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.
Sunday, August 30, 2015
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.
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