Minds have ideas and minds make plans. Most people intuitively agree that minds, ideas and plans are insubstantial, with no solid physicality (until we act on them). But how can that action happen? Without any kind of hand, how do minds affect the stuff which makes up the physical world? We can't lift a cup of tea with thought alone, or even warm the water. So how does the decision to jump actually generate the chemical and electrical nerve signals involved in an actual jump by actual legs?
Some evidence seems to suggest that ideas and plans actually follow (if only by a fraction of a second) the action they intend. I find this a bit depressing, because it says that my sense of being a conscious creature with free will is entirely illusory: just a story I tell myself to explain why I've done what I did.
But perhaps the experimenters weren't looking in the right place.
They were looking in the brain, the location designated as a safely scientific venue for the mind. But maybe we actually do the thinking
with the heart, or the gut, or something else entirely, and only process our decision in the brain. The trouble is that questions of mind shade into spooky and religious territory and is a bit of a dangerous subject for serious scientists.
But mind really does seem to affect body directly, causally and repeatably in the placebo effect. Nobody disbelieves in the placebo effect (where people get genuinely and measurably better in
respond to pretend medicines). Even hard-headed pharmaceutical companies fund additional work in every
trial to discover how much of the apparent effect is caused by their
medicine, and how much is (merely) placebo.
However, as far as I can tell, little serious research is conducted into how placebo operates - although there is a bit of fun dabbling into whether red or blue pretend medicines work better for particular ailments. Instead of being a focus for study of the interface between mind and body, placebo is simply used as a kind of hygenic screen separating the real (ie currently understandable) science from the weirdness, subjectivity and the other inexplicable 'noise' that life imposes over the pure conceptual framework of hard science.
Science serves us well, but few of the remaining questions are more fundamental than how minds gain real traction on the material world. Surely it's time to risk raising the screen and find out what is really going on. We might even find out how to lift a cup of tea by thought alone.
Sunday, December 20, 2015
Sunday, December 6, 2015
A hidden dimension
Pairing up opposites orders the world so that we can think about it. Hot versus cold. Nice versus nasty. Screen time versus real world activity. Very little is black and white, but we can place things along the dimension which stretches between our opposites - is this more geeky, or more fashionable, and where shall we put geek-chic? We do this in all kinds of contexts from plotting data on graphs to scoring movies with 0-5 stars.
Thousands of these dimensions exist running across and alongside each other. Sometimes a big, clear opposition can contain within it another, subtler one, the operation of which may slip by unnoticed. Saying 'yes' versus saying 'no' to things holds within it the dimension which stretches between Adventure (by which I mean the attitude of enthusiasm for new opportunities and experiences) and Focus (which, as Steve Jobs famously said, is about saying 'No').
Recognising that direct tension exists between Focus and Adventure isn't easy, because so many adventure stories feature a rugged and focused hero who appears to collapse the dimension down to a single point. This (generally male) character is not distracted by physical discomfort, not disheartened by difficulty and remains fixed in his purpose. He is supremely focused on achieving his aims and we admire him for it.
Confusingly he seems terribly adventurous as he penetrates jungles, navigates oceans, and scales mountains, but of course he is not. He has adventures, sure, but they serve to conceal from the reader the relative poverty of his inner life, which is hyper-focused on his objective (finding treasure, escaping from baddies, you know the kind of thing). In the jungle our hero doesn't really notice the plants, except as obstacles, or sources of food, shelter or poison, and on the ocean he doesn't think about the life in the waters below, unless one of them sends up waving tentacles to pluck him from his raft.
Adventure stories follow our hero's focus, because focus provides a plot line, onto which can be threaded a bunch of adventurous exploits. The writer and the reader both savour this adventurous window-dressing more fully than our hero. We mull over his escape from the giant octopus when it's over, but he's busy tackling the next part of his 'adventure'. How could you even tell a story about someone who is not focused on an aim, who explores any opportunities which come their way? Their plot is continually being drawn off in tangents. It's all trailers and no movie.
I like watching trailers, but I have experience of seeing movies which helps me imagine the kind of experience the trailer is trailing. If you've never seen a movie, a trailer can't tell you what it's like, to park your body in the dark for 100 minutes while your mind visits a bright imaginary world.
We love adventure, we intrinsically say 'yes' to new things. We are curious, exploring monkeys and we are drawn to what we get offered by adverts, pinterest, facebook. It's addictive - you get a little imaginative rush from each new idea. I spend probably too much time pinning things that inspire me - new techniques to try, new ideas to mull over, new places I might explore. But although Adventure beckons, it's only a starting point. To actually have the adventure takes focus.
If I'm going to decoupage that chair, I need to stop pinning, gather materials and devote several hours to the project, over a period of a few days, until it's finished. Otherwise I just have a big mess. Or an item on a To Do list which never gets done. More often than not, I stay where I am, comfortably imagining trailers of a life I'm not actually living.
Recognising that direct tension exists between Focus and Adventure isn't easy, because so many adventure stories feature a rugged and focused hero who appears to collapse the dimension down to a single point. This (generally male) character is not distracted by physical discomfort, not disheartened by difficulty and remains fixed in his purpose. He is supremely focused on achieving his aims and we admire him for it.
Confusingly he seems terribly adventurous as he penetrates jungles, navigates oceans, and scales mountains, but of course he is not. He has adventures, sure, but they serve to conceal from the reader the relative poverty of his inner life, which is hyper-focused on his objective (finding treasure, escaping from baddies, you know the kind of thing). In the jungle our hero doesn't really notice the plants, except as obstacles, or sources of food, shelter or poison, and on the ocean he doesn't think about the life in the waters below, unless one of them sends up waving tentacles to pluck him from his raft.
Adventure stories follow our hero's focus, because focus provides a plot line, onto which can be threaded a bunch of adventurous exploits. The writer and the reader both savour this adventurous window-dressing more fully than our hero. We mull over his escape from the giant octopus when it's over, but he's busy tackling the next part of his 'adventure'. How could you even tell a story about someone who is not focused on an aim, who explores any opportunities which come their way? Their plot is continually being drawn off in tangents. It's all trailers and no movie.
I like watching trailers, but I have experience of seeing movies which helps me imagine the kind of experience the trailer is trailing. If you've never seen a movie, a trailer can't tell you what it's like, to park your body in the dark for 100 minutes while your mind visits a bright imaginary world.
We love adventure, we intrinsically say 'yes' to new things. We are curious, exploring monkeys and we are drawn to what we get offered by adverts, pinterest, facebook. It's addictive - you get a little imaginative rush from each new idea. I spend probably too much time pinning things that inspire me - new techniques to try, new ideas to mull over, new places I might explore. But although Adventure beckons, it's only a starting point. To actually have the adventure takes focus.
If I'm going to decoupage that chair, I need to stop pinning, gather materials and devote several hours to the project, over a period of a few days, until it's finished. Otherwise I just have a big mess. Or an item on a To Do list which never gets done. More often than not, I stay where I am, comfortably imagining trailers of a life I'm not actually living.
So, now I know that 'saying yes to life' is not actually an absolute good. Indeed, it's not even possible. There's too much life: saying yes to any of it involves a massive amount of saying no, something which never makes it into the fancy quote jpegs. But Focus-No is the necessary setting for the gem of Adventure-Yes, and if we neglect it the meaning of our adventures falls away.
Sunday, November 22, 2015
What is luxury?
The words used to sell luxury now are artisan, handmade and craftsmanship. They all speak of time spent paying attention. We are so rushed, multi-tasking on our consumerist hamster wheels, that the real rarity, the precious luxury is attention. And it is a safe refuge: attention can never be mechanised. There is no machine to allow us to produce more attention per minute.
We don't like to admit that we need attention, especially as adults. If we don't get enough from friends, relations and colleagues, we can pay for beauty treatments, or set up mentoring relationships, or even write a blog (ahem). Research is piling up that the experience of real-life, real-time (and ideally in-person) attention is an important factor in health and longevity. But what of the new luxury: attention goods? Can we really absorb the focus and skill of the potter from the pot? Or do we just enjoy the knowledge of it? Most people seem sure that seeing a gig or a match played live is a very different experience from the DVD. Being there has something extra - an 'atmosphere' is created by the communal focus. But what about afterwards?
Does attention leave a trace? When someone has spent hours knitting a blanket, is there something additional in the blanket itself; something not present in one made by a machine in a factory and barely glanced at? Or is it just the knowledge of that attention, and the care it implies, that makes something precious to us?
Knowledge charges traces of the maker's hand with meaning. We see the swirling pattern on the base of our mug, and we know it was made by a practised sweep of the cutting wire freeing it from the wheel on which it was thrown. We think of the potter attaching the handle, drying, firing, glazing and firing again. We can savour the attention lavished on this mug at one remove, in our imaginations. But does it exist beyond that?
If the trace of the maker's attention is real, does sustained attention from the same person throughout the making leave a different trace than serial attention paid by different makers? Does the attentive trace spring from a developing relationship between maker and made, or is it merely a kind of patina bestowed by repeated applications of attention? Do years of honing skills add to amount or change the nature of the attentive trace in an object - can you apply more attentive force as a master than as a novice?
