Here's an interesting blog:
http://people-everyday.blogspot.com/
Monday, 6 April 2009
CIRCULARITY AND CHOCOLATE SHOES
I like circularity. Life itself is circular. That is a freeing thought. For Green types keen on recycling, it is good to know that they, as I, will be recycled.
Matt comes. There is circularity in our relationship. He is my Godson. And Zara, my daughter, is in turn his Goddaughter. The very first time I met him he was a tiny baby. I held him in my arms on his first day home from the hospital where he was born. Earlier the phone had rung. "I'm very sorry," the voice told me. "Your mother died late last night". Matt was then the instant reminder of life's circularity - the great universal circularity of life and death. If there are such things, he was an angel then. He is most certainly an angel in my life now.
Matt rings me and says "I'm coming over for lunch". "Good, "I say. He stays for two days. Great! We shop for and build a structure in my vegetable garden to keep birds from feasting on my peas and beans and raspberries. During this construction project we act like builders, calling each other by expletives and berating the other's abject lack of skill or effort.
We go to the spring sale at Tennants, where they are auctioning unspeakably awful oil paintings for ten and twelve thousand pounds a pop, and where, for lower priced lots the auctioneer says things like "Come along now. The frame's worth more than that!" Matt reins me in from my normal practice of over excitement. A good thing, as normally all financial constraints disappear in my mind if I am in an antiques bidding war. My dad was an an antique dealer at one stage. I used to go with him to the auctions where he would challenge me to say how much each lot would go for. I was invariably wildly wrong. He was invariably close to the mark. Age has not improved my skills in this deparment. He also instructed me to set a budget (for an antique dealer normally answered by "can I get double that for it?"). I've failed him there too.
We leave to go to the chocolate factory, where Matt has a professional appointment to buy bulk quantities of moulded full size chocolate stiletto shoes. These unlikely delicacies sell readily in the deli, and at great margins too. Then we run them down to the deli and have a convoluted argument about political engagement. The gist of this is to observe that politicians want engagement rather than apathy. But they want engagement in a system that is itself disengaging. If the limit of participation is a cross in a box every five years, how can it be otherwise? We debate government by constant referendum. And we wonder if apologising is ever really needed.
Finally, Matt leaves to fulfil his obligation as early morning baker at the deli.
Two glorious days of spring weather, marvellous company, many laughs, quite a bit of chocolate, and no oil paintings.
Matt comes. There is circularity in our relationship. He is my Godson. And Zara, my daughter, is in turn his Goddaughter. The very first time I met him he was a tiny baby. I held him in my arms on his first day home from the hospital where he was born. Earlier the phone had rung. "I'm very sorry," the voice told me. "Your mother died late last night". Matt was then the instant reminder of life's circularity - the great universal circularity of life and death. If there are such things, he was an angel then. He is most certainly an angel in my life now.
Matt rings me and says "I'm coming over for lunch". "Good, "I say. He stays for two days. Great! We shop for and build a structure in my vegetable garden to keep birds from feasting on my peas and beans and raspberries. During this construction project we act like builders, calling each other by expletives and berating the other's abject lack of skill or effort.
We go to the spring sale at Tennants, where they are auctioning unspeakably awful oil paintings for ten and twelve thousand pounds a pop, and where, for lower priced lots the auctioneer says things like "Come along now. The frame's worth more than that!" Matt reins me in from my normal practice of over excitement. A good thing, as normally all financial constraints disappear in my mind if I am in an antiques bidding war. My dad was an an antique dealer at one stage. I used to go with him to the auctions where he would challenge me to say how much each lot would go for. I was invariably wildly wrong. He was invariably close to the mark. Age has not improved my skills in this deparment. He also instructed me to set a budget (for an antique dealer normally answered by "can I get double that for it?"). I've failed him there too.
We leave to go to the chocolate factory, where Matt has a professional appointment to buy bulk quantities of moulded full size chocolate stiletto shoes. These unlikely delicacies sell readily in the deli, and at great margins too. Then we run them down to the deli and have a convoluted argument about political engagement. The gist of this is to observe that politicians want engagement rather than apathy. But they want engagement in a system that is itself disengaging. If the limit of participation is a cross in a box every five years, how can it be otherwise? We debate government by constant referendum. And we wonder if apologising is ever really needed.
Finally, Matt leaves to fulfil his obligation as early morning baker at the deli.
Two glorious days of spring weather, marvellous company, many laughs, quite a bit of chocolate, and no oil paintings.
