IT'S TIME TO START DREAMING
OUR DELTA DAWN.

By Gareth Andrews

“Delta Dawn, what’s that flower you have on
Could it be a faded rose from days gone by?”  

Australia’s Helen Reddy had a hit with Delta Dawn in 1973 and the words and music have been rattling around in my recently deadened, decaying head. Somehow, I was uplifted, despite knowing that the actual song spirals downhill beyond these first sentences.

The words relate to our Delta times and the “faded roses” are the faces I see daily when I step outside, as permitted; pallid and empty faces of people losing grip with reality, their minds and hopes devastated by another winter of despair. The question we all ask is: “Will we ever see our Delta Dawn?” It’s a fair question.

Does this really mean all of us?
Lucinda Brogden, chair of the National Health Commission, believes so: “Five in five Australians are experiencing psychological distress, beginning at the mild end of anxiety and depression.”

I believed I was ready for it last year. I thought I’d done the hard yards, having experienced a serious bout of clinical depression 20 years earlier. I’d retrained my own mind and got plenty of help along the way professionally and privately. I’d helped others as well and I figured I had all the coping mechanisms I needed. Except for one thing: my total loss of freedom. The emotional, physical and mental loss of freedom immediately put me in the five out of five bracket.

What I did know was that there were positive steps I could take to help myself change. A great place to start is in the morning. It can be a dark place when the chips are down in your life and I have listened to many heart-wrenching stories on this score.

Get out of bed straight away, do some serious stretching and breathing exercises, have a shower, have a hearty breakfast and keep away from your technology; you are not ready for it.

You are ready instead to break bad habits. Make a fundamental change even though change is hard when you’re feeling like shit. Work closely with your partner and kids if necessary.

I started mentally engaging with myself; looking for a new tool to give me hope and open me up to the modern Delta Dawn. The letters almost spelled it out. Dream and dreaming would be my key words.

I’m not necessarily thinking of the dreams we associate with sleep, although a night of powerful dreams can enhance creativity and problem-solving. I’m thinking of the dreams we have which are more associated with daydreaming. Put yourself back in a place when you didn’t have a care in the world.

In the middle section of The Beatles’ classic, A Day in the Life, Paul McCartney sings, “Woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head”, and finishes six lines later with, “And somebody spoke and I fell into a dream” before John Lennon drifts away.

Float into dreamtime. Think of Mary Poppins, Peter Pan, tilting at windmills, Dumbo the Flying Elephant, all taking us back to our childhood where we were taught to dream and reflect and believe and no one telling us “No”.

I love to dream about travel. I could almost go to Hell and back right now to get on the road again. I read Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey, during lockdown(s) — I had the time! What a journey Odysseus had over 10 years trying to get home to Ithaca after the Trojan War. Monsters of various sorts, a visit to the afterlife, cannibals, alluring women (it was tough!) and Poseidon himself, god of the sea and earthquakes.

It might be hard to emulate the fantasy of Odysseus, let alone survive it. But what about the adventure! To me, travel has always been about the adventure of different countries, different cultures, different peoples. Capturing India in your nostrils. Sweating your way across the Andes and the Himalayas. Suffering on the Camino to achieve a spiritual awakening. Just by having the dream you’re ready to fly — literally.

I mentioned creativity a few lines back. How do we dream about rediscovering our creative selves? Imagine a summer’s day: you’re stripped down to the barest essentials, wandering down to a sparkling stream and setting up your painting tools, including easel and paper, brushes, chalk and rubbers. Isn’t it amazing how far we’ve come away from all of that in the modern age? We now know how much more preciously we must value our time.

Perhaps paint a picture about falling in love with life again. Just thinking about what that might look like gets the juices moving.

I can’t finish on dreamtime without mentioning the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders of our nation. They used the Earth’s features, the landscapes, the animals and the rock formations to tell their stories, giving them special meaning for being conceived or born in the Country they inhabit. Maybe we should all start to give understanding to this belief.

READ THIS ARTICLE IN THE AGE NEWSPAPER

Author’s Bio
Gareth Andrews - Founder and Director of Life Again, a registered Not for Profit charity that educates and helps men to change and lead more fulfilling and purposeful lives. Through writing, public speaking, taking men to the Outback and working with Aboriginals, workshops and personally challenging men.