A research trip to a fine craft gallery is clearly required.
Sunday, November 8, 2015
Mending magic
Have you noticed that if you mend something, it often feels more precious afterwards?
There is some magic in mending. I think it goes like this:
Something gets broken, or torn, or worn through. You consider getting rid of it. Sometimes this will make you sad and you decide you can't part with it, and mend it instead.
By choosing to mend you are consciously recognising the object's worth, perhaps for its own sake, perhaps for the times you've had with it, perhaps a blend of the two.
By choosing to mend you are consciously recognising the object's worth, perhaps for its own sake, perhaps for the times you've had with it, perhaps a blend of the two.
In the act of mending, you make this explicit. You pledge your time and effort to your relationship with the item. I think, by not simply replacing the mug, or the jeans, you acknowledge the separate identity and value of the item, its beinghood. It may not be alive, but it is starting to shade into agency and to become a player in your life. It asked something of you, and you answered the call.
I have also noticed this during times in my life when money was pretty tight, and mending wasn't a declaration of love, but of need. I often liked the jeans better after patching than before. They had become more personal, they had something of me stitched into them. I have even felt a flicker of this this about sharpened pencils (it always seems to be a major production to find the pencil sharpener, which might explain why).
I have also noticed this during times in my life when money was pretty tight, and mending wasn't a declaration of love, but of need. I often liked the jeans better after patching than before. They had become more personal, they had something of me stitched into them. I have even felt a flicker of this this about sharpened pencils (it always seems to be a major production to find the pencil sharpener, which might explain why).
You give things life by mending them. The mend does not have to be tailored and invisible. Indeed, the animating power of mending benefits from some level of visibility. When you publicly confirm your commitment to the item for all to see, it's like a wedding.
To a lesser extent this is also true of cleaning. Check out 'boro' and 'kintsugi' on the internet, you'll get lots of beautiful images of humble items mended, and better for it. Nothing is permanent, nothing is finished, nothing is perfect. And that is an invitation to dance.
To a lesser extent this is also true of cleaning. Check out 'boro' and 'kintsugi' on the internet, you'll get lots of beautiful images of humble items mended, and better for it. Nothing is permanent, nothing is finished, nothing is perfect. And that is an invitation to dance.
Sunday, October 25, 2015
Experts and elites
Everyone is precious. Every life is of value and worth, whether it's lived by old or young, male or female, black or white, broken or whole. This is similar, but not the same as everyone's knowledge, skills or opinions being of equal worth.
But the fact that it's so bound up with the experts who embody it, means that it's very hard to see how to give equal value to the non-expert. Maybe everyone is an expert at something, but this requires the summoning up of some rather specious expertises - an expert in their own experience? A baby can be nothing else, no matter how precious.
Possibly we need to relearn how to value the path to expertise, which is full of highly unfashionable virtues like attention, respect for mastery, patient practice, and perseverance over many years. The current tendency to default to an interactive approach, and the both-sides-of-any-question media promote the idea that every point of view is somehow equal. We reject the making of judgements. The trouble is that we make them anyhow. Just in a less well-informed way.
The frieze of clay faces on the school playground wall is cheerful, touching, and was no doubt an empowering and exciting experience for the kids involved. Possibly it also built a bit of local community. These are precious things. But is it of equal aesthetic value to a Rodin sculpture? Obviously not.
We're glad to be able to google the diagnosis our doctor gave us and read up: it gives us a sense of control and helps us manage changes in our lives. But we also recognise that they offer an expertise that isn't google-able, an expertise about what else to look out for, to recognise the unexpected, the apparently unconnected, to know what is worrying and what isn't.
We still need experts and skillful people. I want people with a deep knowledge of the history and culture of other nations to be doing the international diplomacy - perhaps not only those who've trod the traditional rather privileged pathways, but certainly not someone like me, who's never been in charge of more than a handful of people.
We're glad to be able to google the diagnosis our doctor gave us and read up: it gives us a sense of control and helps us manage changes in our lives. But we also recognise that they offer an expertise that isn't google-able, an expertise about what else to look out for, to recognise the unexpected, the apparently unconnected, to know what is worrying and what isn't.
We still need experts and skillful people. I want people with a deep knowledge of the history and culture of other nations to be doing the international diplomacy - perhaps not only those who've trod the traditional rather privileged pathways, but certainly not someone like me, who's never been in charge of more than a handful of people.
The problem is that it's not easy to separate respect for the skill from respect for the person. Expertise worth the name is not detachable into expert systems and certainly not into online searches. It's an integral understanding, an awareness of context. Expertise is when knowledge becomes tacit knowledge.
But the fact that it's so bound up with the experts who embody it, means that it's very hard to see how to give equal value to the non-expert. Maybe everyone is an expert at something, but this requires the summoning up of some rather specious expertises - an expert in their own experience? A baby can be nothing else, no matter how precious.
Possibly we need to relearn how to value the path to expertise, which is full of highly unfashionable virtues like attention, respect for mastery, patient practice, and perseverance over many years. The current tendency to default to an interactive approach, and the both-sides-of-any-question media promote the idea that every point of view is somehow equal. We reject the making of judgements. The trouble is that we make them anyhow. Just in a less well-informed way.
Sunday, October 11, 2015
Towards and away
There's no such place as 'away'. 'Away' from somewhere is always towards another place, whether intended or not. And a little thought can always name that other place which, once named, is no longer 'away'.
'Away' means 'I've stopped paying attention'; it doesn't mean 'gone'. We speak of 'paying' attention, because it costs us. There are so many demands on our attention.
We budget. And we have to: the world is unmanageably big these days. To reach round news, social media and our daily lives in the real world, we stretch our attention: it gets thinner and more gappy. It creates a lot of away. Nobody can attend to everything, or even to every aspect of something. What goes into your away?
I bought my son some ethically questionable trainers the other day. He loved them, they fit well, he needed new sports footwear, the shop is run responsibly from the point of view of its local employees. It didn't show pictures of child labour. I knew about it anyway, but chose to prioritise the immediate meeting of our need. My son doesn't know what the logo means. If there had been photos and information, I expect he would have been shocked, and possibly not wanted to buy the trainers. Then we would have trailed around town, all subsequent pairs blighted by comparison with the hugely comfortable, favourite coloured trainers that we hadn't bought. We might well have come home frustrated, empty handed and instead of cheerful, with new shoes and with most of the day left to get out into the sunshine.
I put the manufacture of those trainers into away. I consciously and deliberately refused it my attention, so that we could have a lovely day. Lucky us.
When we throw things away, they don't cease to exist. The people and processes we put into away, people suffering in far off nations, recyclable or organic waste going into landfill, it's all really there. It happens, and it has and will have consequences.
I know that we can't attend to everything. I know that I would rather have bought different trainers, but it's not easy to know where to draw the line. I don't always manage to meet my own minimum standards. It takes a great deal of attention, and emotional effort, and sometimes I'm tired. It doesn't seem something that can be fixed by individual effort - only something that can be made much worse if we don't make as much effort as we can.
We budget. And we have to: the world is unmanageably big these days. To reach round news, social media and our daily lives in the real world, we stretch our attention: it gets thinner and more gappy. It creates a lot of away. Nobody can attend to everything, or even to every aspect of something. What goes into your away?
I bought my son some ethically questionable trainers the other day. He loved them, they fit well, he needed new sports footwear, the shop is run responsibly from the point of view of its local employees. It didn't show pictures of child labour. I knew about it anyway, but chose to prioritise the immediate meeting of our need. My son doesn't know what the logo means. If there had been photos and information, I expect he would have been shocked, and possibly not wanted to buy the trainers. Then we would have trailed around town, all subsequent pairs blighted by comparison with the hugely comfortable, favourite coloured trainers that we hadn't bought. We might well have come home frustrated, empty handed and instead of cheerful, with new shoes and with most of the day left to get out into the sunshine.
I put the manufacture of those trainers into away. I consciously and deliberately refused it my attention, so that we could have a lovely day. Lucky us.
When we throw things away, they don't cease to exist. The people and processes we put into away, people suffering in far off nations, recyclable or organic waste going into landfill, it's all really there. It happens, and it has and will have consequences.
I know that we can't attend to everything. I know that I would rather have bought different trainers, but it's not easy to know where to draw the line. I don't always manage to meet my own minimum standards. It takes a great deal of attention, and emotional effort, and sometimes I'm tired. It doesn't seem something that can be fixed by individual effort - only something that can be made much worse if we don't make as much effort as we can.
Sunday, September 27, 2015
Re-wilding
Re-wilding is an appealing project: Let's step back from our domination of the world and invite the non-human other, the Wild, to step forward and meet us. It feels like an act of mature self-restraint, humbly acknowledging value beyond current human concerns. Many conservationists work hard to defend, or recreate, wild spaces: checking non-native invaders; reintroducing departed natives from nearby populations; preserving and recreating precious habitats.
