Blather's end?

Somewhat to my own amazement, I discover I have said everything I currently have to say about humans and nature, identity and interconnectedness. I thought I could blather indefinitely, but apparently not.

I am therefore announcing a temporary cease-blather. As with all cease-blathers, it's unclear if it will hold. If you want to be notified should blather break out once more, please register by email on the widget to the right.

Thank you for listening thus far.

The lacy city

 In China Mieville's fascinating The city and the city, two cities occupy the same space: tightly enmeshed physically, but powerfully separated culturally with different cultures, economies, building styles, fashions and language. Citizens avoid seeing things occuring in the other city even though they might be on the same street. It's called 'unseeing'. People pass through a border control point to see a place the other city, even though the route they travel might take them back along the same roads to a building right next door to their starting point.

It sounds like wildest invention, but it's not so different to life in an ordinary European city. I live in Southampton, but I haven't walked or even driven down every street. Not even every street in my area. I follow a fairly small set of routes to and from work, my son's school, particular shops, friends' houses, the stations. My Southampton is a lacy little subset of the city as a whole, reflecting my lifestyle and tendencies like a kind of fingerprint. It will be just as unique - as would anyone's, especially those with less regular lives.

As well as my sub-Southampton physically, I live culturally in a sub-Southampton. I work with and live near people who generally share my outlook, I connect digitally with people who share my interests. My father, who worked in social housing for many years and felt passionately about homelessness, has made our homeless population very visible to me - but many people 'unsee' those in doorways with cardboard notices. Other people unsee other groups. I myself try to unsee unnervingly raucous groups of teenagers in the street, trusting that they will elect to unsee me in return as I scuttle middle-agedly by.

It seems harmless, but in the city riots five years ago, the rioters were almost certainly throwing their stones across an invisible division into another city, one that shared a name and a location, but wasn't theirs.

The heat of the moment

I've gone off 'living in the moment'. It is true that the past cannot be changed and the future cannot be controlled. Yes, we must beware of letting hopes, fears, regrets and wistfulness dominate the foreground of our experience. However, and it's a big however, there isn't time in the brevity of the moment, to consider. In the moment there is only immediate reaction, instinct, the heat.

It is time which tells. Time tells because deep thought is slow, no matter how fast events are. We need to digest experience and ideas, mull things over. We need time to catch ourselves out in the errors of perception and judgement which are part of normal fallible human consciousness. We need to mull over and re-examine things. And because of this, we simply can't think properly about everything ourselves, there isn't time.

This is what we need experts for. We need to outsource the time to become well-informed about some difficult issues, so that we can focus on others. I don't think we are 'tired of experts': reviews, curated selections and price comparison sites abound. The trouble is that our global connectivity means we are called upon to develop to too many opinions too quickly.

As we struggle with the overload, we are drawn to hyper-real clarity: soundbites, slogans, shortcuts. We don't want the ifs and buts, the complexities - indeed we suspect them to be the mark of the weasel, instead of honest respect for a difficult issue.

Processing deep thoughts takes time, but life is fast and getting faster. The amount of the world to which each of us is exposed is huge and getting huger. If we want to stop people managing the overload by radically and dangerously oversimplifying issues, we really need experts. And time.

Referendumb

I'm ashamed: ashamed of our collective decision to leave the EU and even more of the "debate" we had in the run-up, so full of hate and lies. But I'm personally most ashamed that I spent last Friday bitterly bad-mouthing democracy. As if the majority of people doing the voting were somehow unworthy because they didn't see it my way.

The problem (now I've come back to my senses) is not of course with democracy. It is with time and attention poverty. I realised this when I found myself thinking Monday would be a bit late to post a reaction to Friday's news. As if the passing of three days would render that seismic moment old news. As if we should be on to the next thing now: the plummeting pound, the admissions of misinformation, the petition for a new referendum.

