Blog 265 – Successfully Dealing With Terrible Situations, Part 1 – 29 May 2025

 

My purpose is to give hope to those who have lost hope. Without hope, we remain lost in the Shadow Lands.

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I have had to deal with some truly terrible situations in my life and I will share some of the strategies I used to survive.

I am very aware that others have successfully dealt with much worse situations than me, but I can only tell the stories of what I have lived through.

My intention in telling you some of these stories is NOT to claim a hero badge, but to try and give you some tools to help you survive your own dark days.

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Many decades ago, I had hair everywhere.  This photo dates from about 1974 when I was about 25 and living in Melbourne.  This version of me lived through the events I am going to tell you about in this Blog.  If you can imagine me with a short “back and sides” haircut and without the beard, you will have a reasonable picture of what I looked like.

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This is a photo of my mother Josephine Hankin (nee Wood) in about 2,000.  She looks completely harmless in this photo (and she was by then) but this radically misrepresents what she was really like in earlier decades.  The events described in this Blog happened in 1969 when she definitely did not need a walking frame.

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This is a photo of me and Cathy Carey (sometimes surnamed Sparks) in about 1974.  Cathy was a great friend and I was an idiot not to have fallen in love with her … but we are all idiots for much of our lives.  Cathy died of a brain aneurism in 1983.

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Go with a clear, open and receptive spirit, and the universe will not treat you badly.”

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In 1969 I was studying third year law at Monash University in Clayton, Victoria.  I had obtained a Commonwealth University Scholarship which paid the university fees and which also paid a living allowance.  The amount of the living allowance depended on how much money mum and dad earned in the previous financial year.  In 1967 and 1968, the living allowance was $85.00 every 2 months.  Mum used to demand that I give her $50.00 out of every living allowance payment and I paid all of my expenses for the next two months out of the remaining $30.00.  I had barely enough money to survive.  I had to buy all of my own clothes, books and stuff like that.

In 1968, mum got a job and my living allowance was reduced to $64.00 every two months.  I had no idea the allowance was going to be cut until I got home from university one evening in April 1969 at about 7.00 pm.

Mum was waiting for me when I got home.

She had (of course) opened my mail and found my living allowance cheque.  She handed the cheque to me and said “I want $50.00 board money tomorrow”.

I took the cheque from her, thinking things did not look good.  I cashed the cheque next day and paid the bills I had to pay.  I had $40.00 left over to give to mum.

When I arrived home, mum was waiting and demanded her $50.00.  I said I could not pay her $50.00 because the living allowance had been reduced and I could not survive for 2 months on only $14.00.

Mum’s response was immediate.  I had to pay her $50.00 and there was to be no argument.  If I did not like living at home, “I knew what I could do.  I could pack up my bags and leave.”

I tried arguing with her, but it was useless.  I had heard the phrase “Pack up your bags and go” so many, many times and in the past I had always knuckled under and accepted whatever she was demanding.  This time she had misjudged me.

There was no possibility of me paying her the $50.00.

The $50.00 she demanded did not exist.

I went into my room, packed a few items of clothing, grabbed a worn out nearly useless sleeping bag and threw the stuff into my car – a tiny Morris Minor.

I drove into the cold and rainy night.  

I had nowhere to sleep. 

I had no money.

Credit cards had not been invented in 1968.

I had been thrown out of my home by my own mother.

I was a full time student at university studying law and I hoped one day to become a lawyer.

I was only 19.

Anyone willing to bet that I would even survive the night would have been risking their money.

I slept that night in my Morris Minor.  I was able to remove the screen between the boot and the back seat.  By curling up my legs and lying across the width of the car, I was able to mostly stretch my legs out.

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Decades later my brother Bill, who also had a scholarship to go to Monash, told me that mum had never demanded that he pay any board money at all out of his living allowance.

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On that night in April 1969, I had no need to think any further ahead than how to survive the night. 

I could not begin to work out a solution for every aspect of the terrible situation I was in, and I did not need to. 

Stripped of the irrelevant factors, on that cold, rainy night I only had to find a way to make it through the night.

I did make it safely through that night.

This is what a Morris Minor looked like (photo from Wiki).  It was tiny.  Wiki gives these dimensions for the Morris Minor.

Dimensions Wheelbase       7 feet 2 inches (86 inches or 2,184 millimetres) Length            12 feet 4 inches (148 inches or 3,759 millimetres) Width             5 feet (60 inches or 1,524 millimetres) Height            5 feet (60 inches or 1,524 millimetres) Kerb weight   0.76 Imperial tons (1,708 pounds or 775 kilograms)

 

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Terrible situations can be overcome.

When you act with purpose, you add meaning to your life.

When you add meaning to your life, the way out of the Pit is unmistakable.

Take things one step at a time.

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I will tell you more tomorrow.