I am much in sympathy with this work, but it is not re-wilding. It is gardening. Wise, wonderful, gardening. Gardening which appeals to me morally and politically, and usually aesthetically. But still just gardening. Because the wild is what happens all by itself.
The wild is not any particular species, not even wolves. It's not any particular ecosystem, not even old-growth forest. Wild is the state of being unmanaged. We confuse Wild - the unmanaged, with New or Untouched - the un-interacted-with, which is something quite different. And it's a dangerous mistake.
When we identify wild as untouched-by-humans, it becomes distant and loses relevance to our lives. It subsides into fodder for documentaries - awesome, but not our world.
But unmanaged wildness is an intimate part of our daily lives. It's the familiar buddleia scrub alongside the railway track, moss on your roof and nettles in the park. It the microbes in your body and the pigeon which hops onto the circle line train.
We have set up a false opposition between the everyday things and the marvellous ones. The more we share with each other images of the exceptional, the distant and the fantastical, the more we need to cultivate appreciation of the familiar beauties which are beside us all the time. Let's attend to the wonder of valerian blossoming out of a wall; the sun-warmed skins of a garden harvest; the companionable calling of a skein of geese travelling across the autumn skies, living in a bigger world than most humans, for all our petrol engines.
This small, familiar wild may not have the majesty of virgin rainforest, but it has wonder. And it has something the virgin rainforest doesn't: it has touchability. We can live here and it doesn't crumble. It is our ecosystem. It tells us that we really belong in the world, living alongside other species, doing our human things. And our human things include gardening, doing science and otherwise managing our environment, even making documentaries about the precarious virgin ecosystems that remain.
I am much in sympathy with this work, but it is not re-wilding. It is gardening. Wise, wonderful, gardening. Gardening which appeals to me morally and politically, and usually aesthetically. But still just gardening. Because the wild is what happens all by itself.
The wild is not any particular species, not even wolves. It's not any particular ecosystem, not even old-growth forest. Wild is the state of being unmanaged. We confuse Wild - the unmanaged, with New or Untouched - the un-interacted-with, which is something quite different. And it's a dangerous mistake.
When we identify wild as untouched-by-humans, it becomes distant and loses relevance to our lives. It subsides into fodder for documentaries - awesome, but not our world.
But unmanaged wildness is an intimate part of our daily lives. It's the familiar buddleia scrub alongside the railway track, moss on your roof and nettles in the park. It the microbes in your body and the pigeon which hops onto the circle line train.
We have set up a false opposition between the everyday things and the marvellous ones. The more we share with each other images of the exceptional, the distant and the fantastical, the more we need to cultivate appreciation of the familiar beauties which are beside us all the time. Let's attend to the wonder of valerian blossoming out of a wall; the sun-warmed skins of a garden harvest; the companionable calling of a skein of geese travelling across the autumn skies, living in a bigger world than most humans, for all our petrol engines.
This small, familiar wild may not have the majesty of virgin rainforest, but it has wonder. And it has something the virgin rainforest doesn't: it has touchability. We can live here and it doesn't crumble. It is our ecosystem. It tells us that we really belong in the world, living alongside other species, doing our human things. And our human things include gardening, doing science and otherwise managing our environment, even making documentaries about the precarious virgin ecosystems that remain.
Maybe, too, if we more clearly experience our inescapable involvement in our own ecosystems, we'll find it easier to find a way to live both joyfully and respectfully in the world.
Sunday, September 13, 2015
Starting something
In our joined up world of communications, it's easy to feel swamped and powerless. But, no matter how much we turn off the news, it doesn't go away. National and international is the stage on which we all live now. And in truth, it's the stage on which we have all, always, lived.
In the past we didn't know it so vividly. The impact of and knowledge of actions propagated more slowly through the world. The here and now was better insulated by time from elsewheres, and from futures.
But.
A simple increase in speed has changed the nature of communication. If word of mouth is the principal mode of communication, then some context naturally adheres. You knew something of the actors, of the places, of the meanings - and as the message travelled further and the context dropped away, so did the message's power. Now our messages can be picked up and whirled away on a tide of social media. They can end up far from their context without losing their freshness and the power that comes with it. They can have real effects in places, and ways, that were never intended.
An apparently powerful person or act rides on a tide of other acts, attitudes, and people. Other acts, unsupported by such a tide, seem futile. Yet the apparently futile act may start start something instead of being lost in the noise. The apparently powerful one may be nothing more than a random piece of flotsam: prominent but passive.
We cannot comfort ourselves that it doesn't matter what we do. It might not, but then again, it really might. And it really might not be what we meant to do. The world has become precarious; how can we dare to act at all, in this unwieldy, enormous, joined up world?
We cannot get out of it. Disengagement from politics, from communication is also an act. Even disengagement from life by suicide is an act, and one not available for any fine-tuning afterwards.
One thing I am certain of is that we cannot tell in advance what acts will make a difference, and what the difference is they will make. Contexts and perspectives on any single issue expand in all directions and we cannot appreciate them all, even in hindsight.
We're left with guesswork - about both the likely effects and the likely effectiveness of our actions. But guesswork is what people are good at. We struggle when we have too much clarity, we get bored, we get miserable. We are much better when we don't quite know: then we get curious, we try things out, learn from experience, imagine possibilities and use a blend of thought and intuition to decide what to try next.
Every day, make your best guess about what to do. And then do it. You may be part of a tide, or lost in the noise, that's not the point. The point is to make your response, to your context. Whatever it is: participate in the world. There's actually nothing else you can do.
In the past we didn't know it so vividly. The impact of and knowledge of actions propagated more slowly through the world. The here and now was better insulated by time from elsewheres, and from futures.
But.
A simple increase in speed has changed the nature of communication. If word of mouth is the principal mode of communication, then some context naturally adheres. You knew something of the actors, of the places, of the meanings - and as the message travelled further and the context dropped away, so did the message's power. Now our messages can be picked up and whirled away on a tide of social media. They can end up far from their context without losing their freshness and the power that comes with it. They can have real effects in places, and ways, that were never intended.
An apparently powerful person or act rides on a tide of other acts, attitudes, and people. Other acts, unsupported by such a tide, seem futile. Yet the apparently futile act may start start something instead of being lost in the noise. The apparently powerful one may be nothing more than a random piece of flotsam: prominent but passive.
We cannot comfort ourselves that it doesn't matter what we do. It might not, but then again, it really might. And it really might not be what we meant to do. The world has become precarious; how can we dare to act at all, in this unwieldy, enormous, joined up world?
We cannot get out of it. Disengagement from politics, from communication is also an act. Even disengagement from life by suicide is an act, and one not available for any fine-tuning afterwards.
One thing I am certain of is that we cannot tell in advance what acts will make a difference, and what the difference is they will make. Contexts and perspectives on any single issue expand in all directions and we cannot appreciate them all, even in hindsight.
We're left with guesswork - about both the likely effects and the likely effectiveness of our actions. But guesswork is what people are good at. We struggle when we have too much clarity, we get bored, we get miserable. We are much better when we don't quite know: then we get curious, we try things out, learn from experience, imagine possibilities and use a blend of thought and intuition to decide what to try next.
Every day, make your best guess about what to do. And then do it. You may be part of a tide, or lost in the noise, that's not the point. The point is to make your response, to your context. Whatever it is: participate in the world. There's actually nothing else you can do.
Sunday, August 30, 2015
Ambling the overhwhelm
Like the centipede who 'lay distracted in a ditch, considering how to run' I am lucky enough to have too many things to do. I do an interesting dayjob. I have a family. I need to explore nature, understand the world around me and express the beauty and fascination I find there. I want to challenge our discounting of the non-human, and the non-living. I want to be part of a re-wonder-ing as well as a re-wild-ing of the world. I have a list of grand plans: but my desk is a heap, and I'm overwhelmed.
I remember as a child wanting to try everything at family buffet parties and being unable to finish the resulting plateful. Not much has changed. These days people don't tell me archly that 'someone's eyes were bigger than her stomach', but it's just as true. My intellectual, passionate and creative eyes are still much too big for my practical stomach.
The sensible thing would be to prioritise and, more importantly, to de-prioritise. To make a deliberate choice to give up on part of it. I continually fail to do that, some things inevitably get sidelined anyway, but I shrink from consciously owning the choices that get made.
But I think I am prepared to own the refusal to make the choice. In spite of all the obvious good sense, there is something deeply tragic about project managing your actual life. Yes, I'm sure that deciding what really matters and then resourcing it well is a highly sensible approach. It is likely to lead to satisfying achievements. But there's not much life in it.
The project management approach is about achieving an outcome, about over-riding happenstance and opportunity. It's about the objective, and not about the journey. Life is just the opposite. In life, there is only the journey. Journey's end is unpredictable, and only rarely (and very sadly) an objective.
I believe in ambling through life. Ambling is progress without a plan: growing a journey step by step. Some steps will take you places that could be toiled towards as destinations, and some won't. The nature of the journey is flowing, opportunistic, adventurous. More fun. Every day, start from where you are and take the most promising looking next step.