And these things do need thinking about. But we still need to mull over the big moments, and slowly digest them; getting beyond initial reactions. The problem is not that people are selfish, ignorant, or desperate (though some are), the problem is that people have no time to think, and indeed there is little cultural value for coming to a considered conclusion. Unsustainable claims about releasing funds or regaining some mythical state of unilateral sovereignty could only ever make much impact in a competition between sound-bites. In a considered, thoughtful discussion, they rapidly unravel.

The trouble with promoting everyone's right to be heard, is that we devalue expertise and have to do our own thoughtful research, on everything. Constantly breaking news, social media updates and incoming mail need prioritising for scarce attention. The process of choosing what we attend to in itself takes up attention. News media have to fight for our attention, and turn up the drama leaving us punch-drunk.

The pre-referendum media coverage was weeks long, but not weeks deep. Much of it was a series of stand-alone, off-the-peg, mini-stances - to be consumed in a moment. Vivid, attention-grabbing elements which implied the underlying situation was similarly simple and clear cut.

Nowhere is this fast-news, fast-opinion culture more dangerous than when making long term decisions, with decades of implications hanging on them. I have no idea how to slow down discussion to the point where an actual conversation develops instead of just waving a series of emblematic events across a battleground. I do know that on this occasion, we did it wrong and we need to work out how to do this kind of thing better in future.

And it will take a lot of thought.

UPDATE: or, possibly, just this: http://www.parliament.uk/edm/2016-17/278 (well, you never know). Find out more about the campaign at https://www.change.org/p/restore-truthful-politics-create-an-independent-office-to-monitor-political-campaigns

A Wild Life Manifesto

Are you enjoying #30DaysWild? It's the Wildlife Trusts' annual festival of noticing and celebrating the wild world around you. If you haven't come across it yet, check it out. There's an outbreak of birds, bees and beetles on Twitter, not to mention daisy-chains, bare toes and grubby grins.

Towards the end of the campaign page (where they are encouraging the doubters) they point out that "the chances are that nature is already there, but you haven't noticed it yet." This, for me, is the whole heart and centre of the point. Noticing it. Of course nature is already there - you are nature, the yeast and wheat in your breakfast toast is nature - regardless of how many flour improvers were added as well. Indeed, if a bird's nest is nature, then your house is nature too.

... and so is the toaster. And so is the internet. And just like that all meaning has drained away from words like 'nature' and 'wild'. What is it that we really mean by 'nature', by 'wild' if huge, air-conditioned termite mounds are nature, but my garden shed isn't. If the fox which poos in my garden is, but my neighbour's cat, which also poos in my garden, isn't.

We mean not-human. We mean unmanaged-by-humans. We mean 'other' to our human-built worlds. And we often sink into our human-built worlds,  getting lost, like Narcissus, in our own reflections. There's probably nothing more essential to our health, and that of the planet, than looking away: noticing and celebrating the other - and how much of it there is everywhere.

After 30 days wild, let's make every day wild. Nature is all around you. In your house, in your fridge, in you. In fact, you are part of it, and it's not other at all.

Mystery, imagination and facts

I do love a fact. I love knowing the names of things: being able to recognise them again and give them meaning. Long contrails in a blue sky tell me the rain is coming; a May sky full of screaming tells me the swifts are back from Africa. It makes the world more familiar, more predictable: my safe little kingdom.

But facts are also the opposite of that. They make the world bigger. The vague green fuzz at the roadside resolves into detail and meaning: apple blossom imply cores tossed out of windows and unexpected roses suggest visiting finches, blackbirds or thrushes.

And then the detail and meaning unfurls into more questions: who threw the apple, was it did they hope it would grow, or just want to get rid of it? Did the bird have it's meal of rose hip in a garden or from a hedgerow? Does it nest in this same verge? Plenty to muse and wonder about now. It's as if the fact gives us a mental foothold in the fuzz - making it real enough to enter and explore.

