The night the ghost got in

A feral cat yowling hoarsely in the garden last night so none of us slept well. Winter here and  there are feral cats hunting for  food  in the cold.

Brittle bitter cold. Another week opening up, the  reluctance of Monday morning, just to get going, to get the  usual routines and effort underway.

Showing compassion towards the self, a reminder we all need from time to time.

Contrary to what many people think, treating yourself kindly is also good for achieving your goals. “People believe that self-criticism helps to motivate them,” Neff says. Those low in self-compassion think that unless they are hard on themselves, they will not amount to much—but research reveals that being kind to yourself does not lower your standards. “With self-compassion, you reach just as high, but if you don’t reach your goals it’s okay because your sense of self-worth isn’t contingent on success,” she explains.

 

And showing  compassion to others rather than antipathy, suspicion or criticism  is another doorway to  feeling more compassionate towards yourself, letting go of all that punitive inner judging:

“There was a unique benefit to giving support—the benefit wasn’t just from feeling connected or realizing that others had problems, too,” explains Breines, a doctoral candidate in psychology and the study’s lead author. During tough times, people naturally tend to focus on themselves and find it difficult to support others, she says. “But actually, as many people intuitively discover, taking the opportunity to support other people can make you feel better about what you’re going through.”

Saturday night the dog  was convinced there was a ghost in the house. He sat staring at the wall and trembling. Then he sat barking at an empty doorway. Disconcerting, to say the least. I suspect  that  there was a tiny earth tremor or thunder in the distance that disturbed him, but it made for a very restless, haunted kind of evening. We reassured the dog and kept peering into empty rooms and listening to see if we could hear anything. The dog sat staring into space and  growling at whatever was bothering him. The other small dogs just ignored this  psychic medium in their midst and  went on snoring  on the rug.

So we sat and  told one another ghost stories:  the figure beckoning on the stairwell in an old Edwardian homestead, the  young man riding a black horse across the veld and  suddenly vanishing, the  hearse speeding on the old road over the notorious mountain pass, stopping only for the dead, a hearse seen by many travellers. The road that runs through the Eastern Cape where a young girl stands at the roadside  hitchhiking, a thin arm  held out to  wave down cars. Passing motorists have stopped in  the mist and  offered her a lift. She climbs into the back seat and  disappears as the driver approaches the nearest town. An enjoyable and scary evening. The dog finally  grew bored with the supernatural and put himself to bed.  The ghost quietly left the  building.

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