But by ambling, I can keep my plate full of too many things to do. I won't pre-empt circumstance by striking dear projects off the list purely in the name of focus and achievement. Instead, I will amble through the overwhelm, and let circumstances decide, moment by moment, what actually happens.
After all, in spite of my lists, circumstances have been in charge all along anyway.
I remember as a child wanting to try everything at family buffet parties and being unable to finish the resulting plateful. Not much has changed. These days people don't tell me archly that 'someone's eyes were bigger than her stomach', but it's just as true. My intellectual, passionate and creative eyes are still much too big for my practical stomach.
The sensible thing would be to prioritise and, more importantly, to de-prioritise. To make a deliberate choice to give up on part of it. I continually fail to do that, some things inevitably get sidelined anyway, but I shrink from consciously owning the choices that get made.
But I think I am prepared to own the refusal to make the choice. In spite of all the obvious good sense, there is something deeply tragic about project managing your actual life. Yes, I'm sure that deciding what really matters and then resourcing it well is a highly sensible approach. It is likely to lead to satisfying achievements. But there's not much life in it.
The project management approach is about achieving an outcome, about over-riding happenstance and opportunity. It's about the objective, and not about the journey. Life is just the opposite. In life, there is only the journey. Journey's end is unpredictable, and only rarely (and very sadly) an objective.
I believe in ambling through life. Ambling is progress without a plan: growing a journey step by step. Some steps will take you places that could be toiled towards as destinations, and some won't. The nature of the journey is flowing, opportunistic, adventurous. More fun. Every day, start from where you are and take the most promising looking next step.
But by ambling, I can keep my plate full of too many things to do. I won't pre-empt circumstance by striking dear projects off the list purely in the name of focus and achievement. Instead, I will amble through the overwhelm, and let circumstances decide, moment by moment, what actually happens.
After all, in spite of my lists, circumstances have been in charge all along anyway.
Sunday, August 16, 2015
Lying fallow
I love my phone because it means I can (almost) always, (almost) everywhere, do a search.
I can fill up any spare time with new images, ideas and information. It's a great luxury - it's like having a reference library, personal assistant and messenger service in my pocket. I make notes, update the shared shopping list, keep in touch. I slightly struggle to remember how life actually felt in the pre-smart phone days, let alone the pre-mobile ones.
I can be always doing something.
But this blaze of productivity drowns out the moments of silence, of vulnerability, of serendipity. I distract myself from worry in the doctor's waiting room. I protect myself from social awkwardness in the after school pick up playground. I'm never at a loose end.
Being productive is great, but it's blinkered. It requires blinkers. We canter down the focus road, seeking to avoid being distracted or unnerved by irrelevant things to right or left. A 'window' in your calendar is asking to be filled. We think of open space as empty space - we call land that isn't beautiful to us or useful to us 'waste land'.
Crop rotations used to include fallow time and it supported the rest of the cycle. The wild flower meadows kept the pollinators going between the short flowering of crop, as well as allowing the soil to recover and the small animals to have somewhere to nest, forage and hunt. Some farmers are starting to experiment with bringing back strips of fallow, wild areas and giving space to their hedgerows.
In urban and office life, we must defend the fallow spaces in the day from smart phones and productivity. I'd like to point out that I mean defend the genuinely fallow time. Scheduling a yoga class, joining an educational guided nature walk or meditation group is not fallow - although it probably is worth doing. Fallow time is weed-filled, and non-productive. Fallow is a pyjama day where the laundry doesn't get done. If it's a fallow day then you can answer a knock on the door without a change of plan, you can turn a quick phone call into a long chat because nothing is going on. You might end up tidying a cupboard because you're looking for the risotto rice and it's right at the back. But you didn't plan to, or it's not fallow time.
Fallow time offers recuperation, an openness to happenstance, and asks you to stop living your life so that your life can live you. Mark some in your diary now, and then visit your life without farming it. You might be surprised by what starts growing.
I can fill up any spare time with new images, ideas and information. It's a great luxury - it's like having a reference library, personal assistant and messenger service in my pocket. I make notes, update the shared shopping list, keep in touch. I slightly struggle to remember how life actually felt in the pre-smart phone days, let alone the pre-mobile ones.
I can be always doing something.
But this blaze of productivity drowns out the moments of silence, of vulnerability, of serendipity. I distract myself from worry in the doctor's waiting room. I protect myself from social awkwardness in the after school pick up playground. I'm never at a loose end.
Being productive is great, but it's blinkered. It requires blinkers. We canter down the focus road, seeking to avoid being distracted or unnerved by irrelevant things to right or left. A 'window' in your calendar is asking to be filled. We think of open space as empty space - we call land that isn't beautiful to us or useful to us 'waste land'.
Crop rotations used to include fallow time and it supported the rest of the cycle. The wild flower meadows kept the pollinators going between the short flowering of crop, as well as allowing the soil to recover and the small animals to have somewhere to nest, forage and hunt. Some farmers are starting to experiment with bringing back strips of fallow, wild areas and giving space to their hedgerows.
In urban and office life, we must defend the fallow spaces in the day from smart phones and productivity. I'd like to point out that I mean defend the genuinely fallow time. Scheduling a yoga class, joining an educational guided nature walk or meditation group is not fallow - although it probably is worth doing. Fallow time is weed-filled, and non-productive. Fallow is a pyjama day where the laundry doesn't get done. If it's a fallow day then you can answer a knock on the door without a change of plan, you can turn a quick phone call into a long chat because nothing is going on. You might end up tidying a cupboard because you're looking for the risotto rice and it's right at the back. But you didn't plan to, or it's not fallow time.
Fallow time offers recuperation, an openness to happenstance, and asks you to stop living your life so that your life can live you. Mark some in your diary now, and then visit your life without farming it. You might be surprised by what starts growing.
Sunday, August 2, 2015
New eyes
I tested some new eyes at the weekend. There was an optical equipment fair at a nearby nature reserve and high end binoculars took my breath away.
For decades, modest binoculars have been lurking compactly at the bottom of my bag; an underused cousin to wallet, phone and keys. It turns out good optics are actual magic: not just a bit clearer, but an actual super-power. Like poaching a hawk's vision. Such clarity, focus, detail. Reaching crisp and bright into the distance: creeping invisibly up on wildlife to drink in their detail. I'm in love.
It's also true of wetsuits. Till February this year, I looked at those few seal-like surfers in grey Cornish waves and considered them ridiculously hardy. Fit and skilled they certainly are, but with a winter wetsuit (including hood and boots), I wandered into that wintry sea as open and comfortable as if it was my living room. I have the sea in winter too - that's as near magic as I expect to get.
This kind of magic is what people do: increase our control, our speed and our freedom. Binoculars render me almost disembodied: reliably unseen, unheard and unsmelled, while I watch birds. A wetsuit changes my personal season - it's warm enough to swim all year round. We can schedule reminders, emails, blog posts. Come to that literacy is so deeply integrated into who I am that pen and paper, or at least keyboard, are very much the tools I use to think with, not just tools for sharing my thoughts after the fact.
But no binoculars in the world can turn the first sight of noisily nesting black-headed gulls, into a diverse mix of seventeen species. That takes patience and attention. It takes openness to whatever is, even if - this time - it is only black-headed gulls after all.
We augment our powers, but only the active ones. It's not so easy to augment the passive ones of receiving, of attending. But the balance is important, and our tools unbalance it. There's nothing to buy which offers the attention span of a hawk to go with it's vision, the patience of a tree to match the timeproofness of wetsuits and scheduled blog posts. I wish there was.
For decades, modest binoculars have been lurking compactly at the bottom of my bag; an underused cousin to wallet, phone and keys. It turns out good optics are actual magic: not just a bit clearer, but an actual super-power. Like poaching a hawk's vision. Such clarity, focus, detail. Reaching crisp and bright into the distance: creeping invisibly up on wildlife to drink in their detail. I'm in love.
It's also true of wetsuits. Till February this year, I looked at those few seal-like surfers in grey Cornish waves and considered them ridiculously hardy. Fit and skilled they certainly are, but with a winter wetsuit (including hood and boots), I wandered into that wintry sea as open and comfortable as if it was my living room. I have the sea in winter too - that's as near magic as I expect to get.
This kind of magic is what people do: increase our control, our speed and our freedom. Binoculars render me almost disembodied: reliably unseen, unheard and unsmelled, while I watch birds. A wetsuit changes my personal season - it's warm enough to swim all year round. We can schedule reminders, emails, blog posts. Come to that literacy is so deeply integrated into who I am that pen and paper, or at least keyboard, are very much the tools I use to think with, not just tools for sharing my thoughts after the fact.
But no binoculars in the world can turn the first sight of noisily nesting black-headed gulls, into a diverse mix of seventeen species. That takes patience and attention. It takes openness to whatever is, even if - this time - it is only black-headed gulls after all.
