Judymay Is Listening – Elspeth Proudlock, How Can A Celebrity Save Your Life

Hello, everyone, and welcome. This is Judy Mae Murphy. You are listening to women's Radio station, and Judy Mae is listening, where I listen to what's going on in your life. And together we transform that. Here on women's radio station, we're all about your wellbeing. We're all about you having the best life possible. No matter what is going on, please know that no matter what you're going through right now, there are ways that you can make yourself feel better. There are ways that you can get progress. There are ways that you can feel like, you know what? This is as good an experience as it can be. And it's getting even better. So not just about hope, not just about someday, maybe, but today. And definitely this is a good, good day. So what I've worked out for today is a little bit different. On today's show, Melis and Elspeth have very kindly allowed me to have a little bit more free reign today because I wanted to have a big chat with you for the entire hour about fiction, about how literature and books. Please, please, please, if you're not a literature and books person, please don't run away right now. I promise you this is going to be good. But how we can learn a lot about how we can live our lives through fiction. Let's imagine that there is a movie that you love, because film scripts are fiction, too. So let's imagine there's a movie that you really love and you've watched it a whole bunch of times. Why is that? My guess is it's because there's something about one of the main characters that really resonates with you. Either they are going through something that you want to go through or don't want to go through or have been through or would rather you hadn't been through. And you're able to live it through them in a way that heals, in a way that lets you know, you know what this is. Okay, she came through it. I'm going to come through this. You know, one day she was believing that it was all over, and then it turned full circle or whatever it is that that charact through. You can learn through that and grow through that and just sit a lot easier in your own existence. And if you are someone who doesn't like to read, I love to read. I've always loved to read. I was always that little kid who, you know, was trailing a book behind her, could be found, you know, behind curtains and under tables reading away from a very young age. So if you're like that you already know what great literature can do. And if you are not so much into books, I'd like you to think about it in terms of movies. I'm not one of these snobs that says, oh, no, don't watch the movie. It's a lesser version of the book. It's not a movie is a different telling of the same story and it can be done really, really well. So if you prefer to watch movies, if you prefer to watch really good TV shows, then do that. The thing is, though, right across the board, whether it's books or on the screen, the one thing has to hold true, that it needs to be a classic in order to really be worthy of your time. Now, there are kind of instant classics like, I Know, Although I haven't seen things like Breaking Bad, I haven't seen things like the Crown. You can know by everyone's excitement around them. And what are other ones that have recently been around. What was one about the big house? I can't remember that kind of an upstairs, downstairs. But everyone's talking about now. Downton Abbey. Downton Abbey. Like, you can tell everyone's getting excited, not because, you know, they just been. Have been sold an idea, but there's something in that story that's really resonating with people. So it's the same thing for books. If you are concerned about, well, I don't want to put the time into reading a book or watching a whole series series without knowing that I'm going to get something out of it. Choose something that is a classic. Choose something that has passed from generation to generation, that it's kept going, that it's been kept alive because there is so much good stuff in it. I had the honor, and I do call an honor, I don't call it that lightly. A few months ago, to be sitting in the living room that had been Jane Austen's living room when she lived in Bath, and it was just so great to just be sitting there and looking out over slightly different scenes than what she would have been looking out from. But the same window, the same building that you know the same proportions and just sort of feeling really close to her in that way. And it just shows that our humanness is something that lasts. So let's just go way back. I'm going to just do a really, really quick. Here's the thing that you might want to do if you want to go way back, and that is have a look at a thing called Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Marcus Aurelius is my favorite Stoic philosopher. And Stoic simply means that it's all about getting that little bit of objective distance between you and what's happening to you. So your emotions aren't discarded, but also aren't running the show and aren't, certainly aren't running you into the ground. And the reason I think that he was so cool was because his Meditations were written for him. It was a kind of a note to himself saying, hey, Marcus, remember this? So his name is Marcus Aurelius. The book is called Meditations. It didn't have a name. It was named afterward because it wasn't supposed to be published as a book. And what's in there is a lot of really, really useful stuff. And many of you know that my big daytime job is that I'm a motivational speaker around the world and I get to stand up on these big stages and I've done it for 20 years. I also am the coach for a lot of other motivational speakers and authors in the self help world. And I keep saying to them, go back to the original because it's not diluted. You've got the pureness there. You've got this idea of hey, you know what? Meet each day as if it's a brand new start. That's an idea from another guy called Seneca. But there's loads of really, really cool ideas. The older stuff and these days as well, you can get versions of it like you can get like books where they've taken all the good stuff and they've just put it together in a more simplified version, kind of like Spark notes if you like, for philosophy. And that's okay too, again, if you prefer something like to go onto YouTube. You can see things like School of Life, the Academy of Ideas. There's loads of places where you can get. Ted Ed is another one we all know about Ted and TedX. Ted Ed, the education side of it. Really great little 5 to 10 minute videos all about these things that are just good to know. Why are they good to know? Because when we're surrounded by the same people that we're surrounded by every, every day and we're counting in that some brilliant people, your friends, your family, your co workers, the people that maybe if you listen to the radio or watch tv, there might be some really great people around, but you are limited to those people. You are knowing what they know. That becomes the sum total of your knowledge base is their wisdom. Their wisdom becomes your wisdom. So if you want more wisdom and why do we want wisdom? Not so we can sit around and pretend that we're cleverer than other people. Wisdom is