Thursday, 2 April 2009
UNCENSORED
Sometimes in the course of my coaching work, common thematics seem to arise through a number of sessions with widely different people. One at the moment is about wasting energy.
It was one of my brightest, most insightful, most surprising and certainly highest potential clients who indicated and clarified this thematic to me, and it has since applied to many of my interventions. He realised, he said, as a result of coaching, how much energy he was wasting in either trying to be, or telling himself he should be, someone he was not. By contracting with himself to fully be himself, glorious and uncensored, he was able to release that energy into his own confidence and performance. The results for him have been transformational.
I'd never really thought about this matter in terms of the effective use of energy. For me it had always been an article of faith, or perhaps simply a compulsion for myself. But I've found that this thematic emerges a great deal at present. And what is stark is how much energy it takes to angst the natural self and confuse it with what one "should" be. Some people live in a forest of shoulds. It's quite a dark place, and difficult there to see the wood for the trees.
I owe my now super-energetic client a vote of thanks.
It was one of my brightest, most insightful, most surprising and certainly highest potential clients who indicated and clarified this thematic to me, and it has since applied to many of my interventions. He realised, he said, as a result of coaching, how much energy he was wasting in either trying to be, or telling himself he should be, someone he was not. By contracting with himself to fully be himself, glorious and uncensored, he was able to release that energy into his own confidence and performance. The results for him have been transformational.
I'd never really thought about this matter in terms of the effective use of energy. For me it had always been an article of faith, or perhaps simply a compulsion for myself. But I've found that this thematic emerges a great deal at present. And what is stark is how much energy it takes to angst the natural self and confuse it with what one "should" be. Some people live in a forest of shoulds. It's quite a dark place, and difficult there to see the wood for the trees.
I owe my now super-energetic client a vote of thanks.
LICKING CONSULTANTS IS WRONG
I was reminded the other day that I once had a complaint letter about me. I was working with a very large Company designing a behaviour change programme for their customer service staff. During a design session we were talking about the impact of inhibition, and how to make people aware of its limiting effect. I proposed a session where people licked each other. "Urghh!!" said the assembled Company. "Exactly," I said. As the discussion wore on, I challenged my main client to lick me. Great woman that she is, she came across the room and did so. That was what triggered the complaint letter. Her staff filed an official complaint. In their letter were the immortal lines: "It is highly inappropriate for a Senior Manager to lick a consultant".
Monday, 30 March 2009
MIS HEARD HEADLINES
- Cat hears Khmer rouge testimony
- Tiger Woods fights back seals
- Jacqui Smith fiddled during adult film
- GM Chief Waggoner outed by Obama
- Nationwide buys Dunfermline
- G20 summit will forget the poor
Sunday, 29 March 2009
REASONS NOT TO BE CHEERFUL ABOUT HMG
- The application of TUPE regulations to professional service contracts
- Harriet Harman
- the removal of Britannia from coins
- £ slide against $
- The disingenuous shenanigans about Fred Goodwin's pension - designed to pillory a capitalist icon in disguise of the obvious profligacy of a government that maintains two armies in wars of highly questionable legality at vast expense to the British state
- Political correctness
- Health and safety
- State enlargement
- Recent advertising encouraging citizen surveillance of suspicious terrorist - looking stuff
- Police hassling photographers
- More to come..........
Saturday, 28 March 2009
DR. BERRY'S PATENT QUACK REMEDIES FOR BOREDOM
I go to see a friend who is dark, dangerous, clever and powerful - an almost irresistible combination to some women.
He is bored, and I promise to publish my quack remedy.
Here it is:
· Boredom is a metaphor for our own isolation.
· The only real remedy for being bored is full acceptance of what is, and full rejection of what is not.
· Pseudo remedies arise as palliatives to the pains of our own disappointments in being bored.
· Our disappointments are ultimately self directed.
· As with disappointment, so with anger, sadness, guilt and every other negative emotion.Disappointment is a failure of presence, nothing more. Boredom too.
· Filling time persuades us momentarily we are alive, but it is a temporary palliative. It is emptiness that really is persuasive of our life force.
· It is notable how many time-filling activities involve the mouth. This tells you that they are infantile drives toward nipple pleasure, the baby’s response to minor pain, neediness. Always, the filling response. Are you a baby?
· Filling time is an act based on the presumption of emptiness. But no time is empty to the person really there. And all time is empty to the person never there.
· Emptiness, fullness are points of view. Nothing more. One man’s emptiness is another’s fullness. One man’s fullness is another’s emptiness.
