HELLO AGAIN

Only kidding.

Back, due to overwhelming and sometimes surprising reader demand.

This blog shall, of course, NEVER end.........maybe.

Awake at 0500 this morning, with the cool, benign early morning air welcoming me to the equinox. I look out over the rows of hedges, and the coverts and can just see the Wolds, hazy in the early sun. Living isn't bad.

I have been wondering about autism. People say it is genetic, but I wonder if it's socialized, its characteristic inability to empathise being a learned behaviour from parents who gave little away to their poor infant. In teaching facilitation, coaching, and the person centred orientation, I've often played a game which I bill as teaching mind reading. I get people to sit in pairs, subject and observer. The subject is to think silently of a person to whom they have a strong emotional reaction - love, hate, jealousy, fear, whatever. The observer's job is to watch their face, and then, after observation, to say what the subject feels about the person they are bringing to mind. It never fails. Though I've never tried it with autistic people. What it shows up is our innate ability to see in the other how they are feeling. But what it also normally prompts is a discussion of how that hugely rich data so often goes ignored. I've heard it said that torturers won't look their victims in the eye. If true, I wonder if that is to add to the torture, or whether it is to protect the torturer from facing the inevitable pain of seeing someone else suffering? Perhaps I forgive too easily.

I also pondered a video I saw of a BBC camera team who got caught a bit close to the front line in Iraq in the ISIS conflict there (for the record caused by US - and Blair led UK - foreign policy). I was struck by how panicky everyone was - the Iraqi fighters, the cameraman and reporter. It was a far cry from British soldiers, who are admirably calm, determined and focused under fire. Indeed, I couldn't even be sure that the incoming fire on this video was especially effective anyway. In conflict situations, it is easy to panic. Calmness under fire, though, is not an innate thing, it is acquired through actual experience. I'm talking here about life in general. Very often what sounds like really dangerous stuff is just some idiots firing off in no general direction in an overdose of testosterone. The battle hardened know how to tell the difference.

Last night, during a really excellent night's sleep, I dreamt of sleeping and dreaming. Now what the hell does that mean?