about us being able to add to our own existence and through that, add to the existence of everybody else, to sort of to be a positive force in the world, to use a cliche for my industry. And when we're doing that, when we're bringing on board different ideas, we can feel ourselves expand and that makes us feel safer. And that is so important right now that we're knowing that our safety doesn't have to come from outside. Our safety isn't in. How close is someone standing next to us in the supermarket? Although, yes, of course, we are social distancing, we're wearing our masks, but our ultimate safety comes from how much do I really know that I can do what I need to do and that I can cope with whatever comes up and then I can come out the other side and I can thrive. Not just survive that knowing when you're waking up with that, knowing life is so much easier and you find yourself healthier, happier, more productive. Because I remember so much. I'm in my 50s now and I remember what it was like in my 20s and early 30s when I was just terrified all the time. I didn't know that I was going to be loved. I didn't know that I was loved. I felt like I wasn't loved and I was never going to be loved. I felt like I hadn't achieved and I was never going to achieve. I felt like the world was too difficult. The world didn't get me, the world didn't see me. We all have little bits of that, that kind of linger, those little ideas. And so when we're looking at fiction, we're going to be looking at it in order to just drink it dry, in order to take every bit of awesome that we can from great literature. Some of you are like, Jeannie Mae, you can't talk about great literature and use the word awesome. Yes, I can. Kurt Vonnegut probably did. So what we're going to be doing is we're going to be, in a very human way, in a very womanly way, in a very, I'm your mate and we're sitting over a cup of tea kind of a way. We're going to be looking at some of the great works of literature and what it is that we can learn from them. Now, the thing about great works of literature is we don't have to put out a statement, spoiler alert, all right? Because for a lot of them, knowing a little bit about the plot or knowing A little bit about the characters absolutely will not spoil the experience for you. In fact, I find with things like Jane Eyre, Persuasion, Far from the Madding Crowd, Middlemarch, a lot of these things, some of which we're going to talk about today for a lot of them. It's in the 10th reading that I was really, really starting to get it. You get that with movies, I'm sure, right? For me, I've seen the movie Breakfast club at least 20 times. I saw the movie Dead Poets Society about eight times when it was in the cinema. And so we knew, we know that when something's really great, having a little bit of information about a little bit of the plot or knowing the main character traits of some of the characters is absolutely not going to spoil the experience. In fact, it might add to the experience. It might get us excited. Get in there. So this is my wish for you, is that. And not necessarily that you go and, you know, buy a book and. And read it from beginning to end. Although if that's your thing, fantastic. Right now I'm reading a thing called the Master of Margarita, which I can't believe I hadn't read because so many people told me for so many years to read it. And I've just finished reading Crime and Punishment for the first time. And with Crime and Punishment, that was a really interesting one. That's by a Russian guy called Dostoevsky. Oh, he had a really cool life, by the way. Dostoevsky. Some of these people, you think that they sound all dusty and then you find out one thing about them and you're like, oh, my God, that must have been insane. He ended up getting arrested for something and almost getting shot. And when we talk about almost getting shot, almost getting executed, it was like minutes away. And it was like. It was like a movie itself, or it was like a book itself where like the cavalry kind of charge in and say, no, we have this piece of paper. Don't shoot. It was literally that. And instead he was sent off to Serbia. He was sent off to the gulags, and he had to live and work in a prison camp there. And my favorite part of Crime and Punishment was actually when he was describing a character who was in those gulags. So it's kind of like a way of getting close to these really awesome people because they're always telling a little bit about themselves, if not a lot about themselves in their books. I don't know if you guys know this, but I actually am a published author myself. Not just in self help, but originally back in my 20s, I was a theater director and playwright and then I became a novelist and my first novel was called that Girl from Happy and I wasn't happy. If you want to read a novel about being a big old mess, that's probably a good place to start. But in it, you know, you can find out a lot about the adventures that I had, the adventures of living in New York. You can also find out, you know, the ways that I used art in order to help myself get through and travel to help myself get through and all these different things. You could learn something about the, you know, me in my 20s through reading that. Again, I'm not recommending it. Please don't, Please read these other ones first. Then also I had these books that were a cross between coaching books and novels for teenage girls for 13 year old girls. There was four of them. They were out in a whole bunch of different countries, whole bunch of different languages. They did really well. They were called things like Copper Girl, Blue Lavender Girl, Hazelwood Girl and Diamond Star Girl. You can get them, I think. Is it Saber or one of these companies, I've forgotten which companies have it published as a, on as an audiobook. So if you want to do that, you can. I think the, for that, for those ones though, I think the covers are so delicious. They were done by an Italian artist. I would recommend that if you want to do that, get them, get the actual hardback copy. And again, they're in a whole bunch of different languages and it's published with. My name is Judy May, my first name split in two. So it doesn't get mixed up with the stuff for grown ups. But anyway, I digress. But if you, if you want to hang out with some of the most brilliant people who ever lived, there are different ways that you can do it. And one of the ways is by reading. Reading is hanging out. If you read Persuasion is my favorite Jane Austen. A lot of people like Mansfield Park, Pride and Prejudice, a whole bunch of them. And if there are guys listening, by the way, this is not just for women. I think it's been sold as a thing just for women. Really. Not a lot of the guys I know really, really like Jane Austen's work. So please don't limit yourself. But it's kind of like hanging out with Jane Austen. You don't have to be in the position I was in, you know, sitting in her actual house because you can, you can sit there with her. You can be getting the wisdom from her. What would, what would Jane Austen do? What would Jane Austen say, right? We can kind of know that when we know her character. But the book that we're going to start off with is one that's a little bit more. A little bit