We augment our powers, but only the active ones. It's not so easy to augment the passive ones of receiving, of attending. But the balance is important, and our tools unbalance it. There's nothing to buy which offers the attention span of a hawk to go with it's vision, the patience of a tree to match the timeproofness of wetsuits and scheduled blog posts. I wish there was.
Sunday, July 19, 2015
The love of sheep
I'm recovering from reading Sightlines by Kathleen Jamie. Almost too wonderful: interesting, wise, unshowily elegant. As soon as the exhilaration wore off, I began to wonder if there is any point in my writing when this book has already been written. What on earth could anyone have to add?
In our overcrowded world, this fear lurks at the bottom of many minds. It's surely beneath all the sales of motivational and self improvement products. There's always something or someone better out there.
Categorising is an effective way to deal with the huge size and complexity of the modern world. You can't read the back of and dip into every book in a bookshop, let alone on Amazon. But you know you like books by author X or in genre Y. Starting there saves time. But categorising is not a neutral act, it ripples back upstream: bookshops categorise by genre, and publishers in turn encourage authors to stay filed in genres. News is categorised as 'world', 'health', 'environment', a big story or a merely local one. We categorise each other and we categorise ourselves: are we geeky, social, travellers, parents, booklovers? It's a useful way to navigate our expanded world - we know what size clothes to take to the fitting room.
When I read Sightlines it was natural to compare my writing, because it shares a category: I don't feel daunted by novels in the same way. But she threw me a line in 'Aurora', as she looks back at their ship, surrounded by icebergs:
"Though white, the ship looks dirty ... the way sheep suddenly look dirty when it snows"
That's the point. Categories lead us to focus on the abstract quality, and seduce our love out of the actual content of the life we are living. An appreciation of real sheep, rather of the category fluffy whiteness, is appreciation that will stand firm when it snows. If it is the sheep you love to see, then snow will make that love blossom forth into a love of mottled gray-brown, a love of hanky texture, a love of steamy bleating made visible in cold air.
Abstract thought has proved its worth with many excellent fruits: cars, solar panels, refrigeration and mobile phones, but it is dangerous. Abstracts bring ideals and ideals oppose life, reducing it to mere shadows on the cave wall, while outside we imagine perfection romping in the sunshine of truth. The great gift of being alive is to revel in the details - enjoying them as particulars, not imperfections. A hot chocolate moustache after a day in the cold, a worn cuff on a favourite jacket, evening light sliding under the clouds.
It's not for us to judge whether our contribution is worth making. All we can do is make it, in detail. Particularly.
In our overcrowded world, this fear lurks at the bottom of many minds. It's surely beneath all the sales of motivational and self improvement products. There's always something or someone better out there.
Categorising is an effective way to deal with the huge size and complexity of the modern world. You can't read the back of and dip into every book in a bookshop, let alone on Amazon. But you know you like books by author X or in genre Y. Starting there saves time. But categorising is not a neutral act, it ripples back upstream: bookshops categorise by genre, and publishers in turn encourage authors to stay filed in genres. News is categorised as 'world', 'health', 'environment', a big story or a merely local one. We categorise each other and we categorise ourselves: are we geeky, social, travellers, parents, booklovers? It's a useful way to navigate our expanded world - we know what size clothes to take to the fitting room.
When I read Sightlines it was natural to compare my writing, because it shares a category: I don't feel daunted by novels in the same way. But she threw me a line in 'Aurora', as she looks back at their ship, surrounded by icebergs:
"Though white, the ship looks dirty ... the way sheep suddenly look dirty when it snows"
That's the point. Categories lead us to focus on the abstract quality, and seduce our love out of the actual content of the life we are living. An appreciation of real sheep, rather of the category fluffy whiteness, is appreciation that will stand firm when it snows. If it is the sheep you love to see, then snow will make that love blossom forth into a love of mottled gray-brown, a love of hanky texture, a love of steamy bleating made visible in cold air.
Abstract thought has proved its worth with many excellent fruits: cars, solar panels, refrigeration and mobile phones, but it is dangerous. Abstracts bring ideals and ideals oppose life, reducing it to mere shadows on the cave wall, while outside we imagine perfection romping in the sunshine of truth. The great gift of being alive is to revel in the details - enjoying them as particulars, not imperfections. A hot chocolate moustache after a day in the cold, a worn cuff on a favourite jacket, evening light sliding under the clouds.
It's not for us to judge whether our contribution is worth making. All we can do is make it, in detail. Particularly.
Sunday, July 5, 2015
Aaagh! Stuff!
How many products and services promise to simplify your life? There are books, blogs, storage solutions, handy organisers, decluttering advice professionals and TV insights into other people's stuff endgame... the list goes on, and with barely a trace of irony.
Some of the stuff is sentimental and charged with tenderness. Some of it is beautiful and gives me daily joy. But really a great deal of it just might-come-in-handy-one-day. This final category is both hardest to defend and hardest to control. So what is it about, really?
Sometimes I want to escape to the purity of a single note, a sparsely furnished holiday home, and a great empty sea horizon. It's restful. But it's good to come back to the complexity and richness of a life which has a past, a future, and a multi-stranded present.
Last time we went on holiday I realised that the great sigh of relief I felt when we got to the apartment was as much about its relative emptiness as about having finished the journey. Wow, I thought. If I go on holiday partly to get away from my possessions, then surely when I get home, I can get rid of 80% of everything and feel on holiday all the time! I came home determined. And I can't do it.
Some of the stuff is sentimental and charged with tenderness. Some of it is beautiful and gives me daily joy. But really a great deal of it just might-come-in-handy-one-day. This final category is both hardest to defend and hardest to control. So what is it about, really?
For a start: the might-come-in-handy stuff does, in fact, come in handy. I recently re-covered dining room chairs with material stashed for more than a decade. Like advertising, more than half of might-come-in-handy stuff is pointless, but nobody knows which half.
To continue: it's recycling: I have stuffed several craft projects over the years with the insides of an old duvet kept for that purpose.
And finally, like Walt Whitman, 'I am large, I contain multitudes'. I go off some clothes, craft techniques, sports, and then a few years later, I take them up again. Keeping stuff is a way to hang on to options. My collection of tools and materials is the first stage of work on future projects, many of which have not yet broken the surface of consciousness. The stuff is in my mind, as well as my house.
A commonly used creativity technique takes two apparently unrelated objects challenging you to make connections. My stuff gives me that work out all the time. I'm writing at my desk, and it presents me with supermarket vouchers, a pine cone, loom bands, some pebbles, felt pens, a little resin sculpture, lego, and other items. Some offer memories, some remind me of plans and some I just seem to have hung onto. They all become talismans connecting me to ideas and emotions, including some only half-conscious ones which as they can't be explicitly noted down would otherwise trickle away.
Whenever a talisman pops up in my visual field, a bunch of associated thoughts and feelings get a little charge of attention. They are briefly introduced to whatever I'm thinking about at the time. My home is thus an extension of my brain, and I am thinking in it outside my head; layering plans, memories and symbols together.
To continue: it's recycling: I have stuffed several craft projects over the years with the insides of an old duvet kept for that purpose.
And finally, like Walt Whitman, 'I am large, I contain multitudes'. I go off some clothes, craft techniques, sports, and then a few years later, I take them up again. Keeping stuff is a way to hang on to options. My collection of tools and materials is the first stage of work on future projects, many of which have not yet broken the surface of consciousness. The stuff is in my mind, as well as my house.
A commonly used creativity technique takes two apparently unrelated objects challenging you to make connections. My stuff gives me that work out all the time. I'm writing at my desk, and it presents me with supermarket vouchers, a pine cone, loom bands, some pebbles, felt pens, a little resin sculpture, lego, and other items. Some offer memories, some remind me of plans and some I just seem to have hung onto. They all become talismans connecting me to ideas and emotions, including some only half-conscious ones which as they can't be explicitly noted down would otherwise trickle away.
Whenever a talisman pops up in my visual field, a bunch of associated thoughts and feelings get a little charge of attention. They are briefly introduced to whatever I'm thinking about at the time. My home is thus an extension of my brain, and I am thinking in it outside my head; layering plans, memories and symbols together.
Sometimes I want to escape to the purity of a single note, a sparsely furnished holiday home, and a great empty sea horizon. It's restful. But it's good to come back to the complexity and richness of a life which has a past, a future, and a multi-stranded present.
Sunday, June 21, 2015
Go down to the sea
I must go down to the sea, to the lonely sea and the sky, (from Sea Fever, by John Masefield)
The impulse to go off into the woods, down to the sea or up on the moor is all about the impulse to look away from the human. To stop staring into the mirror of culture and find something else, something beyond: a breath of fresh air.
It is the fundamental spiritual urge. Spiritual as opposed to the religious urge, because religion is a cultural vessel for spirituality. Whether religious or not, almost everyone has an upwelling desire to try and see past our human perspective and this is a spring which pours through our lives. It might run partly through religious canals, which are after all designed for it (some might say to contain it, and some might say to harness its power), or it might find its own way entirely: waterfalling, streaming or seeping through our inner marshland as a sense of wonder, of beauty, a feeling for the wild.
