Bloganuary Day 25: thankfully entering the final week.

Write about what makes you feel strong.

Maybe I just have a suspicious mind [no, really? – Ed.], but to me this sounds very much like another sneaky attempt by WordPress to elicit something cloyingly inspirational. Well it didn’t work last time and it’s not going to on this occasion either. Maybe.

So what does make me feel strong? Boiled down to its purely physiological roots, of course it has to be energy: calories ingested in the form of food.

Or drink. At various points in my student days, this fine beverage would, I’m pretty sure, have constituted an alarmingly high proportion of my total calorific intake: six pints before moving onto the shorts. ‘Remember when you were young?’ as the Pink Floyd song goes. Yeah – just about.

It is often said that ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’, so since I still seem to be exhibiting the key vital signs, I guess there’s lots of things in the environment dedicated to not killing me and thereby feeding what remains of my strength. Or maybe they just can’t be bothered. Either way, I thank them.

My guess is that a lot of the responses to this particular prompt will talk about ‘belief’ or ‘faith’ as being a key strength giver. Fine, if it works for you, as it does for very many people, but that sort of thing does absolutely nothing for me. I’m with John Lennon (in his song ‘God’) on this:

“I don’t believe in magic
I don’t believe in I-ching
I don’t believe in Bible
I don’t believe in Tarot
I don’t believe in Hitler
I don’t believe in Jesus
I don’t believe in Kennedy
I don’t believe in Buddha
I don’t believe in Mantra
I don’t believe in Gita
I don’t believe in Yoga
I don’t believe in Kings
I don’t believe in Elvis
I don’t believe in Zimmerman
I don’t believe in Beatles”

But out of respect for the brief, I will tell you what does make me feel strong, and here I’m paraphrasing the next line of this song:

“I just believe in me, (Madame) and me, and that’s reality”

Without self-belief, I don’t perceive how you could ever feel truly strong. And when that strength is reinforced by the love of a good (as in ‘wonderful’) woman, far stronger than I will ever be, then that should be sufficient to keep the rest of the world at bay.

Even if they really are out to get you.