more modern. And it's from. It was published in 1957, and it was by Jack Kerouac. It's called on the Road. And some of you know it, you're like, oh, yeah, I saw that movie. You know what? The movie was a different version of the book. And the reason that I really loved. I love, love, love Jack Harawack, by the way. He's an absolute hero to me. I think that he. He is thought of, quite rightly as the leader of the beat generation. If you think about the whole kind of thing that came before the hippies and after World War II, and you had people out there being crazy, man, and blowing that trumpet and wearing that beret and whatnot and smoking gitans, that was it. And the thing that I really get every time I reread on the Road is this idea. And right now, this is why this book really, really spoke to me to read it again. This idea of you're never stuck, you're not stuck, that you can get out there on the road. Now, right now, we can't physically get out on the road, but we see with Jack Kerouac that he. Getting out on the road was really about solving a bunch of different problems and being open to what was going to happen. So the very first bit of the road, he's hitchhiking and he's on his own. And on day one, he gets it all wrong. He gets it all wrong. Everything that can go wrong does go wrong. He's got to kind of backtrack and start again. And how many of us have had that idea, had that feeling of that we're stuck and that when we do start out that we get it all wrong and we just want to go home. And he had that idea. He had the idea of, I'm just going to throw my arms up there. I'm just going to give up on this. I'm going to go home. I'm going to go home and just do stuff the way I was doing it right until now, because the stuff I was doing was pretty good. I'm just going to go and do that. And if someone has that feeling going on with a project, maybe, maybe you've tried to launch a website, maybe you tried to launch yourself in a new career, maybe you've tried to get a particular job, or maybe you've Tried try to mend some bridges in a particular relationship and you just feel like, oh my God, I just made that a whole lot worse. I've just got loads of signals back that this is not going to work. And then you go and you read that part of on the Road, it'll make you do things differently. And that is my big belief about all kinds of literature, about poetry and about spoken word and about conversation. You know, really good conversations are like really good literature, is that it makes us do things differently. That's kind of the point of it. When we feel different, we do different. If we're just feeling different, then I believe that it's limited. But when you really are feeling and you've really had that, that game changer, that idea that's kind of like switched all these cogs in your brain to a different place as kind of, you know, if you think of your brain as a series of cogs and an actual mechanical machinery and great wor and great ideas and great inspiration comes along as levers and oil and cogs moving in different directions and it actually can change the direction of your brain, which can change the direction of your actions, which then must, must always, every single time, change the direction of your life. You just got to make sure that you're changing it into good ways. And on the Road really does that. On the Road, I think is very practical. And it seems to be about people who are not getting it together. People who are constantly getting drunk, going broke, having affairs, lying, disappearing off, saying one thing and not following through, hurting each other. So it looks like you are reading about the most dysfunctional bunch of people on the planet. Hey, there's that too, right? So if you're feeling a little bit, you know, not crazy about your family or your inner circle group right now, you're going to really adore them as soon as you look at the reprobates that Jack Kerouac was hanging out with. And this is based on his life, by the way. So the main character in on the Road is a guy called Sal paradise who was based on Kerouac. And then Dean Moriarty is the character name for the, you know, the main kind of like driver of the adventures. And that was based on another real guy, Neil Cassidy, who ended up. If you ever get to read about Neil Cassidy's life, please do. Oh my goodness. The guy, you know, was just extraordinary. An extreme character who really, you know, couldn't say no. It wasn't that he didn't say no. It seems he was absolutely unable to say no to the next shiny, glittery thing ahead in the road. And when we look at these people who seem to be getting it all wrong, we first of all get this message of, oh, you know what? There is, in fact, no way of getting it wrong. That their terrible fall about ending up starving, broke on the side of a road in the rain, literally, a way of doing life is still valid. That it's still valid. No matter what state your life is in right now, no matter what story you're telling yourself about your ability or inability or how good or how not good something is going, your life is valid. And that's a wonderful thing that we can get from this. And then also that no matter how out of sorts you are or how impossible things seem, that things will change and an answer will show up. But eventually, sometimes after a long time, but eventually someone comes along, gives them a lift or gives them an opportunity to make money or gives them money, or, you know, they. They see things differently, eventually something will change just because the world is different. So it's not all on your shoulders to make absolutely everything happen. And that's something that we can get from on the road. And also that we get that there's a lot of laughter in the sadness, that, you know, terrible things can be happening or difficult things can be happening, and then suddenly things can turn. Suddenly just one person can decide that, my goodness, they're happy to be alive, and that that's an option too. And that we get through the times that aren't so terrible and we move on to different times. It also is a good thing to read in and around the same time as reading the novel by John Steinbeck called Grapes, the Grapes of Wrath. Okay, so the Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939, so about two decades earlier than on the Road. But interestingly, in on the Road, you can still see a lot of what's left of the Grapes of Wrath. So the Grapes of Wrath is kind of like an earlier road trip. And in the road trip, it's all about people moving from places like Oklahoma where, like, it's a dust bowl, that the farmers aren't. Their farms aren't working, they are getting kicked off their farms, and they're all being told to go to California. And they're being told that that's where the work is, that there's definitely work in California. And interestingly, on the road, they still use phrases like okies, which was a derogatory term for people who were moving from Oakland to California. So I think that that's just from a cultural point of view. That stuff is pretty interesting. But. But what really makes me excited for you about Grapes of Wrath is that it's about people who are living in a very different time, and it shows us that we will never need to sink that low again. A