We humans are prodigiously, thrillingly, ingenious, but still just creatures. Temporary ripples in evolution, here for a brief moment in the unrolling story of the universe. However much we enquire into the world, we can never understand Everything. Facts always come with a new little mystery or two in their arms. There's always more context, more relationship, more implications. The world is a bottomless lucky dip of things to know.

Isn't that great? We can utterly surrender to curiosity, seeking answers for ever and ever without any danger of running out of questions. And the world will still have plenty of mystery space for playing around with imagination.

Facts are the cake you can really have, and eat. And still leave room for madey-uppey dessert.

Another kind of outdoors

Online: we might spend much of our time there, but - particularly as parents - we complain that it is isolating and that it can lead to obesity, although this is equally true of spending all day reading books (which I did entirely uncriticised throughout my childhood). We say it leads to shortened concentration span, but does it? Perhaps our childhoods were boring enough to teach patience naturally. My son spends just as long building a castle in Minecraft as he does in Lego - longer, because he won't run out of the blocks he needs to extend it. 

We have done silly online quizzes as a family and ended up learning something new in the conversations they prompted. We race each other across a virtual moon on our separate mobile phones, shrieking and complaining about unfair tactics. All these activities are just as unifying as playing a board game which nobody means when they complain about 'gaming'.

The unacknowledged fear at the heart of anti-online parenting is that the confines of the home are no longer confines. A door as if to Narnia has opened up in your child's bedroom, and witches as well as fauns can come through. Anxiety about house-bound, nature-disconnected children bundles up nicely with this into a single mission to get your children off the computer and into the woods, where they can have a proper childhood making dens and mud pies and getting into the kind of trouble that calls for nurses and first aid, instead of police officers and therapy.

However, through that online door is a genuinely magical world. The world of ideas. A world of other people's minds which was previously only available to small groups of intellectuals living in particular times and places. The internet offers a kind of digital outdoors. Like the real outdoors it has discovery, wonder and danger all jumbled up together.

It's not safe for unattended children, so attend them: teach them digital bushcraft. But it's not a bad place just because it's not a safe place. Online is just like the real outdoors, except that you don't get physical exercise, or fresh air. So you might want to make sure they get into the woods too.

My body is not my temple

You hear it all the time: my body is my temple. But a temple cannot be home. The point of temples, shrines, churches is that they offer a place away from the ordinary business of life, somewhere to withdraw for reflection.

Life is - and must be - just full of things not generally acceptable in temples: eating breakfast, going to the bathroom, doing the laundry, laughing immoderately, falling in love, falling apart, falling asleep. Step away from this and reflect, sure, but then (and this is important) step back again into the fray.

The idea that it would be good thing to keep ourselves, and our lives, permanently temple-pure is poisonous because it recoils from engaging with the complex muck and magic of existence. While there is value in withdrawal and reflection, it is there to season a life, not to replace it. Just as monastic traditions season their supporting culture rather than offering a complete alternative.

We need to engage with all of life, perhaps especially with those of whom we disapprove. There's no other way to understand them or to make ourselves understood in turn. We are all standing together on this increasingly small world, and it does no good to judge and turn our backs. The people and behaviours we judge are still standing right there behind us: if they extinguish species, poison the seas or start wars, we don't get an exemption from the consequences.

We cannot sweep away the dirty world but we can infect it with our own outlook, if we get off our soapboxes. We need the courage to wade through a somewhat compromised life, putting aside the comforts of purity and blame.

Can we please drop this impossible aspiration to the temple? Without someone to translate and interpret, your temple life of purity and good example is unintelligible, unattractive, unattainable. Irrelevant.

Breath and tide

We are tidal creatures, all of us on this planet. Tides come in many kinds: a tide of light flows from day to night and a tide of warmth flows with the seasons. The tide which describes how we fit into our world is: the breath. In, out; eat, excrete; listen, talk.