The Oxford Junior Dictionary shed lots of its nature words a few years ago, to make room for the new words which have become prominent in the lives of most young children now. Words like attachment and chatroom displaced words like acorn and conker. It's a sign that we're allowing ourselves to fall more deeply into human life, and away from the more-than-human.
I lived for a while in a very landlocked and urban part of the country, and hearing the cries of seagulls in the background of phone calls home used to feel like a huge breath opening in my chest. I didn't know then what I know now - that I have to attend to the non-human. Thankfully, I can get basic rations by watching birds who still whirl through the air in our streets and parks, by noticing the fungi which spring up after autumn rain, by giving myself up to the clouds out of the window, or by looking closely at a wildflower by the side of the road. But you have to pay the attention, and very humble things like pigeons, clouds and weeds are hard to attend to in our world of global image-sharing.
We hungrily consume 'nature' on computers and TVs. Fabulous footage of distant places, amazing plants, extraordinary animals. Photos of beautiful landscapes, wild skies, green river valleys. But the trouble is, it's not nature. It's photography. You don't get a lungful of it. It doesn't soak the bottom of your jeans and you don't get to pick a bit of it up and carry it home.
Like Narcissus, we are held in a gaze of rapture. We think it's nature, the other, but it's still just us. We need to look away and go down to the sea, or at least the park, before we drown in our reflection.
The impulse to go off into the woods, down to the sea or up on the moor is all about the impulse to look away from the human. To stop staring into the mirror of culture and find something else, something beyond: a breath of fresh air.
It is the fundamental spiritual urge. Spiritual as opposed to the religious urge, because religion is a cultural vessel for spirituality. Whether religious or not, almost everyone has an upwelling desire to try and see past our human perspective and this is a spring which pours through our lives. It might run partly through religious canals, which are after all designed for it (some might say to contain it, and some might say to harness its power), or it might find its own way entirely: waterfalling, streaming or seeping through our inner marshland as a sense of wonder, of beauty, a feeling for the wild.
The Oxford Junior Dictionary shed lots of its nature words a few years ago, to make room for the new words which have become prominent in the lives of most young children now. Words like attachment and chatroom displaced words like acorn and conker. It's a sign that we're allowing ourselves to fall more deeply into human life, and away from the more-than-human.
I lived for a while in a very landlocked and urban part of the country, and hearing the cries of seagulls in the background of phone calls home used to feel like a huge breath opening in my chest. I didn't know then what I know now - that I have to attend to the non-human. Thankfully, I can get basic rations by watching birds who still whirl through the air in our streets and parks, by noticing the fungi which spring up after autumn rain, by giving myself up to the clouds out of the window, or by looking closely at a wildflower by the side of the road. But you have to pay the attention, and very humble things like pigeons, clouds and weeds are hard to attend to in our world of global image-sharing.
We hungrily consume 'nature' on computers and TVs. Fabulous footage of distant places, amazing plants, extraordinary animals. Photos of beautiful landscapes, wild skies, green river valleys. But the trouble is, it's not nature. It's photography. You don't get a lungful of it. It doesn't soak the bottom of your jeans and you don't get to pick a bit of it up and carry it home.
Like Narcissus, we are held in a gaze of rapture. We think it's nature, the other, but it's still just us. We need to look away and go down to the sea, or at least the park, before we drown in our reflection.
Monday, June 8, 2015
Location, location, location
Not so long ago, 20 years if that, I'd arrange to meet a friend a few days in the future and a little before the appointed time, I'd take a jacket with my keys and wallet in the pocket and set out. It feels brittle now - no means of communicating to repair or even improve plans on the fly. You'd stick to the plan, or stand your friend up. No other choices.
The first one to arrive would wait because how else would we find each other? Some people would wait longer than others, some would be more punctual than others. If someone didn't show up at all, you'd assume something quite bad had happened, although you wouldn't be able to call and find out till you'd definitely given up on them - because in order to do so, you'd have to leave the meeting point to find a call box, and the longer after the meeting time that was the more danger your friend would arrive, and on seeing you not there, assume you'd already left and leave again too.
Now we can communicate with anyone we know wherever they are. We carry all our contacts with us all the time. It's great.
But experiences still happen in specific places. I was in the rose garden at Mottisfont Abbey when I got a call telling me about my father's heart attack. That was over a decade ago and he recovered well, but the memory remains in that rose garden, part of what flits through my head whenever I'm there in that part of the year.
I covered a box file with woven paper strands while listening to a really moving afternoon play on the radio. I eventually had to get rid of the file, because I'd woven the story into it and it was much too harrowing to be reminding myself of on a daily basis.
We often holiday in the same town and have built up a patina of happy memories in the place: we all relax when we arrive. It's as if there are ruts worn into the place which make it hard not to be happy there.
I find it difficult to do certain parts of my day job from home, because my contact with the details of the meetings, calls and emails is much stronger when I sit at the desk or make tea in the kitchen where I had them. It's as if part of my memory is encoded outside my skin, perhaps in the arrangement of post-it notes, lego and paperclips on my desk.
The first one to arrive would wait because how else would we find each other? Some people would wait longer than others, some would be more punctual than others. If someone didn't show up at all, you'd assume something quite bad had happened, although you wouldn't be able to call and find out till you'd definitely given up on them - because in order to do so, you'd have to leave the meeting point to find a call box, and the longer after the meeting time that was the more danger your friend would arrive, and on seeing you not there, assume you'd already left and leave again too.
But experiences still happen in specific places. I was in the rose garden at Mottisfont Abbey when I got a call telling me about my father's heart attack. That was over a decade ago and he recovered well, but the memory remains in that rose garden, part of what flits through my head whenever I'm there in that part of the year.
I covered a box file with woven paper strands while listening to a really moving afternoon play on the radio. I eventually had to get rid of the file, because I'd woven the story into it and it was much too harrowing to be reminding myself of on a daily basis.
We often holiday in the same town and have built up a patina of happy memories in the place: we all relax when we arrive. It's as if there are ruts worn into the place which make it hard not to be happy there.
I find it difficult to do certain parts of my day job from home, because my contact with the details of the meetings, calls and emails is much stronger when I sit at the desk or make tea in the kitchen where I had them. It's as if part of my memory is encoded outside my skin, perhaps in the arrangement of post-it notes, lego and paperclips on my desk.
Everything happens somewhere, and it leaves a mark on both the thing and the where, at least as they exist in the minds of the players. Everything may well be connected, but it isn't all here. If you google 'living in the present moment' you will find thousands of considerations of the importance of attending to now rather than losing yourself in regret and nostalgia for the past or plans and anxieties for the future. But just try looking for 'living in the present place': it's clearly not an issue.
Regardless of mobiles and the internet, we are still creatures, and we have a location. Where we are is meaningful. It's hard to talk about the importance of proximity without sounding parochial - the very word has become negative, when it used not to be. We know of a bigger world, but we live in a small one. No matter how much we travel, we are only actually in one place at a time. We may stay in one place long and deeply, or flit and skitter over a wide area, and that will affect the thoughts we think, but not how many hands we can hold at once, and what that holding means.
Regardless of mobiles and the internet, we are still creatures, and we have a location. Where we are is meaningful. It's hard to talk about the importance of proximity without sounding parochial - the very word has become negative, when it used not to be. We know of a bigger world, but we live in a small one. No matter how much we travel, we are only actually in one place at a time. We may stay in one place long and deeply, or flit and skitter over a wide area, and that will affect the thoughts we think, but not how many hands we can hold at once, and what that holding means.
Sunday, June 7, 2015
Poisonous aspirations
These days we set objectives and fill up our diaries months ahead. We strive continually to improve ourselves: physically, psychologically, intellectually, spiritually. There's a truly massive industry supported by our sense that we are not fit, serene, rich, beautiful, happy, stable, educated, witty, creative, productive or just plain good enough.
We also have instant access to images which show how far short of the ideals we fall. No matter we know many of these images photoshop the truth: with their aid, we can vividly imagine and compare ourselves to the dream. Now some would say that the urge to be a better version of yourself is wholly a good thing, that it keeps us from becoming complacent slobs, wasting our talents on a life of TV and junk food.
I'm starting to think that the story of the Fall from Eden is all about this. Once you have knowledge of perfect 'Good', it is extremely difficult not to strive for it, or to fear, judge and attempt to conceal your lack of it. These are the features of being fallen, and shame at one's nakedness makes a good symbol. Nakedness is vulnerability, honesty - introducing the separation of good and evil leads to anxiety, grief and a desire to cover oneself.
But we don't learn best when we feel stupid, and regimes based on denial can take us only to the limit of our will power. Willpower is a finite mental resource, besides depleting other functions when it's being used. It's a temporary, stop-gap approach: it can't be the foundation of anything.
We all know that the second something is identified as a 'target' for some business or public service it becomes much less useful and generates unfortunate side effects into the bargain. Making something a target changes its relationship with its context.