lot of people are comparing what's happening now with the Great Depression, but you know what? It's not. It's not. It's not going to sink so far down, and it's not going to last that long. The Great Depression lasted roughly from 1929 to 1939. It's not going to be any. Anything close to that, because a huge thing was that they were all setting out on misinformation. They were believing that there was lots and lots of work for everybody and that if they arrived in California, everybody would get work picking fruit, that they would get paid a lot of money, that they would be able to build their own houses. And that's not what happened. Even at one point in on the Road, the one that's 20 years later, sow paradise, the Jack Harawak character goes. And, you know, he spends some time doing that work that I think it was cotton that he was. He was picking. And he ended up getting to know a family that had come out to California in that era and hadn't progressed much further than that. But anyway, I digress. The whole point is that these terrible things were allowed to happen because information wasn't available. And if they had had that information, if someone had said to them, hey, you know what? Or if enough people had said to them, or if they'd heard from a credible source, hey, you know what? That's not actually the case, and you're going to be driving yourself into danger. Like right now, there are people who are getting all kinds of misinformation about best practices and they're driving themselves into hurt. So, you know, it really is good that we know that the best information is available. So have a little look around. Another thing that we get from Grapes of Wrath is that when we can create a family unit, that things can be easier. Now, it might be that your family unit, your family of origin, or maybe you are divorced or just not on speaking terms with certain family members, that's okay, because I think that Grapes of Wrath shows us really well, is that we create family and we do it faster and deeper and during times of difficulty and that there are always people available. I won't tell you what the very last or second to last chapter is about, but it's There's a thing that occurs that is the ultimate. I'm tearing up here just thinking about it. The ultimate, ultimate act of generosity. The ultimate way that one human can look after another human. And something, you know, very unusual and quite brilliant, and it will stay with you forever. And when you read that, you just know that you're okay. You just know that people. That more people are more good than bad, and that that's all you need. And that we are. We are safe, that we've got it, and that we all need each other. And so you might have been saying to yourself, oh, you know what? I'm not on the front lines right now. I'm not saving anybody's life. I wish I was doing more. I have friends who are in the fashion world, and they are actually. Instead of preparing stuff for their fancy runways in New York and Paris, they are making scrubs and masks and. And protective gear. They literally have got their old sewing machines out, and they're doing that. But also, you know that there might be an older person in your community, and you just. Whenever you're going to the shops, you're just giving them a wave. And that is everything to them that way, that telling them of, I see you, I see you. That might be everything. So there's so much in the Grapes of Wrath that is reminding you how useful you are and how safe you are, as well as how important it is to get the good information so that you can get to a better place even faster. All right, so the next book that we're going to look at is one that is my favorite book. If I had to pick a favorite, favorite book, it would probably be this one. It's Jane Eyre. And it's always been that. I remember the very first time I was interviewed on television, it was in Ireland, and it was for a show where they had a section which was about different people's favorite novel or favorite book of all time. And mine was Jane Eyre. And over the years. And this was, gosh, about 25 years ago when I did this interview. And over the years, I've had so many people come up to me and say, I saw you on Live at 3, which is the name of the show, years ago. And you said that we should all read Jane Eyre. And I did. And it changed. Changed my life. Now it changed my life. The reason it changed my life was because somebody else had read it and somebody else had seen me as a teacher whose name was Mrs. Mackle, and she was my sixth class teacher. So I would have been 12 years old in Muckers Park, Dominican Convent, Donnybrook, in Dublin in Ireland. And she saw that I was a smart kitty and an unhappy kitty, that I was kind of. Not kind of. I was completely distraught. I was lonely. I was. I hadn't settled in Ireland after coming over at the age of eight from England, that I wasn't having a good time. And she just put this book in my hands and she said, I wouldn't give this to anybody else because they wouldn't be ready. Now, I don't. I don't even know if that's true or not, but this is how I heard it. I heard it as I see something in you. And I'd like to tell you that although you and I haven't perhaps met physically, maybe we have, but the fact that you're listening to this this far, I want you to know that I see something in you. I see a curiosity I can sense. I know that you know that there's more and that you're reaching for that more. And if you haven't read, or if you haven't read Jane Eyre in a while, I'd really like to invite you to do so in the same way that Mrs. Mackle is invited me to do so now at the age of 12. It took me three months to get through it, and half the time I didn't know what was going on. But it has stayed with me, the experience of it, it was absolutely glorious. And there's so, so much that we. That we learn from reading Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre is about a young woman who is really on the outside. So at the beginning of the book, she is without family who is claiming her. So she's with her stepmother. Her father has died, she's their stepmother, and her stepbrothers and sisters. And although most step families are highly functional and highly loving, and they don't even use the word step because it's just like, oh, no, we're all brothers and sisters here. For Jane, it was a very different story. And the story was that she was the black sheep of the family, and she was ostracized to the point where she was sent away. She was treated badly, and then she was sent away. And you follow her through things going from bad to worse. So she went from where it was emotionally highly uncomfortable to where it was not just emotionally highly uncomfortable, but also physically highly uncomfortable, where she was, you know, not just being punished, but she also was cold and hungry and also where she couldn't see an end to it. But then you see that things do get better, and sometimes before things do get better, they have to get worse. And in Jane Eyre, there is a bout of illness that affects a lot of the community, but after that, there's change. So after the illness, after the sickness, change happens because whenever there's something like a pandemic, it invites change, it invites people. We talk