A strong hunger for air, food, information, drives our in breaths, and those of us living in the comfortable strata of the developed human world tend to find these hungers easy as well as pleasurable to satisfy. I know I'm not the only person who regularly devotes hours to a snack-food-and-information combo on the sofa. Intake intake intake. It's a real privilege and I love it.

The out breath is often more problematic. I'm sometimes aware of a sensation of being mentally over-full. My mind jostles with ideas and projects: things to make, things to write, new techniques to learn, new experiences to have. I can't do - or even think about - all of them, and pulled in too many directions at once I'm quite likely go to bed and sleep it off. In the morning I'll be hungry, ready to breathe in again.

But breathing out is essential, and to do that we must - just for a minute - stop breathing in. The out breath of the lungs stimulates the calming, rest-and-digest responses which is why pranayama yoga breathing patterns tend to spend longer on the out than the in breath. The mental out breath is creativity and communication.

Having taken in a day's worth of new sensations and concepts, we must breath out again by making, dreaming, thinking, communicating. We hold our breath for fear that the contents might not be up to standard, but that's not the point. The point is to breathe out, so that you can breathe in again, and out again and in again. Waves wash to and fro: some are beautiful, some just wet, but each one is part of the next. They are all needed.

Breathe out as well as in: so that you can ebb and flow with the tidal life of this little world.

Balancing act

I'm writing this ahead of time, just after the equinox: when day and night are roughly equal lengths. There was an instant of equality, but it hurtled past.

Today is going to be four minutes longer than yesterday, and by this time next week the daylight will have grown nearly another half hour. On the other hand, the day after the winter solstice was less than a minute longer, and even after a week it had still only grown three minutes.

We rock from day to night like a child on a swing. At the solstice we seem to hang suspended in a moment of weightless, timeless astonishment before gravity breaks in and rushes us back to, and then past, the ground.

Equinox isn't a peaceful balance between opposing forces: equinox isn't stillness. Equinox is speed. The energy gathered up in the long night propels us through equinox towards the longest day, where we will hang motionless again for a charmed instant. The solstices are our homes and we stop a moment to refresh our inner and outer worlds. Balanced at the extremes, we pause before changing direction.

The moment of equal night and day offers no such pause: the road is clear and we thunder by. Everything is pulling the same way. Equinox is no destination; it is a milestone. It says 'Take heart: we're on the homeward stretch'. 

Hotly desking

We're moving to a hot-desking system at my work. Not everyone is happy, including me. I've found myself getting a bit contrary in the face of the glib enthusaism with which it's being presented. Yay, we can break down silos, save money, and be all cool and modern. Scepticism feels churlish against such big-hitting benefits, but I can't hep but question them.

Silos don't develop out of cussedness, they develop when the actual work in one part of a buisness is quite specialised and opaque to other parts. The tasks of the IT staff, the finance team and the marketers are important, but best left to them, as they call on specialist skills and knowledge sets. They will still sit together if they possibly can. With people who sympathise with the particular annoyances of their particular tasks.

Saving money by evicting your staff may cost more down the road, when the introverts' stress levels start turning into sickness absence and the extroverts multiplied opportunities to socialise at work start to eat into productivity. And being modern? Well, pfff. That's not a benefit in itself, surely?

Hot desks are impersonal desks. The accretion of notes and print offs which transform an office desk from an item of furniture to an extension of an employee's memory must go. If there is no fixed place waiting for you in the morning, how much of your time is going to be spent identifying where you will sit, who you will sit next to and then settling in. Yes, inevitably you will be interacting more with other colleagues. But people will still try to sit with friends, and colleagues with compatible work habits and for less extroverted people, this will charge the whole business of arriving for work with social anxiety. You can get in early and pick your desk, but then you can't relax until the nearby desks are taken by compatible colleagues. If someone you find really difficult to work near decides to sit next to you, you're trapped unless you actually pack up and move away. That seems like a real energy cost. Every day.