I recently heard about a hospital target set to discharge recovered patients by 11am. Intended to speed up release of both the patient and the bed, in practice it led to some patients staying an extra night so that the target could be achieved... the following day. Similarly, we rank schools by exam results, and unwittingly affect the attention given to everything else that happens there: healthy physical, emotional and social development, creativity, self discovery. A growing body of research shows that when we reward children for anything we quickly re-focus their interest towards the reward and away from what we were actually trying to encourage. And this seems to be the case even if the activity we were rewarding was something they wanted to do in the first place.
Let's all stop looking over our shoulders at ideals of mind, body, heart and soul, and instead let our current lives fill up our whole attention. We're not perfect. Nobody can actually be perfect: perfect is a moment, as considered in a particular context. It's not something that can be an ongoing attribute of a living being. The attention you withdraw from striving can be reinvested in your actual life. And that will surely lead to learning and growth and do so easily because the effort is drawn from you by interest and supported by what's around you.
So put aside objectives and aspirations: they cast you out of Eden. Make peace with fallibility, your own and everyone else's, and you'll be instantly back there, and realise that you never really left.
We also have instant access to images which show how far short of the ideals we fall. No matter we know many of these images photoshop the truth: with their aid, we can vividly imagine and compare ourselves to the dream. Now some would say that the urge to be a better version of yourself is wholly a good thing, that it keeps us from becoming complacent slobs, wasting our talents on a life of TV and junk food.
I'm starting to think that the story of the Fall from Eden is all about this. Once you have knowledge of perfect 'Good', it is extremely difficult not to strive for it, or to fear, judge and attempt to conceal your lack of it. These are the features of being fallen, and shame at one's nakedness makes a good symbol. Nakedness is vulnerability, honesty - introducing the separation of good and evil leads to anxiety, grief and a desire to cover oneself.
But we don't learn best when we feel stupid, and regimes based on denial can take us only to the limit of our will power. Willpower is a finite mental resource, besides depleting other functions when it's being used. It's a temporary, stop-gap approach: it can't be the foundation of anything.
We all know that the second something is identified as a 'target' for some business or public service it becomes much less useful and generates unfortunate side effects into the bargain. Making something a target changes its relationship with its context.
I recently heard about a hospital target set to discharge recovered patients by 11am. Intended to speed up release of both the patient and the bed, in practice it led to some patients staying an extra night so that the target could be achieved... the following day. Similarly, we rank schools by exam results, and unwittingly affect the attention given to everything else that happens there: healthy physical, emotional and social development, creativity, self discovery. A growing body of research shows that when we reward children for anything we quickly re-focus their interest towards the reward and away from what we were actually trying to encourage. And this seems to be the case even if the activity we were rewarding was something they wanted to do in the first place.
Let's all stop looking over our shoulders at ideals of mind, body, heart and soul, and instead let our current lives fill up our whole attention. We're not perfect. Nobody can actually be perfect: perfect is a moment, as considered in a particular context. It's not something that can be an ongoing attribute of a living being. The attention you withdraw from striving can be reinvested in your actual life. And that will surely lead to learning and growth and do so easily because the effort is drawn from you by interest and supported by what's around you.
So put aside objectives and aspirations: they cast you out of Eden. Make peace with fallibility, your own and everyone else's, and you'll be instantly back there, and realise that you never really left.
Sunday, May 24, 2015
On not feeling guilty when the sun shines
Today there is glorious sunshine here, although it is raining somewhere else. I don't feel guilty about this.
But I do feel guilty when I think of how lucky I am in general. I'm living in a peace zone. I have interesting employment in a fairly free and equable society. Myself and those I care for are in adequate health and we have access to medicine. Other people are living in terror, in poverty, in pain.
Why is that different from the sunshine? I didn't make the wars, oppose international equal rights or undermine anyone's healthcare system. But nevertheless it is different, because I could do something about the misfortune of others. I sign petitions and give money to charities, but I could take humanitarian aid to a war zone, I could devote more time campaigning for equality and justice. Lots of people risked their own health fighting Ebola, thank goodness. But I didn't. I carried on doing my marginally worthwhile day job and looking after my family. I went out with friends, enjoyed the sunshine, and fretted about not getting enough exercise or giving my son enough vegetables.
The stoics believed that you need to start with acceptance of how things are; that all wise action comes from calm consideration rather than emotional drive. But to the best of my knowledge they mostly talked about coming to terms with your own misfortunes, not those of others. Presumably one's own suffering was the greater challenge then. They didn't have a 24-hour news industry.
News may be the greatest challenge of modern life. As responsible citizens of the world we must inform ourselves, just as we take an interest in the welfare of friends and colleagues. What is the difference? A few miles? In the age of the internet? It feels like a duty to be aware of world news.
But we experience news events out of context, and out of scale. It feels local: we see faces, hear voices. It feels as if it's happening in our street, and in so far as we all are interconnected waves in the universe, it is. But the world, though connected, is large, and we are small, and finite.
School trip nerves cannot be adequately responded to in the context of someone else's hostage crisis. But the news comes in, so, lest all personal concerns be swamped by the international theatre of cruelty and disaster, many people respond by blunting their sense of connection to the distant events. How else to defend raising money to further improve your local school facilities, when there are so many schools with no facilities, and so many children with no school at all?
Is there a better way to survive modern like than by blunting our awareness of connection? Perhaps the answer is to actively honour our particle nature. We do have a focused location, however much we spread out from it around the edges. Cherish the world right beside you - wherever you go and whoever arrives - because you cannot cherish properly at long distance. And be grateful, not guilty, when any kind of sun shines on you, because it's not shining everywhere.
But I do feel guilty when I think of how lucky I am in general. I'm living in a peace zone. I have interesting employment in a fairly free and equable society. Myself and those I care for are in adequate health and we have access to medicine. Other people are living in terror, in poverty, in pain.
Why is that different from the sunshine? I didn't make the wars, oppose international equal rights or undermine anyone's healthcare system. But nevertheless it is different, because I could do something about the misfortune of others. I sign petitions and give money to charities, but I could take humanitarian aid to a war zone, I could devote more time campaigning for equality and justice. Lots of people risked their own health fighting Ebola, thank goodness. But I didn't. I carried on doing my marginally worthwhile day job and looking after my family. I went out with friends, enjoyed the sunshine, and fretted about not getting enough exercise or giving my son enough vegetables.
The stoics believed that you need to start with acceptance of how things are; that all wise action comes from calm consideration rather than emotional drive. But to the best of my knowledge they mostly talked about coming to terms with your own misfortunes, not those of others. Presumably one's own suffering was the greater challenge then. They didn't have a 24-hour news industry.
News may be the greatest challenge of modern life. As responsible citizens of the world we must inform ourselves, just as we take an interest in the welfare of friends and colleagues. What is the difference? A few miles? In the age of the internet? It feels like a duty to be aware of world news.
But we experience news events out of context, and out of scale. It feels local: we see faces, hear voices. It feels as if it's happening in our street, and in so far as we all are interconnected waves in the universe, it is. But the world, though connected, is large, and we are small, and finite.
School trip nerves cannot be adequately responded to in the context of someone else's hostage crisis. But the news comes in, so, lest all personal concerns be swamped by the international theatre of cruelty and disaster, many people respond by blunting their sense of connection to the distant events. How else to defend raising money to further improve your local school facilities, when there are so many schools with no facilities, and so many children with no school at all?
Is there a better way to survive modern like than by blunting our awareness of connection? Perhaps the answer is to actively honour our particle nature. We do have a focused location, however much we spread out from it around the edges. Cherish the world right beside you - wherever you go and whoever arrives - because you cannot cherish properly at long distance. And be grateful, not guilty, when any kind of sun shines on you, because it's not shining everywhere.
Sunday, May 10, 2015
On being a wave and a particle
In order to understand how light behaves you sometimes have to think of it as a particle; sometimes it as a wave. We learn this at school, where they don't generally mention that the same is true of everything else in the world, not just light.
It's usual to think of ourselves as particles in a universe of particles. Particles eat other kinds of particles, wear particles, and tell, or don't tell things (particles of information) to other particles. This perspective sets up meaningful boundaries around various parts of the world and we can uncover real understandings by thinking this way. I'm a big fan of my smart phone, my hot and cold running water, and the fact that I'm here at all, which I owe to modern medicine.
But we are also waves in the stuff of the universe: local gestures of the space-time-mind through which other gestures - minerals, energy, other life - flow. Our actions provoke other actions and reactions and the interference patterns are so complex as to be unpredictable. Chemicals and microbes flow through us around the world too - we catch and pass on all manner of colds as well as ideas. Metabolites of the medicines we take pass through us into the water the whole city drinks. Sometimes we might, in time, have exactly the opposite effect to the one we intended.
We don't like the implicit loss of free will inherent in the wave perspective: we want to make choices, not just react and rebound against the rest of the universe. But the alternative can be even more depressing: as infinitesimal particles, we are futilely struggling like fallen flies in the meniscus of the world. It's a matter of scale: we can't change the world - it changes, and we might be part of that change.
The only answer is to let go of free will, and just do what we do. You love your children because you love them, not because you should. And all the laws and all the wars in the world haven't stopped people from doing cruel things.