about, we feel differently, to do differently. And that's what's happening to us right now. We're feeling differently. We're sorting out what's important and what's not important. And this is what happened to Jane was there was a wind change. There was an actual physical change in her environment that at first was quite scary, but then it benefited all those who went forward. And for Jane, the benefit was that just she was able to live more easily and grow herself. And then came a point where she decided that it was time to change again, it was time to move out again. And this is the bit that I love, my actual favorite part of Jane Eyre, and it always has been. And I would have thought, knowing the way I am, I would have thought that it was the more romantic elements of it. But in fact, it's the bit where on no evidence whatsoever, without any kind of picture in her head, without any kind of idea that she could do it or should do it or that it was going to turn out in any way, shape, or form in her favor, she decided that she was going to leave the school that she had known since she was a young child. She was going to go out and become a governess, and she was going to go to this place that she didn't know anything about it. You see, when she arrives, she thinks that the woman who's the housekeeper, Mrs. Fairfax, she believes that Mrs. Fairfax is the owner. That's how little she knows about the situation that she's walking into. And she just takes that chance. And if you're in a position where you're like, you know what? I want to walk into something that is completely different. I want to walk into something that I've never known before, and I don't know if I'm going to just end up back at square one or I don't know if I'm going to end up with nothing. But I know that I need to take the chance. I know that there's enough in me, and I know that this is calling to me, and I'm going to make this happen. And that's what she did. And another thing is then all kinds of twists and turns happen, and that's really reassuring about life. We think that progress is linear. When we think about setting goals and we think about achieving those goals, we get quite dissatisfied if things are going well and then they're going really badly and then they're going well again and then we see to plateau and then it just seems boring and it seems like, well, it's kind of, it's not, not working, but it's not working. And we are just like, oh, this isn't fun anymore, let me switch to something else. And we kind of do that rather than this is part of it. This is the way things unfold. Things unfold in an organic, non linear fashion. It's not straight from A to B. It's kind of like A. Or was that even A? And then we're on H. And what's this? Is this. Somebody says we're on F. How can we be on F? We haven't done B yet. Oh, here's B. Oh, we're on B. Oh, we're still on B. Oh my God. How come we were on F a while ago? Why are we still on B? That is the way that we can panic about things rather than just where are we now? What can we do with what we have? And Jane is just brilliant with that. She's brilliant at being satisfied. She's brilliant at saying, well, this is who I am and this is what I can do to bring this forward. This is what I have in me. This is what I have to offer. I'm not looking to be Blanche Ingram. Blanche Ingram then is the woman that she gets very jealous of. And she actually, there's a point. So basically she starts to fall for Mr. Rochester, right, who's the owner of the house. She starts to fall for him, but at the same time he brings this party of people to stay at his house. Because back then if you lived in a big house, you would bring a whole bunch of people to come and have a house party. That's why they had so many rooms. And as soon as she sees Blanche Ingraham, she just says to herself, okay, let me look at the reality of this. And she paints, she draws a picture of Blanche Ingram and she draws a picture of herself just to remind herself that, hey, this is the reality here. Blanche Ingram is accomplished. She's a noblewoman. She is stunningly beautiful. She's really good in company. And here's me. I'm a different creature altogether. And rather than have it as, use it as a way to beat herself up, she uses it as a way to be okay with the situation and to just sort of say, well, I wish it were different. I don't even know if she says that, but I certainly would be. I certainly go into. I wish this were really different. I wish I was someone completely different on the planet. I tend to go there quite easily. But then we think about how, you know, she deals with her discontent. She. She disciplines her discontent. She says to herself, you know what? That's okay. It's okay to be me. It's okay to sit on the sidelines a little bit. It's okay to not be the center of attention. And I can still have a very, very rich experience while I'm bringing things forward. So it's not about her being static or being passive. You can see the rich inner life. You can see her, you know, wanting to bring her pure further, having ambition for, you know, her pupil, becoming, you know, growing her character and learning different things. So she's not. So that isn't about just being passive and giving up and saying, well, there's nothing I can do about it. It's about being actively satisfied with who you are. And then later on in Jane Eyre, the great thing that we learn is that we can survive as many new beginnings as we need to take that. You know, suddenly it looks like she's going to get the lottery. She's going to. Suddenly all it's going to be dream come true. It's going to be Hallmark Christmas movie time. It's going to be all good. And then suddenly it's just like, what. Whoa. What. What even happened there? Hold on. Oh, no. Let's, you know, let's. Let's get this back. This can't be happening to poor Jane, you know, because we are Jane at this point. So we're like, this can't be happening to me. You know, I can't be brought this low where I'm so stealing porridge from a pigsty and collapsed on the. On a moor. This can't be. This can't be it. I didn't come this far to end up like this. And. No, you didn't come this far to end up like this. And every other new beginning and every other triumph that's come before isn't wasted. It's. It doesn't mean that there were failures. I remember years ago coaching this guy who. He came to me because he was on his third marriage and he felt like he had failed because he had been divorced twice. And I was able to just quite simply say to him in the first two minutes, but hold on a second. Did you learn something from your first marriage? Did you learn how to love better? Did you take that into your second marriage? Was your. Was your second marriage better in that regard at least? He's like, well, yes, I learned this, and I became more this great. And in your second marriage, what did you learn? Oh, I learned in my second marriage that I had to love me, too, that I had to not get pushed around. And so I said, so in this third marriage, now you are learning how to love better, learning how to love yourself better. And so this marriage is better. I was like, yeah, I'm 20 years on. I check in with him every now and then. This marriage is wonderful, wonderful marriage. So you take. You get to take