I used not to believe in ghosts....

Do you believe in ghosts? My girlfriend does. You know, the ‘white sheet’ variety and clanking chain noses in stately homes.

I used to be dismissive of her statements about the ‘other’ world. I thought that I was logical and rational. You know, the ‘if you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist’ type. But recently I’ve started to change my thinking on this.

I read ‘The Famished Road’ by Nigerian author, Ben Okri. It won the Booker prize for Fiction in 1991. The protagonist, Azaro (as in Lazarus) is a spirit child who lives in the real world with his parents and is an observer of events. Azaro experiences bad spirits and good spirits in the spiritual domain of Nigerian Yoruba mythology.

This got me thinking about my own opinion about the spiritual world and ‘spirits’ themselves. I like to think that when we die, our ‘energy’ lives on through the people that we know and have interacted with over the years. A teacher, for example, might have a strong influence on their pupils, encouraging them to study a particular subject, or influencing their opinion about a particular topic. After the teacher is dead and gone, perhaps they ‘live on’ through the actions of their pupils? Perhaps they have become a ‘good spirit’.

I think that it may not need to only commence after our death. If we perform an act of kindness one day, the person that we have helped may be influenced to do something kind to another person the next day. How we live on after our death is driven by what we say and do while we are alive. Is it influenced by our thoughts? I don't know, but I suspect it might be. Maybe I should be more careful about what I think.....

I was influenced, by many people during my career. They will not have known the positive influences that they had on my work, but I’m grateful to them, of course. I honour them. They were ‘positive spirits’ in my life. They may have passed away, but they live on, through their influence on my work.

‘The Famished Road’ is a very long book. It’s poetic, but long. The only way I could get through it was listening to it on Audible. As one of my pals said; ‘There’s no story’! It's definitely a circular book, an observation of life.

So now I believe in ghosts, and I think that we can choose to be a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ spirit, both personally and professionally. 

What sort of spirit are you?