Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment
Rumi
Our ability to not know, to be curious, is our energy. It breeds learning, growth, relationships, love, movement, dreams, invention, self discovery…
Month: April 2016
yesterday’s traditions today
It’s Bank Holiday weekend.
Strange how we hold on to these relics of a time gone by. These customs. These traditions. Long beyond their time in a sense.
Bank Holidays have been around in current form since the late 1800s and were all associated with important religious festivals and agricultural holidays before they were enacted into law by the Victorians. So many go back even further. May Day only became an official bank holiday in 1971, but its roots as a holiday stretch back to pre-Christian pagan festivals, and the familiar rituals of crowning of the May Queen and dancing around the Maypole made it a popular seasonal celebration in medieval England.
So why do we keep traditions?
Sure we enjoy the day off, but we don’t bring the holiday into the present context; rather, we hang on to a relevance long gone.
It is like that too with our lives more broadly. We hold on to behaviour and thinking rituals which often served us well as children. No longer useful as adults, we keep them still; almost shackled to the tradition.
We do this with learning too. Learning skills and ways of being which suit one role, but still practicing them in others, such as later careers we may undertake, or even in parenting, or other life roles.
Strange our love of the past.
the home fires
The soldier fights, not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.
GK Chesterton
What is behind you that drives you forward?
where does a smell take you?
There’s a man eating a pasty, maybe fifteen feet from me.
I can smell it. A slightly sweet aroma. I can feel the sensations of a bite of the piping hot food in my mouth. I can sense my slight open mouthed panting, as air is used to cool that bite to a temperature for swallow. I can taste the meaty, gooey mouthful, mixed with crumbly buttery pastry. I can taste the slightly peppery warmth.
There’s something strangely primal about holding your food in your hand.
I am instantly transported to my own specific memories of enjoying a pasty. Walking in the street with my family, grabbing lunch on a shopping trip. Numerous glorious holidays in Cornwall. A rushed snack on the way home from somewhere, late. In each memory, the smell of this man’s pasty takes me there. Fully.
Where does a smell take you and how vibrant is that place?
I’m off for a pasty…
whose embarrassment?
This morning, two guys standing on the train were sniffing. Each drawing bodily fluid up into their sinuses through the medium of sucked in air. Both sniffing independently. Both once every ten seconds or so. Slightly different rates and slightly different resonance. Together almost musical.
I wanted to hand out tissues.
They were seemingly oblivious to their mildly melodic disruption of my thinking time.
The man next to me produced a silent smell.
It left me pondering what embarrasses us; the actions of others or our own? And who does the embarrassment belong to? Are we embarrassed for ourselves or for others having to judge us?
Why are some of us embarrassed by falling over, having a wardrobe malfunction, nose picking, spot squeezing, breaking wind, going red, messy hair, sneezing … and some of us not?
What is that about? Where does it come from? What purpose does it serve? And whose is it?
ego antidote
The ego’s greatest enemy of all is the present moment
When we live in the present moment, what is, simply is. There is no judgement, no expectation, no can or can’t, no should or shouldn’t.
a bit worried about worry
I met a potential coaching client the other day, wanting to explore how they could spend less of their time in a worried state. The brief conversation led to me being curious about worrying. Its intent, patterns of behaviour, structure, purpose etc.
In pondering my own experience I notice that I don’t typically worry when I’m in a really good mood. When things are joyous, happy, positive, worry seems to be absent?
The next thing I notice is that worry seems to be in two broad forms – imagining a future potential scenario or assessing a past one. I worry about something that might or might not happen, or I worry about what I’ve just done, or not done. This leads me to notice that worry seems to be neutral in some way – it shows no favoritism to good or bad, might or might not, did or didn’t.
Worry seems to be a state of disablement. Worry, in a sense, stops me acting. It occupies me … with worry. I don’t know that worry achieves anything other than keeping us busy. I am reminded of this quote (attributed to a number of people)…
Worrying is like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do but it gets you nowhere.
I have also met people for whom worry becomes a state of existence. They develop beliefs about the need to worry in order to be themselves. Worrying develops a heightened state of challenge that delivers, it seems to them, a better result.
Curious that we worry.
That’s enough worrying about worry for now. Time to just be.
emerge
I’m too old for perfection so I’m experimenting with emergence
spoiling the view
I look out of the window near my desk on occasion to help me think.
A bird has ‘bombed’ the window . A serious amount.
It’s been distracting me all day. Causing me to focus not on the view outside, but instead drawing my attention to the window pane. Somehow making me look near, rather than far. Obstructing my thinking.
I’m sure there’s a metaphor in there somewhere!
the five second rule
You know that rule.
The rule states that if you drop something on the floor, you have five seconds to pick it up. Five seconds before the bacteria infect it. Be quick, be safe.
I have a mental image of these armies of slow moving bacteria marching towards the discarded food. Bacteria armies that bizarrely aren’t on the exact spot the food fell, but are somehow always precisely five seconds away. They respond like a shark to the scent of blood. Swooping onto the food to a five second deadline, moving to the sound of ‘dum dum, dum dum’ like a menacing time countdown sounding out the impending infection.
The reality is that there are probably more bacteria on the plate the food fell off, in the air you are breathing, on your fingers picking the food up…
In essence the rule is a fabrication, albeit a useful one when you drop a piece of your best chocolate. Nom nom nom. No point wasting that!
Often our own rules are inventions too. Fabrications. Untruths.
Rules about what we can do, or can’t do. Should do, or mustn’t do. Rules about cause and effect. This means that.
Yet we live our lives by them. We behave strangely, yet to a recognisable pattern, as befits the rule and its purpose. In much the same way as the five second rule gets us reaching down quickly for the food, looking at it, like the bacteria will be waving back at us, or will have inexplicably made the food luminous green. Blowing on it, like the bacteria will fly off, descending in tiny parachutes back to the floor to await the next food spillage, thus cleansing the said food morsel.
Fantasy. Yet played out like the truth.
illuminated dandelion 