as many fresh starts as you need because it's not wasted. And she started again, and she ended up in a position where, you know, it would look to the outside as if she hadn't yet got back to the place that she had been. So let's just look at it in terms of us these days. Let's imagine that you're someone who, 10 years ago, you had your ideal job. You were just absolutely loving it, and you were paid really, really well. And then three years ago, you were let go from that job. And now you're in a job where you don't enjoy it quite as much, but you've had to learn a whole new set of skills, and you don't yet make as much money as you used to back in the day. You know what? It's not the end of the book yet. It really isn't. This is just, you know, chapter whatever. It might feel like chapter 679, but that's okay. It's not the end of the book yet. The book is an ongoing thing, and you're writing it, you're scripting it as you're reading it. So this is what we need to do, is we need to say to ourselves, what is this teaching me for the next stage? Because it might be that, you know, when you do go into that next stage, the skills that you're learning now, maybe you're more flexible, maybe you're more patient. Maybe you're better at appreciating the money that you make. And so it's going to be even better. And that's what happens to Jane. By the time she goes back with Rochester. By the time she's back there, she's a very different person. And you kind of know that her relationship with him is now more equal. And it's going to be. It's going to proceed with much more depth and in a much better way because of what she went through. And so we can kind of take solace from that. We can kind of know that when we. When we read these books, that we're learning, there's a part of our brain, even if we're not directly saying, you know, I am Jane Eyre and I am Spartacus kind of way, if we're not directly saying that, we are learning that, like, for a lot of women with Pride and Prejudice, we all think that we're Lizzie Bennet. Like, we just do. We think that we're Elizabeth Bennet, the hero. We think that we're the one that is witty. We think we're the one who's. Who's, you know, whose emotions don't get carried away or who isn't too timid. But I had this realization about 10 years ago. I was like, oh, my gosh, for all these years, I've been thinking that I'm Elizabeth Bennet. In fact, I'm more like Kitty. I'm more like a cross between Kitty and Mary. The really kind of like, hickey awkward one and the one that cries at the drop of a hat. And I'm just like, okay, well, that's good. That gives me a path to steer. Okay, so how can I be less like Kitty? Right? God bless her. Give Kitty a great big hug. Like, since then, she's been one of my favorite characters. How can I be less like Mary? How can I, you know, how can I be more like Elizabeth Bennet? How can I become more of what I admire? So we can read books in that way, in a way of how can I become that? And this is a thing that if your diet is only one genre, so if it's only horror books or if it's only sci fi, we can be missing out. So a few years ago, I was dating a guy who really loved sci fi. And he said to me, right, if you only read three sci fi books, it needs to be these. God forgive me. I can't remember the names of them, but they are actually the three ones that are the classics in that genre. And. And I learned so much from them. And I think that if I hadn't read sci fi, I wouldn't have read Kurt Von and got. I wouldn't have read Slaughterhouse five. It would have just been too trippy for me. So, you know, whatever it is that you read or whatever type of people you hang out with or whatever kind of movies that you watch, always try something new. Bring yourself into A new place. Bring yourself into a place of, you know, what have I not yet even found out that I'm missing in my life? So that's kind of another thing that I want you to get excited for today and to know that all this is available for you. So the next book that we're going to look at, what are we talking about? Jane Eyre. I could, by the way, chat about Jane Eyre all day and all night. So if you ever want to do that, come find me. But I really do want to give you loads and loads of options for books that can bring you to an even better place. And part of that is that we kind of get annoyed and we say to ourselves, you know, what would I have done different? What would I have done differently? And that's a really important thing to do, to get really into the book so much that you're treating them like characters and you're getting annoyed and you're saying, oh, my God, I can't believe that this character has just done this. Oh, my gosh, I can't believe that Sheba Evergreen has just, you know, agreed to get married to Sergeant Troy. Oh, no, what's she doing? Because what it does is it gives us the ability to discern. Now, discernment is a really, really important thing when it comes to us being really happy and making good decisions. The reason is that we are really discouraged by certain religions and by certain mind, body, spirits, ways of looking at things, and by just certain philosophies or certain cultural leanings, shall we say. We're often discouraged from this idea of judging other people. And a lot of people will come to me and they'll say, oh, yes, well, I'm in this relationship with this guy who, you know, he. He's really mean to me, but I don't want to judge him. You know, he had a really tough childhood. And, you know, I think that he's learning. And always I say to people, it's like, okay, we're not damning them, so let's avoid the word judgment altogether. We're not damning them. We're not just throwing them in the bin as human beings, but we must discern. We must say to ourselves, what's going on with this person? And is this person the best choice of person for me? And this is why I think that, you know, it's really good to read a book if you are on the more codependent end of the scale where you're better at living for others and sacrificing yourself so that others can have an easier time, as opposed to the more narcissistic end of the scale, where they're better at living for themselves and sacrificing others so that they themselves can have a good time. If you're more on the codependent end of the scale scale as I am, we can read great books like Codependent no More by Melody Beatty. We can read Women who Love Too Much by Dr. Robin Norwood. We can read Love Addiction by Pia Melody. These are all the greats, all the classics. And also we can look at what other women did. Women like Bathsheba Evergreen. I don't ever. Dean, I don't even know if I'm saying that right, because I've never actually heard it pronounced. I don't think so. Please forgive me if I've got it wrong, but I think it's right. But that's from the novel by Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd. And it's just such an awesome, awesome novel to read. It's just so, so great. And in it, to me, that is the book on how to choose a healthy man, right? So if that's your thing, or if you maybe you don't, maybe you've kind of like, you know, landed well in your own job. By the way, because I'm straight, I often slip into. Just presuming in my. In my examples, presuming that it's okay with you to use a straight. So