I wandered over to Hyde Park, the south west corner near where the road slips between the two Royal Parks. I was very religious at that time. Not to say I'm not now but it was different back then. Perhaps I was just approaching myself from a different direction. Coming up to the lake I prayed for Gideon's goose. If the geese were silent I would leave things as they were–if they were making a racket I would ask her again. Out in the lake a solitary goose honked through the darkness.
God was saying that asking a girl out was not quite on the same level as deciding to go to war? Or that really these things are up to us? Or maybe the unexpected, ambiguous, singular honk was just a conincidence. Either way it was meaningful to me. I did ask her out in the end, I even asked her to marry me. It was beautiful whilst it lasted.
Six men round a table, this time actually deciding on whether to go to war. My great-grandfather, his brothers and brother-in-law.
Take two steel bars with the same mass and chemical composition. Clamping each at one end and steadily applying more force, suddenly one bar snaps whilst the other seems to be practically indestructible. This is hysteresis; two apparently identical objects but with different responses to the same external force. The stronger bar has been work hardened; strain has been applied to it in the past changing its crystalline structure and increasing its strength. Often it is easiest to think in terms of inputs and outputs: eating less reduces your weight; bad parenting produces delinquent children; cutting taxes boosts the economy. However the simple explanation is not always the right one.
Hysteresis is from the Greek husterēsis meaning shortcoming or deficiency. It is when there is a deficiency in the result we expected that we usually notice hysteresis. My friend Gregor, a travelling salesman, was a friendly and dependable man. One morning, when he woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed into a ratty and horrible mess. He had to force himself just to do normal things, even to get out of bed, and soon lost interest in things he used to love. At first his parents were confused but sympathetic. Then his boss demanded to know why he was under performing when nothing at work had changed. With time even his sister, who showed the most kindness towards his condition, was weary of his new personality.
Behaviourist psychology assumes that what we do is determined by stimuli from our environment and environments in the past where we learned to respond to stimuli in particular ways. Gregor had a good job and great friends so it was hard for him to understand what was causing his problems. Someone in his position should not have snapped like that. The dreams had been of his parents arguing when he was a child. Slamming doors, recriminations and quiet desperation to lock himself away from it all. Patterns of thought picked up from that past were his personal hysteresis.
The most successful modern therapies acknowledge this hidden rumination. They explore the past stresses that colour our current experience and with the right support it is possible for trauma to make us stronger. Researchers have found that post-traumatic growth includes people discovering a greater appreciation for life, warmer more intimate relationships and a deeper sense of personal strength. This depends on accepting you do not have control over everything, including things from life that you cannot go back and change. Gregor is not completely better but he is getting there; he is exercising more, eating better and taking part in more social activities. More importantly he has begun to accept that changing his environment like this will help but might not have the same effect it has done for someone else. The crystalline structure of his mind is being gently pulled in to a stronger lattice.