· There is a long standing story of the zen master whose student found just sitting and breathing boring. The Master took the student to a nearby lake. “Look in there.” He said. The student looked. “I don’t know what I am looking for” said the student. “Look closer”, said the Master. So the student looked closer, still rather mystified. “Kneel down and look” advised the Master. The student knelt at the edge of the pool but still remained puzzled. “Get down really close to the water” the master suggested. The student did so. Then the Master grabbed the student’s head and shoved it under the water, holding it there until the student was very nearly drowning. Eventually the master released him, whilst he choked and gasped for air. “Still find just sitting and breathing boring?” he asked.
· Life doesn’t have to be threatened to see its sheer ever present beauty and how every cell cries out to rejoice in it.
· Boredom is an opportunity for a repose of the ego, as much as it is a chance for frustration.
· As ego fades so disappointment and boredom fade also.
· A remedy for the mental disease of boredom is the same as for any other irksome thought: complete acceptance. Resistance is futile. With our own thoughts, the more one tries to master them, the more they master us. Stand aside, and thoughts do what thoughts will: arise, flare, subside, depart. If they are enemies to desired states of peace all the more so. The bio mechanics are evident: the bigger they come the harder they really do fall. But only if you get out of the way of their own energetic propulsion and let them propel themselves.
· I’ve heard it said that if you are bored it is because you are boring. Perhaps.
· “I am bored” is untrue. Are your feet bored? Is your pancreas? There is always a space between you and the thought. If there were not you would be your thoughts. If you are that, then you are ever vanishing or vanished as yesterday’s, last year’s thoughts are gone and lost now. If you are not that, then no need to worry about the boredom. It most certainly does not define you. At worst you are dealing with a little localised pain. Truer perhaps to say “boredom comes to visit now”.
· Stand and look at your visitor. Stop pretending there’s no one at the door.
· Some people fetishize the expression of boredom as a cue to those around them to do better, be more entertaining, please them more. It is a facile trap. These people are playing a low card trick which can’t work many times, and in any case is destined to destroy connection through its own power assumptions. Then that player will be left alone. And be more bored. So this gambit paradoxically reinvents its own problem and is self defeating.
· When a child says “I am bored” most parents rush to fill the void. This is bad education. “Be bored” is a better response.
· Boredom is also dangerous as a piece of self stimulus that suggests we are in control of life. At best this belief is headed towards yet more disappointment. At worst, megalomania.
· If you are bored you are not looking hard enough. And especially you are not looking hard enough at your own feeble attempts to control the world.
· Does all of this mean that it is easy not to be bored? In one sense it is incredibly simple. Surrender fully to the moment and you cannot be bored. But in many ways modern conditioning promotes boredom with its expectations of an ever exciting lifestyle, and an ever greater need for stimulus. It is instructive to think about who are the beneficiaries of such cultural norms. It doesn’t take long to realise that if you are bored you are very ready to be sold to. This makes ready victims of the bored. In a spare, bored moment or two, an interesting diversion to boredom is to wonder who benefits from it.
· Being against boredom, though, is like being against rain. It defies reality. Given conditioning, if it comes it comes. How can one be against that?
· What’s real, though? The boring circumstance? Or the mind’s reaction to it?
· And whose reaction is the reaction?
· Unravelling that little lot should keep the bored amused for some time.
He is bored, and I promise to publish my quack remedy.
Here it is:
· Boredom is a metaphor for our own isolation.
· The only real remedy for being bored is full acceptance of what is, and full rejection of what is not.
· Pseudo remedies arise as palliatives to the pains of our own disappointments in being bored.
· Our disappointments are ultimately self directed.
· As with disappointment, so with anger, sadness, guilt and every other negative emotion.Disappointment is a failure of presence, nothing more. Boredom too.
· Filling time persuades us momentarily we are alive, but it is a temporary palliative. It is emptiness that really is persuasive of our life force.
· It is notable how many time-filling activities involve the mouth. This tells you that they are infantile drives toward nipple pleasure, the baby’s response to minor pain, neediness. Always, the filling response. Are you a baby?
· Filling time is an act based on the presumption of emptiness. But no time is empty to the person really there. And all time is empty to the person never there.
· Emptiness, fullness are points of view. Nothing more. One man’s emptiness is another’s fullness. One man’s fullness is another’s emptiness.