please, please don't think that I'm just not including you in this experience. So, you know, choosing a man or a woman who is the right one for you, if that's your thing that you haven't quite got right, then this book is really, really lovely because it shows, you know, Bathsheba being very, very human and just not seeing the healthy guy. The healthy guy in this, by the way, the hero, if you like, is Gabriel Oak. And the first time I read it, I was just like, oh, my God, I would have seen him. I read that when I was about 20 for the first time I read it. And it doesn't matter, by the way, what age you are. I'm 52 and I just read Crime and Punishment. There's no first past the post kind of prizes award ceremony on this one. But the first time I read it, I was about 20. And I then said, oh, my God, I would have gone straight for Farmer Oak. Farmer Gabriel Oak. That would have been my first choice. She's a bit crazy. And then proceeded to spend the next 15 years going for every single flavor of Sergeant Troy. The not good guy that was possibly out there to be in relationship with. So sometimes it takes a while for all these things to come together. But. But when we can see a character making the mistake, you know, we can kind of get our own little discernment machine working. We can start to say, I would have done this differently. So, you know, we talked about in Grapes of Wrath, we would have maybe said to ourselves, I wouldn't have set out all the way to California without getting better in of front. Oh, really? How are you doing that with that now? With your information now? Or how are you doing that? How are you doing on that last week when you bought that thing that just showed up on your doorstep and isn't quite the way you thought it was going to be? So it's about us becoming discerning for ourselves. So that's kind of what wisdom is. Wisdom is being able to work out or discern. Is it this path or this path? Is that the best way for me to go right now? So what happened to poor old Bathsheba was that, you know, she set out, she was really, really happy, and she married the wrong guy and he made her kind of miserable. She had her own farm and she was, you know, getting these great people to work for her, and she was just kind of, you know, was jogging along really, really nicely for her. And, you know, she's young, she's beautiful, she's like, healthy. She, you know, she likes her life. And then suddenly this guy comes along and it seems as if she can't live without him. She's kind of just gripped by those emotions. She's just, like owned by emotions. And we all know what that's like, right? She's obsessive. She just loses it. So if ever I meet a young person and they say, my mum said that I was to give you a call, I can't afford coaching. But there's this guy. And as soon as I say there's this guy, immediately knowing that, I'm going to say, yeah, your first piece of homework is go off and read far from the madding crowd and then get back to me. Many times they just send me a little note going, okay, got it all good now. And that knowing of just, you know, she has to live out a whole life. And if you are trying to, you know, make decisions for your whole life based on a feeling, a very intoxicated, very heady feeling of the moment, even if that moment lasts for a few weeks or months, that's probably the fastest way to get yourself into A muddle. Let's imagine that you really, really want to buy a house, okay? And you fall crazy in love with this house. And then you go and read Far from the Madding Crowd. My guess is that you will ask a few more questions, even if consciously you don't realize you're doing it. My guess is that you'll sort of say something like, okay, what's that call crack about in the wall in the basement? Okay, what's that? You know, so that the signals were all there. The, you know, Sergeant Troy's ability to be there one minute, not be there the next. His conditional way of relating all these things, you know, his flirtatiousness, if you like, his charm, his charisma that, you know, has a downside as well as an upside. All those things were available. So you will probably take a little bit more time to ask a few more questions about the house that you're buying, and you won't end up with something that's going to cost you a lot of agony and time and money to put right, because you can put a house right, but you can't put a person right. Like, people have the right to be however they are. So, you know, let's make sure that we are becoming more discerning through the things that we're reading. Also, I'd like you to have a. Have fun with looking at the lesser characters as well, realizing that those lesser characters, they're not just set dressing. They're not just, you know, somebody who, you know, shows up in order to let the plot work. But in fact, you'll find that these characters, when you really love them and you. And you stay. When you have to read literature, you have to stay there for longer. And so these characters are kind of more in you. They become more part of you. The lessons become woven in with your reality when you're reading it for an hour a day over a matter of three weeks. And that's again, why I do encourage people. If reading is your thing, or if reading could be your thing, I encourage you to give that a go. You can also remember that you can do it half and half, that you can read it. You can do a little bit as audiobook, and then you can do a little bit as reading from a printed page. And then you can do a little bit on Kindle and a little bit watching the movie. You don't have to do it all in one one method if that single method doesn't yet work for you. As I say, I'm used to sitting down and Reading very long texts in very long sittings. But that's. Hey, that's just my thing. You've got your thing. You're probably way better at me. You're definitely way better at me than some. At something. Yoga, horse riding, raising kids. A whole bunch of stuff. All right, so let's just always remember that, you know, because that feeling of shame can sometimes rise up in us around learning and around these kinds of books. So let's just decide. We're not doing that. Like, we wouldn't get, you know, we wouldn't get overly overwhelmed. Overly overwhelmed? Hey, I guess that's a thing. We wouldn't get overwhelmed by something like someone showing us a really cool pair of shoes and saying, hey, these are by, you know, this designer. And, you know, do you want to try them on? We just sort of say, oh, yeah, cool shoes. I'll try them on. Hopefully we wouldn't go into a place of, oh, my God, I'll never be able to afford shoes like that. I'm not worthy to try on those shoes. Let me run weeping from the shop. Hopefully we would at least give it a go. Right? That's how we grow. We start to realize then that nothing in the world is too good for us. Nothing. No one, no Experience is too good for us. And it's the same thing with books. So let's just get right in there and have fun with this. So we're talking about the classic books and how these books can help us to settle into our lives and learn things at a much faster pace and bring things forward differently. It's just an extra resource because right now we're feeling like, okay, you know, we can't go out and meet our bestie in a