And then everyone who doesn't naturally work with a clear desk (that's most people) will need to spend some time unpacking a large bag of their notes, files, mugs and pens onto their desk. Rebooting their external memory. A real time cost, on top of the usual coffee-making and greetings. Every day. To say nothing about the times that something gets left behind.

What hot desking is doing under the radar is separating the personal and organisational. On the face of it that feels like a good thing. Morally hygenic. People with regular desks begin to nest, and as they get comfortable they absorb the organisation into their identity. They feel part of their workplace, and that their workplace is part of them. They populate their desks with reminders and photos, stabilise their relastionships with desk-neighbours, and probably don't see a problem in spending time socialising, or using the office printer for party invites. They feel comfortable, and some people will slack off.

But in fighting back against the nesting you risk commodifying the whole relationship: displaced employees feel like 'human resources' rather than part of the organisation, and then the organisation becomes a resource in turn: a means to gain salary, professional opportunities, and stationery supplies.

Nobody thinks that the phrase 'in it for what you can get' describes a good state of affairs. Even if the place does look tidier and cost less to run.

Taking pictures, giving attention

A while back I started an instagram feed. The plan was to post a daily photo showing city nature: the invited guests, the gatecrashers and all the enrichments of weather and time in the urban environment. I thought it would be a new way for me to bang on about how nature is everywhere, all the time. After all, it's probably time my friends and family got a rest from being  sole audience for my 'Ooo look!' moments.

But something unexpected happened, two things really. One is that by setting this most minute of intentions I have turned my passive attention into active looking. I am seeing more.

The second and more important change happened after a week or so when I reviewed the images as a group. The nature moments in my life have so far been entirely accidental and incidental: a series of interruptions. When I reviewed the first few days' worth of images, 'oo, raindrops',  'look, amazing clouds' suddenly joined up into a thread: a whole narrative of my nature-life came into focus.  Intermittent tapping has resolved into a rhythmn.

I generally think of my life as mostly consisting of my family, job, friends, creative projects, and the routes I usually walk or drive between them. Which is of course what it mostly is, but now I have a much stronger awareness of the physical sub-plot.

When I review my images, I see my life without all the social parts. I bring the physical world I inhabit to the fore - something that my life of relative first world ease allows me to ignore a lot. I don't worry about cold, hunger and pain because I have jumpers, supermarkets and painkillers. The  physical world just doesn't impinge much on my knowledge worker's urban lifestyle, but the physical world is full of incontrovertible truth. It just is. No blame, nothing owed: just physics and biology, playing out.

As the images pile up their glimpses of weeds, gulls and clouds, I am gathering a sense of perspective, a bit like when you look up at the night sky. The distant majesty of stars melts away the hot little immediacies of human life: what does it matter?

Nature photos offer a friendlier dose of perspective than the stars. I matter to the weeds in my drive in a way that I obviously don't to Orion in the sky. I'm not going to decide when to pull him up by the roots to save the brickwork. But social awkwardness, unimpressive cooking, or a messy house are just as irrelevant to the weeds as to Orion. I like them for it. I'm going to keep paying them and their city nature colleagues my photographic attention.

If you want to see what I see, you're very welcome @southamptonstarling

Perma-day

pic from www.darkskydiscovery.org.uk

Everybody likes lights. We are strongly visual creatures and we like to be able to see. Even our enjoyment of night is a lot to do with light - the moon and stars, fireworks, candlelight, buzzy neon.

We've never, until now, been without the dark. Before we had mains electricity, the dark was always there, gathered at the edges of the gas or candlelight, ready to roll back across our vision. We could take the dark for granted, and concentrate on making light.

And boy, did we ace it with electricity. Now we easily push away the night to work and play longer and longer. We soak in our artificial extra daytime as if inhabiting an eternal summer. Perma-day is advancing year by year across the land. Many of us now no longer get to experience night.