BARRACKING FOR THE LOSER.

By Gareth Andrews

Grand Final. It’s  that time of the year when most ex-footballers of any age, era, competition or sex (I reckon Daisy Pearce knows more about footy than I’ve forgotten) are asked “who do you reckon will win?” We are supposed to know or have an opinion ( and if the enquirers don’t get the answer they want, “we” get told we wouldn’t know anything!) Unless one of the teams we follow is playing, probably most of us either don’t know, don’t care or both. Spin the coin or tell them to get the answer from Daisy, Tim, Brian and Co. At least they are paid to know.  

Now here’s the rub for me. The “don’t care” factor should still kick in as neither Geelong nor Richmond is playing. The reality is I quite like both teams. I suspect many others feel the same. I might be getting soft but I don’t want either side to lose. How pathetic is that? It needs some explaining. 

The difference between winning and losing a Grand Final has consequences for the rest of the Players’ lives. I’ve been lucky enough to play in two of them, the first in 1967 when my  Geelong Cats were beaten by the Tigers (Richmond) in a game for the ages. With the lead changing hands numerous times in last quarter, the Tigers triumphed by 9 points. As a 20 year old I was gutted, but like all of us in our youth we feel our time will come again.The misery out on the ground after the game and down the highway to the Geelong Town Hall that night was slightly lessened by the fatalistic hope of my youth. It was not something that unburdened the older members of the team. They knew how hard Flags are to win. A cliche but absolutely on the button, as I eventually discovered.

It took exactly another seven years before I changed Clubs to Richmond and playing alongside many of my opponents from ‘67, I got to run around the MCG holding the Cup and sharing the triumph with a group of blokes who have become mates for life. I love my Geelong mates but there’s an extra depth when you win.

So Melbourne or the Bulldogs this week? There’s a rationale behind supporting The Demons this week as their last Flag was in 1964, the year before my career began. But I don’t get very sentimental about that as it seemed like they were winning every year through my formative days. They had their share so to speak, in the same way Hawthorn has in every decade since. Share it around a bit I say although I acknowledge the majority of fans are probably younger than me and feel a bit sorry for the Dees. Not me.

I can also mount a case against the Bullies but the aforementioned may not have heard of Ted Whitten. Who, some might say? Back when I played Whitten was in a battle with Ron Barassi for the unofficial title of Mr Football. They were superstars. It was my misfortune to play on Whitten a number of times in my early years and to be honest, I was scared witless! Gruff, tough and the epitome of somebody coming from the other side of town. I was a kid from Geelong. The Geelong College! He was Footscray. His pregame handshake was honed to perfection as was every part of his game. He fed on kids like me. He gouged fingers and crunched bones as he wished you well. I can’t see it happening today but it always made me wary of a Bulldog. Man or animal.

The players today seem a lot, um, nicer! Haircuts aside, most of them seem to be the sort of bloke you’d be happy to see your daughter go out with. That big tall blond ruckman/forward for the Dogs, Tim English, is unfairly handsome; ex Captain Easton Wood, I’m told, is a quietly spoken gentleman. And the Demons? You couldn’t dislike Max Gawn! Women just want to rap him in their arms. Kysaiah Pickett brings an Indigenous family history to the game with his boyish polish. 

Of course we want to celebrate having two local teams in the Grand Final again after another year from hell. It’s been State versus State this Covid year and who ever wins is representative of us all. We’ve won the lockdown Premiership, we might as well win the real Flag. To do it in Perth, is another bonus! (My friend Tim Lane reckons Melbourne might lay off til next year and play it in front of their adoring fans at the ‘G. I suspect not.)

Two female Presidents as well. I still have split my loyalties. It’s a game for true romantics. In which case, I have to barrack for the loser. But as Gene Pitney sang in 1962, “..true love never runs smooth..” and I suspect the case will happen again this week. Pitneys’s track was “Only Love Can Break a Heart.” Sadly at the final siren there will be many broken hearts. Maybe a little part of mine.

Author’s Bio
Gareth Andrews - Founder and Director of Life Again, a registered Not for Profit charity that educates and helps men to change and lead more fulfilling and purposeful lives. Through writing, public speaking, taking men to the Outback and working with Aboriginals, workshops and personally challenging men.

