Nigel Latta was a successful author, host and psychologist. Photo \/ Supplied<\/p>\n
A seat at the edge<\/p>\n
I once sat in a room with a man who\u2019d kicked someone to death for no real reason at all. I was in the room by choice; him not so much. <\/p>\n
I was there in my capacity as a clinical psychologist completing a risk assessment; he was there because it was a prison, and he didn\u2019t have a lot else to do. He smelt stale, I remember that, as if the air never quite reached his skin.<\/p>\n
\u2018How you doing?\u2019 I asked him. He just shrugged: \u2018Okay.\u2019 And I remember thinking there was a whole lot to unpack in that response. <\/p>\n
I\u2019ve sat in a lot of places at the far edges of things that a lot of people never get to see. I once sat beside a woman who had been through all kinds of horrors and was hanging on to the will to live with ragged fingernails chewed all the way down to the quick, and another time with a kid who still found joy in the world even though his whole life had been stained with abandonment and cruelty.<\/p>\n
I once sat with a mother who\u2019d seen her child murdered in front of her, and another time with a man who wore the uniform of a Catholic priest but was really just a hole in the world into which children would fall.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve sat in the cockpit of a fighter jet slicing a hole through the sky as the pilot said into the intercom, \u2018You have control\u2019, and felt all that speed and power through the stick, and banked left as steeply as I could without risking a telling-off.<\/p>\n
When I was a teenager I sat beside my best friend at the literal edge of a 200-foot cliff as he explained how he\u2019d read in a magazine you could abseil without a harness, and then proceeded to loop the rope about himself in a rough approximation of what he\u2019d seen in the article, took up the tension, and slowly walked back over the edge. <\/p>\n
Lessons of Living, By Nigel Latta. Photo \/ Supplied<\/p>\n
He made it to the bottom, but that was A-grade teenage lunacy. I\u2019ve sat beside people who were so rich that money didn\u2019t have any real meaning to them, and people who were so broke they literally couldn\u2019t feed their kids.<\/p>\n
I once \u2013 in a moment I will always treasure \u2013 sat beside my daughter in an ancient fortress high in the mountains of northern Iran, the two of us completely alone, and another time beside a family of strangers at the Prophet\u2019s Mosque in Medina, Saudi Arabia \u2013 a building that is unquestionably one of the most beautiful structures humans have ever conceived and made real.<\/p>\n
I once sat at the feet of a swami in Pune, India, who sounded like the real deal but just said a bunch of silly nonsense like a clumsy tarot card reading. That\u2019s when I learned that weird long pauses can make even tissue-thin banalities sound profound.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve sat with prime ministers, and rocket scientists, and an Oxford maths professor who is both an actual proper 100% genius and the most lovely man I think I\u2019ve ever met.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve sat with hard-core violent gang members, and I\u2019ve sat with Buddhist nuns, although not at the same time. <\/p>\n
And once, in a moment that was equal parts magical and zoological, I sat at a respectful distance keeping a dying Weddell seal company at Cape Bird in Antarctica as countless Ad\u00e9lie penguins traipsed up and down the beach between us, unmoved by either sadness for the dying seal or the breathtaking beauty of the place itself. Say what you like about penguins, but they are not sentimental in any shape or form.<\/p>\n
And a few months ago I sat with a very nice doctor as he was telling me that the tumour they\u2019d found in my stomach was incurable, and he estimated it would probably kill me in about six to 12 months.<\/p>\n
I know, right? Type quickly.<\/p>\n
Right now I\u2019m sitting in a comfortable leather chair, on an overcast Tuesday afternoon, in comfortable slippers talking with you.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m now several months into chemotherapy for that incurable stomach cancer and I\u2019m currently in my new default state, which is a shifting malaise of fatigue and nausea.<\/p>\n
And yet, in spite of all that, I feel deeply and profoundly lucky.<\/p>\n
I have lived a full and interesting life so far. I wanted to see the far edges of it all, the extremes that exist in the world, life and death, and everything in between \u2026 and I have.<\/p>\n
All things considered, it seemed like a good time to stop and reflect a little on the journey thus far. Although it might be more accurate to say that when you get a diagnosis of incurable cancer, it pretty much punches you in the face over and over until the only way out is to do some reflecting on your life.<\/p>\n
In all those sometimes magical, sometimes terrifying, and often surreal moments I\u2019ve found myself in over the last 57 years of just being alive generally, and over 30 years working as a clinical psychologist, I learned things about the world and how it works. <\/p>\n
I learned a lot about people, and why we do what we do, and I learned just as many things about myself and how to make things happen in my own life \u2026 and in the lives of the people around me.<\/p>\n
Over all those years, I\u2019ve assembled a personal toolkit for living, three simple principles that have taken me to all those places and all those people, and all the things I\u2019ve ever done.<\/p>\n
And that same toolkit has got me through some difficult times as well \u2026 like the whole cancer thing.<\/p>\n
And it also helped me find my way to the woman who is the great love of my life.<\/p>\n
Which made me think maybe I should share that learning with you, on the off-chance it may help you in your own journey. Then I spent some time thinking about just how to do that? I could just give you the list and say, \u2018Go forth and do that stuff\u2019, but that isn\u2019t how real learning happens. <\/p>\n
Real learning happens in the context of living the day-to-day ups and downs of our lives.<\/p>\n
Real learning happens in a real life.<\/p>\n
So I\u2019m going to tell you the story of how I built this mental toolbox within the ups and downs of my own life. These are very simple ideas, but they\u2019re embedded in a rich context. I didn\u2019t have all this worked out from the beginning; I assembled it over time as I blundered from one confusing mess to the next.<\/p>\n
We learn the most from our failures, not our successes, which has worked out very well for me because I have f*****d up a lot of stuff in my life.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a line that runs through it all, but it\u2019s not a straight line. We\u2019re going to need to zig and zag along the way.<\/p>\n
Sometimes I have to start at the end and go back to work out just when, how, and most importantly of all why I wired in each principle.<\/p>\n
This will be an unpredictable ride, and I am, by nature, a pretty zig-zaggy kind of guy.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s more fun that way.<\/p>\n
Lessons on Living: Finding your way through life\u2019s ups and downs by Nigel Latta is out now. Published by HarperCollins New Zealand<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nigel Latta was a successful author, host and psychologist. Photo \/ Supplied A seat at the edge I…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":464457,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3938],"tags":[155168,24560,54347,6342,3444,155167,1204,125919,77,2915,155165,51879,21003,256,120223,155166,3850,3391,9641,29090,17604,63906,102396,16,15,6095],"class_list":{"0":"post-464456","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-aged","9":"tag-an","10":"tag-battle","11":"tag-book","12":"tag-books","13":"tag-broadcaster","14":"tag-cancer","15":"tag-died","16":"tag-entertainment","17":"tag-exclusive","18":"tag-extract","19":"tag-following","20":"tag-from","21":"tag-in","22":"tag-latta","23":"tag-lattas","24":"tag-lessons","25":"tag-living","26":"tag-new","27":"tag-nigel","28":"tag-psychologist","29":"tag-read","30":"tag-stomach","31":"tag-uk","32":"tag-united-kingdom","33":"tag-with"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115296165694469449","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=464456"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464456\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/464457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=464456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=464456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=464456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}