

Sorry there's no journalism this month - had my head down in another place. Next month there is a new interview with me, and an interesting addition to the site, which will be my PSYCHIC'S HOME PAGE!

That should entertain you all...