RECOVERY.

By Gareth Andrews

Emerging recently from the Fifth Lockdown in Melbourne, an almost Olympian First in the Australian Championship of COVID lockdowns, I returned with a surreal feeling of emptiness, an emptiness which would take time to fill, if indeed it would ever be filled again in my lifetime. (I can hear my clock ticking.) And whatever it would be filled with was never going to be the same as “it” held leading up to March 2020. 

I was not alone. The more opinions I sought, the more I realised their was a common feeling of people wearing down as this process dragged on. When I suggested to them that the word Recovery might be an appropriate “descriptor,” they unanimously agreed. It was universally playing on their minds. 

As I write, I had been reading an interview Channel Nine’s Peter Overton had had with veteran  newsreader Brian Henderson in February 2020. In the Herald Sun of August 6th, this was part of reporting of Henderson’s death from cancer at age 89. The interview was “about his kidney cancer diagnosis in 2020. It was his fifth cancer diagnosis after he had beaten melanoma, prostate, bowel and throat cancer,saying he would not be fighting the cancer again. …’there is not much point in having another operation, I don’t want to be cut open again,’ he said.”

It was Brian’s fifth time. We are now heading into our sixth time of being emotionally and physically “opened again” and the pain is becoming more acute. 

This emptiness and the possibility it may never be filled again comes from a place of fear.

Fear that it will happen again. Fear of when it will happen again. Fear of personal freedoms being butchered. Fear of total disconnection from what is real. Fear of Big Brother taking over. Fear of trying to fill in time with soul-destroying thoughts. 

When I refer to Recovery I am not talking about recovery from Clinical Depression and the total debilitating effect  that causes. That make effect 15-20% of our community at any one time. No, I am thinking of a much broader community than that. I am referring to an insidious malaise that is literally affecting 100% of our community. Indeed I recently tuned into an online interview where Lucinda Brogden, Chair of the National Mental Health Commission, suggested that “5 in 5 Australians are experiencing psychological distress, beginning at the mild end of anxiety and depression.”

Covid affects everybody in Australia at the moment— indeed the World. Of course I can’t speak for everybody but the best I can do is be fair, be balanced, be rational, and as much as possible be non-political. There is no right or wrong in all of this but in a world where discussion has gone out the window and those who make the most noise stand off and face each other with totally opposite views. With anger. With ugly aggression. 

So what does Recovery look like and how does it begin?

A good start is to get out of bed! Sounds stupid in its simplicity but I know it resonates across the board in tough times. The easiest thing is to bury under the blankets and hope the world goes away. Without a train to catch or an office meeting (an actual meeting) to go to, we can all hide. Sadly we can’t hide from ourselves. Your brain becomes your enemy. I experienced it at its worst when I was in deep depression twenty years ago: I’m not afraid to admit I’m still experiencing it today. Depression doesn’t grip me but life does. It’s called being human.

It’s not just a matter of rolling out of bed but also getting some physical movement. Whether it’s stretching the whole body on or off the bed or taking some very deep breaths, it’s remarkable how quickly the whole being can come into action. It’s like warming up your Maserati!!!! At least, think about it like that.

The key part of this whole routine is development of Discipline in your life. Your first step out of bed is like all journeys; it sets the tone of the day.

Of course, it’s important to have a good healthy breakfast. That’s a given. But in the context of Recovery and the necessity of paying attention to mind and body, I am exploring the power of overcoming the belting that the mind has taken over the last year and a half. 

So before or after breakfast, do what you are able to do. Go for a walk, get a coffee, more deep breaths, speak to neighbours passing by (despite the fact that the speech can become a muffled grunt behind the mask) and look up in the sky and notice everything is still in it right place. And when you are speaking, try to avoid the C and V words. Covid and Vaccines need a break.

Resting Recovery might seem to be in conflict with the aforementioned getting out of bed comments, but it’s not. For some of us who have already experienced almost 200 days in lockdown—welcome aboard Melburnians—

Author’s Bio
Gareth Andrews - Founder and Director of Life Again, a registered Not for Profit charity that educates and helps men to change and lead more fulfilling and purposeful lives. Through writing, public speaking, taking men to the Outback and working with Aboriginals, workshops and personally challenging men.