Do we dare let go of both the responsibility and the blame. Could the world could survive an escape from conscious, intentional morality? Might it even be the saving of the world?
I am a wave, continuous with the universe and participating in unpredictable developments in unexpected ways. But I'm also a particle and unless I get up to put the kettle on, or persuade someone else to, there will be no tea.
It's usual to think of ourselves as particles in a universe of particles. Particles eat other kinds of particles, wear particles, and tell, or don't tell things (particles of information) to other particles. This perspective sets up meaningful boundaries around various parts of the world and we can uncover real understandings by thinking this way. I'm a big fan of my smart phone, my hot and cold running water, and the fact that I'm here at all, which I owe to modern medicine.
But we are also waves in the stuff of the universe: local gestures of the space-time-mind through which other gestures - minerals, energy, other life - flow. Our actions provoke other actions and reactions and the interference patterns are so complex as to be unpredictable. Chemicals and microbes flow through us around the world too - we catch and pass on all manner of colds as well as ideas. Metabolites of the medicines we take pass through us into the water the whole city drinks. Sometimes we might, in time, have exactly the opposite effect to the one we intended.
We don't like the implicit loss of free will inherent in the wave perspective: we want to make choices, not just react and rebound against the rest of the universe. But the alternative can be even more depressing: as infinitesimal particles, we are futilely struggling like fallen flies in the meniscus of the world. It's a matter of scale: we can't change the world - it changes, and we might be part of that change.
The only answer is to let go of free will, and just do what we do. You love your children because you love them, not because you should. And all the laws and all the wars in the world haven't stopped people from doing cruel things.
Do we dare let go of both the responsibility and the blame. Could the world could survive an escape from conscious, intentional morality? Might it even be the saving of the world?
I am a wave, continuous with the universe and participating in unpredictable developments in unexpected ways. But I'm also a particle and unless I get up to put the kettle on, or persuade someone else to, there will be no tea.
Friday, April 10, 2015
Oneness is hard
Stretch out in the park and feel the breeze filling your lungs. Traces of you whisk downwind. The oxygen exhaled by nearby plants blows into your body, microbial life visiting with each inhalation. Tiny motes of yourself, sloughed off skin cells, pheromones, take flight into the world - little adventurous messengers. Isn't that fun?
I like the sense of profound connection, feeling my oneness with plants, birds, soil and sky. But oneness is oneness. It includes cough germs, the dog poo, and the carcass of a shopping trolley exposed on the riverbank. That is less nice, and I resist it. But what I resist most is accepting my oneness with other people.
Not, particularly, my family or friends. The really hard challenge is people whose actions or opinions I find intolerable. I'm not going to give examples of such actions and opinions: the things that I find intolerable may be different from those you find intolerable. The issue is not the specifics of what we each find intolerable, it's that we respond by dividing the great oneness of the world, denying our connection with the intolerable. But the intolerable is still there.
I think this dividing up of the world is at the root of how conflict of opinion spills over into violence and war. Once the intolerable is experienced as entirely separate from ourselves, then eliminating it becomes a potentially tempting option. We might start with persuasion, or coercion, but violence and annihilation have become options too.
So as a tiny contribution to making my part of the world more peaceful and more war-resistant, I seek to extend my oneness and acknowledge uncomfortable connection. My exercise is to first feel my continuity with the world and how other people are also part of that great continuity. Then I choose some person or behaviour from which I would like to disconnect and I try to reconnect them as part of my extended mind-body: the world.
That's it. If you try it, please let me know what you experienced below. I don't think we need to love everyone, or even forgive them, and I don't think we need to somehow permit all behaviours. But just to remember that although we play particular parts, we aren't directing the whole universe.
You can oppose both people and beliefs without casting them out of your world. We are all just infinitesimal microdots interconnected with a billion billion other parts of this enormous world. Remember how small everyone is, and release the assumption that either you or anyone else can possibly know the whole of what, if anything, is truly 'right' on the scale of the universe.
I think it makes a difference. Not always, and not immediately. But it can allow flexibility back into a stalemate, grow new paths from dead ends, offer breathing space when the pressure's building. It's not as much fun as visualising sunlight and oxygen exchanges, but it might help protect the park if, someday in the future, something we disagree on threatens to erupt into open conflict.
I like the sense of profound connection, feeling my oneness with plants, birds, soil and sky. But oneness is oneness. It includes cough germs, the dog poo, and the carcass of a shopping trolley exposed on the riverbank. That is less nice, and I resist it. But what I resist most is accepting my oneness with other people.
Not, particularly, my family or friends. The really hard challenge is people whose actions or opinions I find intolerable. I'm not going to give examples of such actions and opinions: the things that I find intolerable may be different from those you find intolerable. The issue is not the specifics of what we each find intolerable, it's that we respond by dividing the great oneness of the world, denying our connection with the intolerable. But the intolerable is still there.
I think this dividing up of the world is at the root of how conflict of opinion spills over into violence and war. Once the intolerable is experienced as entirely separate from ourselves, then eliminating it becomes a potentially tempting option. We might start with persuasion, or coercion, but violence and annihilation have become options too.
So as a tiny contribution to making my part of the world more peaceful and more war-resistant, I seek to extend my oneness and acknowledge uncomfortable connection. My exercise is to first feel my continuity with the world and how other people are also part of that great continuity. Then I choose some person or behaviour from which I would like to disconnect and I try to reconnect them as part of my extended mind-body: the world.
That's it. If you try it, please let me know what you experienced below. I don't think we need to love everyone, or even forgive them, and I don't think we need to somehow permit all behaviours. But just to remember that although we play particular parts, we aren't directing the whole universe.
You can oppose both people and beliefs without casting them out of your world. We are all just infinitesimal microdots interconnected with a billion billion other parts of this enormous world. Remember how small everyone is, and release the assumption that either you or anyone else can possibly know the whole of what, if anything, is truly 'right' on the scale of the universe.
I think it makes a difference. Not always, and not immediately. But it can allow flexibility back into a stalemate, grow new paths from dead ends, offer breathing space when the pressure's building. It's not as much fun as visualising sunlight and oxygen exchanges, but it might help protect the park if, someday in the future, something we disagree on threatens to erupt into open conflict.
Tuesday, March 24, 2015
Don't believe in humans
What is a human? The body I call ‘me’ when I'm shopping for clothes is in reality a mobile ecosystem composed of interdependent cells of many species, few of which are human in any sense. If I were a democracy, then cells with human DNA would not be in government, just a fringe group on the back benches.
The exact population of this ecosystem-self affects and is affected by the environment it moves through - exchanging membership all the time. On top of that, each cell, whether genetically human or not, is permeable to the mineral world: atoms and molecules continually flow across boundaries, replacing parts of the structure. Importantly, this replacement is not always exactly like for like - metabolic processes use what is available.
So should our self retreat to the mind - have a little human ‘me’ in charge, driving the little bit of ecosystem that is a 'human' body? Not really. Increasing evidence shows non-human agents, including our own gut bacteria, affecting our minds, our mood and our priorities, as well as our energy levels. If we are in the driving seat, then our 'passengers' are a crowd of map reading backseat drivers who sometimes actually wrest control of the wheel - although we will usually still experience it as ourselves doing the driving.
Can we then expand the 'me' to include all contributors to the driving: our whole local ecosystem of animal, vegetable and mineral? I think we should, but we don't. We keep a clear distinction between ourselves as human, and the rest of nature. That is what 'human' really means - our sense of ourselves as separable from the world.
At least in English, this distinction is embedded in phrases such as ‘getting out into nature’ on the weekend, as if our our own homes and streets were something else. But our homes are the nests of homo sapiens, and our cities no less natural than a stretch savannah with termite mounds, or virgin rainforest containing orang nests.
This idea of ourselves as somehow separable from the natural world is dangerous because it disconnects us. It gives an entirely illusory sense of freedom and power where the world we inhabit seems just one of our possessions. The world is not a possession, not something we can choose to exploit or to care for. It is something we are.
In reality, our skin is no absolute boundary, merely a national border, with constant traffic across. We are utterly knit into the universe, not just walking through it. We are not humans, we are the local world - tiny fragments of conscious nature, utterly continuous with the physical and abstract worlds.
Believe in the world around you, believe in your experience, believe in your connectedness. But don't believe in humans, they are mythical beings abstracted from the world. And since the world is entirely connected, they don't exist.
Tuesday, February 24, 2015
The first note
Starling notebook gathers different perspectives on nature, philosophy and art with a view to better understanding what the good life is, and how to have one.
I picked the name to invoke the emergent coherence of a murmuration - that amazing composite which sometimes dances in our winter skies: thousands of individual starlings swooping and twisting in unison. I have a feeling that many ideas about wilderness, beauty and meaning are deeply connected and I am trusting this faint intuition will come into focus as these notes gather.
Murmurating starlings are constantly interacting with their fellows and similarly I am choosing to blog these thoughts monthly in the hope of comments and feedback from any readers flying a similar path.
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