But still we've kept our light-orientation, even though light is no longer scarce. Dark is what is scarce now, and getting scarcer. We've peopled it with all manner of dangers: from missing your footing, to muggers and the supernatural, and we believe in our hearts that turning on the light will purge them all away.

Our hearts are wrong. Muggers and burglars aren't cockroaches to scatter in the light. Indeed, plenty of research shows that more street lighting doesn't make you safer, and less street lighting doesn't endanger. After all, criminals need to see to assess their target, select their tools, monitor their escape routes - and good 'security' lighting casts wonderfully deep shadows to lurk in, as well as shutting down the night vision of neighbourhood watchers. Light does not make you safe.

But it does hide the stars. The night sky over most homes in the developed world is the grubby beige of light pollution, instead of spangled velvet. It's a waste not just of energy, but of beauty, and of wisdom. A really clear, dark, starry night, when you can see the milky way and almost sense the 3D depth of the sky, joins you to the universe. If you can look up and see that vast majesty above, it offers a perspective on the current Twitter storm, or a good friend's irritating habits.

By projecting our lights up into the sky, we are walling ourselves off. There's no conspiracy, this wall is something we are all building together - and nobody can take it down on their own. Of course, mother nature may be working on that, but why wait till we run out of power? Let's scale back the civic lighting and encourage better direction of lights onto their subject, instead of allowing them to spill wastefully up to obscure the sky.

Even in suburbia you've probably noticed your moon-shadow once or twice - but have you seen your star-shadow on a clear and moonless night? Have you seen the milky way? They are there too, just waiting for you to make the effort. It's not too late yet - visit http://www.darkskydiscovery.org.uk/ to find out where to go.

The right moment

The ancient greeks had two words acknowledging two different relationships with time. The currently dominant relationship was denoted by chronos: chronological, sequential time. This is measurable time, schedule-able time, time you can run out of.

The other kind is kairos: which is the time of the 'right moment'. This kind of time is un-plan-able, unmeasurable and certainly un-scheduleable. If you miss this kind of moment, you can't work nights to make it up. This is organic, flowing time which has nothing to do with clocks, but everything to do with life and with successful endeavour. It's the kind of time I wrote about recently in The still days.

We are much misled by clocks and calendars listing a day by hours, quarter hours and minutes as if all time were equal and to be used equally. More and more we seek a window in the diary to get together with friends, sort through the loft, get out in the fresh air. But what of the right moment? Time is not a bland, homogeneous raw material to be allocated by quantity alone. How often do we end up re-scheduling because when the time comes it is so clearly not the right moment? In the case of sorting through the loft, I'm into double figures. Such is the dominance of chronos in my life though, that the next possible window for tackling it is more than a month away.

As it happens, I really rather like scheduling things. Not because I like my life to be all planned out, but because scheduling something is a bit like having done it. It gives some relief from the pressure of not-done-ness. But by scheduling I sacrifice my freedom to take the right moment, which always arrives unannounced and never waits.

A calendar with great stretches of empty hours looks unsettling. What -tick- are -tick- you -tick- doing -tick- with -tick- your -tick- chronos? Busy people are important, busy people are contributing, busy people don't have to defend their worth. But busy is a drug, and it can dull you to the sudden appearance of the right moment.

By all means, keep busy; but planning to be busy is what kills the magic of the still days. You might even achieve more by drawing back from schedules and remaining open to the rightness of a passing moment.

The still days

I always embark on January with a dash of wistful regret. The most delightful days are over for another year. Not the warm and busy abundance of Christmas, or the late night partying of New Year, fun as it all is. 

What I really treasure are the still, nameless days stretching between Christmas and New Year. The days when you sail about in an uncharted ocean of time with no plans and no commitments, only abandoning pyjamas if the weather outside looks tempting or you run out of milk. Meals happen piecemeal, and life swims in and out of imaginary worlds reading, playing with Christmas toys, having pointless conversations with loved ones, watching TV and napping on the sofa.