wine bar and have to chat the way we used to. This is just another way that we can get it done. And hopefully it's a way that you'll bring forward into the future when we are all back snuggled up close to each other and out in public with each other. And also, for many people, it's something that you might have forgotten. I certainly spent a period of time reading so many nonfiction books for my job that I think a whole year went past and I hadn't read any work of fiction. And then to get myself back, what I did was I set myself the challenge. I actually joined in with the Penguin Classic Literature challenge, where they set a different book that you were reading every month. So I remember at that time reading things like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll. That was amazing. That really got Me excited about just the wondrousness of adventure again. Life had become very kind of like, you know, businessy and very practical. And it was good that it had grown in that direction. But suddenly with Alice's Adventure in Wonderland, that aspect of me that had existed before was kind of reignited. Another thing that I read at that time was a room of. A room of one's own. Is it Room of one's own? Room of your own by Virginia Woolf. A fantastic thing. And that really put me in touch with how blessed I was and also how important the more academic side of things are. So if you like the thing that I'm doing now, the way that I'm finding new ways to help you and bring you forward, that comes from me reading that Virginia Woolf book and remembering how important it is that we. That we do take our place, you know. And also at that time, through reading that, I remembered how much I got from, you know, reading things like Simone de Beauvoir's the Second Sex and realizing that as women, you know, we can't just sort of say, oh, I'm not a feminist. You know, if you believe that things should be equal, you are a feminist. It's just. It's that simple. And I think what you're trying to say is something else with that, with that statement, but just remembering how important it is to acknowledge that aspect, that it's not the same for us, and it's certainly not the same that if you are a woman that comes from another minority, whether it's that you are gay or bi or trans, or if it's that you come from a culture that's not a majority culture, or if it's your skin tone, I mean, I'm very blessed that I'm like middle class, white Irish, or everyone loves the Irish, you know, and all those different things. But, you know, just acknowledging that, yeah, it is different for me. Like, when I step out onto stages, there's normally about between four and eight different speakers on these big stages that I would do around the world. And I'm very often the only woman. And so it is different. So you just get reminded of things in a different way. It's kind of like opening doors to whole new different worlds or worlds that you had forgotten existed for you and that you now can be active in, that you don't have to wait for something really cool to show up on prime movies or on Netflix or movie or whatever it is that you watch, that you can take control of it, that you can actually go in and and you can type into a search engine, you know, the 100 classic pieces of literature. And you can know that you are going to learn things from that. You know, I didn't enjoy reading Crime and Punishment, but I'd made a commitment to somebody that we were going to do it together. And so I kept it going knowing that there were things that I was going to learn. And I really, what I learned from that was, wow, how far I've come. And that was a really great thing. And sometimes that's what you're going to do. You're going to be. It's going to be a big celebration of how far you've come. In Crime and Punishment, there is the most severely codependent, love addicted woman who, you know, makes Bathsheba Everdeen look like just a champion of champions, looks like the healthiest of all people ever because she herself is so broken. And a lot of the characters are very extreme in Crime and Punishment. And that's what we can look at in all the minor characters. The minor characters are often quite extreme. And there are some great messages in those minor characters that allow us to look at, how am I being that extreme? So sometimes we'll roll our eyes or want to skip ahead when we have a character like in Jane Eyre, the character of Bertha Mason, who is in fact, you know, so crazy that she's completely locked up. But there's a lot in that, there's a lot of questioning, there's a lot of what, what brings someone to that point? What is it like when someone is dysfunctional within a system? There's a lot that we can learn from that. And in fact, you know, if you read the book by Jean Reese, the Wide Saragasso Sea, she actually took that character and wrote a whole backstory and really brought us into this character that is really almost just sort of a plot twist, if you like, in Joan Eyre. And it ends fleshed out in Wide Saragasso Sea, just reminding us that these, that we are more than the extremeness of our nature. If you think about a time when you were extreme, a time where you were like, you're like, you really weren't proud of yourself that you were either, like, oh, my God, I'm. I'm barely making enough money or I'm having to rely on other people, or, oh, I was like a screaming banshee there, or I lost my temper all the time at that time, or I just couldn't stop crying, or I stayed in this dysfunctional place too long or whatever it was for you, when you were your extreme version of yourself, you know, you can see that in these characters. That's not all they are, but also they move on from that. And so, you know, have a little think about that. Have a little think about, you know, who is it that I'm being in this, right? And just knowing that you're so much more than that. So just, again, to wind this up in the last minute and a half, that the reason that these great books have lasted this long is because people. People get so much from them and people, different people get different things. And we're not just talking about the stuff going way back. We're not just talking about Wuthering Heights. We're not just talking about, you know, the stuff from Greek philosophers or the, you know, the Thomas Aquinas stuff. We're not talking about way back when. We're also talking about more recent classics. So have a look at, well, as, well at things that were written over the last 50 years and what is it that you can get from them. And knowing that this is a resource for you, but this is the way that the author loved you so much and so believed in you, that they wanted to pass on the best of them. This was their legacy. It's like you have been handed the ultimate, the absolute ultimate. If there's any kind of ultimate, other kind of ultimate in inheritances, this is better than being given a million pounds in someone's will. This is even better than being given a castle in someone's will. This is. You are being handed everything that you need in order to live your best possible life. Thank you for letting me be a part of this. I'm Judy Mae Murphy. This is Judy Mae is listening and you're on wrs. We will see you next week and very, very soon. Big hugs. Take care.