In our hyper-productive, artificially lit, instantly communicating world, these are the only days that you are allowed to waste. The rest of the year the clock is king. Alarms drag us to and fro as we hurry between work and school, dentist's appointments, a booked session on the badminton court. We are hunted through our days by the clock. When we're late we're anxious and apologetic; when we're early we hustle to find a productive use for the extra sliver of time.

Before the industrial revolution and factory working, before clocks and electric light, perhaps the whole of winter was like the still days. With only candles or soft oil lamps to push back the night, it would flood in sooner, you'd go to bed sooner - probably waking in the night for a while before drifting back off to sleep again before morning. That unmeasured, unscheduled time enclosed in night would be an enchanted time for musing, talking with a wakeful bedfellow, making love.

Modern sleep is almost a chore, something you need to fit in enough of before the alarm goes off. If you wake at 2am feeling refreshed you'll likely panic about how on earth you're going to get back to sleep in time to get enough sleep before the alarm goes off at 6, and how exhausted you're going to feel all day if you don't.

There's no rest anywhere except between Christmas and New Year. We pack our weekends with rewards and chores that we couldn't get done in the week, and on holidays we generally go off to have adventures: making the most of our time. But it doesn't work. We need to live more off-clock and I just can't wait till next December.

I'd like to institute my own watchless weekends. I'm not sure if it will work over such a short period of time, or if we can do this as a single household, surrounded by open shops and rumbling buses. How much of the still days is in the air? The noise level in the street? The number and demeanour of walkers in the park? But I'm going to have to try. The clock's been in charge for 400 years and that seems enough. Let's make space for organic time, dreaming time, human time. 

Don't k'nex the new year

My son has coined an expression which we have found very useful: k'nexing.

It refers to a time when a new toy (a k'nex roller coaster set) was rendered irrecoverably disappointing by youtube videos. Excited by the possibilities, he explored youtube for k'nex builds. There were some amazing things. We both ended up watching quite a lot of footage of people's amazing ingenuity. After which our own set looked pointlessly feeble.

He and I are veterans of the conversation about why we haven't got as many X as person Y. He got that the major k'nex constructions we marvelled at were built after years of practice and thousands of pounds spent on bits. But it was more than the ache of envy, which never interfered with his love for his wooden train set when other people's sets were bigger. It was that we had both been distracted from the k'nex itself by the dramatic scale of the constructions. Our little set simply couldn't satisfy our wild imaginings, although it would forever remind us of them.

Inspirations have energy, which you use to start the process of making them real. But this energy drains away over time and it is finite. There are three ways around this - only doing very quick projects; dividing big projects into a series of small endpoints and fresh beginnings; or else be more in love with the medium than the project. This last way seems the best to me, but it can't be pulled out of the hat to meet a goal.

For example, I make ceramic sculptures. I don't have a lot of time for it, and it's not something that's easy to leave half done and come back to weeks later, so in between I browse pinterest for lovely ceramics and daydream about ambitious projects. But this panoply of inspiration doesn't stop me enjoying the single small project I eventually engage in. Because I love clay, for it's own sake.

I also make 2D art in various media. I enjoy this too and so I also pin a lot of cool 2D art. But it's dangerous: I'm in love with the art, with the finished products, not the medium. I like colour, I like texture, I like compositional drama. But it's not so much about the paint, or the software, or the paper, it's about the finished effect. And that makes pinterest dangerous for my 2D work.

It's good, sometimes, to look up and see the mountain peaks of possible, but we are not dream creatures and we cannot fall upwards through pure desire. If you can't retain pleasure in the step by step, in the rocks and plants that are here underfoot, or the rise in the land a hundred yards ahead it's a miserable journey, and one you probably won't finish.

My new year's resolution is avoid over-large resolutions. So far, I'm doing okay.