· There is a long standing story of the zen master whose student found just sitting and breathing boring. The Master took the student to a nearby lake. “Look in there.” He said. The student looked. “I don’t know what I am looking for” said the student. “Look closer”, said the Master. So the student looked closer, still rather mystified. “Kneel down and look” advised the Master. The student knelt at the edge of the pool but still remained puzzled. “Get down really close to the water” the master suggested. The student did so. Then the Master grabbed the student’s head and shoved it under the water, holding it there until the student was very nearly drowning. Eventually the master released him, whilst he choked and gasped for air. “Still find just sitting and breathing boring?” he asked.
· Life doesn’t have to be threatened to see its sheer ever present beauty and how every cell cries out to rejoice in it.
· Boredom is an opportunity for a repose of the ego, as much as it is a chance for frustration.
· As ego fades so disappointment and boredom fade also.
· A remedy for the mental disease of boredom is the same as for any other irksome thought: complete acceptance. Resistance is futile. With our own thoughts, the more one tries to master them, the more they master us. Stand aside, and thoughts do what thoughts will: arise, flare, subside, depart. If they are enemies to desired states of peace all the more so. The bio mechanics are evident: the bigger they come the harder they really do fall. But only if you get out of the way of their own energetic propulsion and let them propel themselves.
· I’ve heard it said that if you are bored it is because you are boring. Perhaps.
· “I am bored” is untrue. Are your feet bored? Is your pancreas? There is always a space between you and the thought. If there were not you would be your thoughts. If you are that, then you are ever vanishing or vanished as yesterday’s, last year’s thoughts are gone and lost now. If you are not that, then no need to worry about the boredom. It most certainly does not define you. At worst you are dealing with a little localised pain. Truer perhaps to say “boredom comes to visit now”.
· Stand and look at your visitor. Stop pretending there’s no one at the door.
· Some people fetishize the expression of boredom as a cue to those around them to do better, be more entertaining, please them more. It is a facile trap. These people are playing a low card trick which can’t work many times, and in any case is destined to destroy connection through its own power assumptions. Then that player will be left alone. And be more bored. So this gambit paradoxically reinvents its own problem and is self defeating.
· When a child says “I am bored” most parents rush to fill the void. This is bad education. “Be bored” is a better response.
· Boredom is also dangerous as a piece of self stimulus that suggests we are in control of life. At best this belief is headed towards yet more disappointment. At worst, megalomania.
· If you are bored you are not looking hard enough. And especially you are not looking hard enough at your own feeble attempts to control the world.
· Does all of this mean that it is easy not to be bored? In one sense it is incredibly simple. Surrender fully to the moment and you cannot be bored. But in many ways modern conditioning promotes boredom with its expectations of an ever exciting lifestyle, and an ever greater need for stimulus. It is instructive to think about who are the beneficiaries of such cultural norms. It doesn’t take long to realise that if you are bored you are very ready to be sold to. This makes ready victims of the bored. In a spare, bored moment or two, an interesting diversion to boredom is to wonder who benefits from it.
· Being against boredom, though, is like being against rain. It defies reality. Given conditioning, if it comes it comes. How can one be against that?
· What’s real, though? The boring circumstance? Or the mind’s reaction to it?
· And whose reaction is the reaction?
· Unravelling that little lot should keep the bored amused for some time.
Friday, 13 March 2009
SUCH GREAT NAMES AS THESE
It almost makes me proud to be British.
The British Grenadiers played by the band. The 2nd Battalion Royal Anglian Regiment, the Poachers, returned from Basra, marching through Luton. A group of orthodox Muslims with banners saying that the soldiers are butchers and child murderers. A counter demonstration in which some sixty year old bloke in a trilby starts mixing it with the bearded Muslims, getting himself arrested, and the BNP there whipping it all up. Our boys in blue in the middle trying to keep everyone apart. The media, whose protective instincts towards our brave boys are offended, railing at Muslim spokespeople. The politicians joining in condemnation. Lots of people, especially in blazers with medals, disgusted and outraged, saying "what about their fallen comrades?" A Muslim cleric saying "what about the 100,000 civilian body count in Iraq?" Journalists remonstrating "but surely you should be protesting to the government not these soldiers". And an obvious riposte: 1,500,000 people (myself amongst them) did that on February 15th 2003. It didn't make any difference then. Why should it now?
Glorious.
A knickerbocker glory of opinion and counter opinion.
Served on the frayed edges of national sensibility.
With a tow row row row row row row.
The British Grenadiers played by the band. The 2nd Battalion Royal Anglian Regiment, the Poachers, returned from Basra, marching through Luton. A group of orthodox Muslims with banners saying that the soldiers are butchers and child murderers. A counter demonstration in which some sixty year old bloke in a trilby starts mixing it with the bearded Muslims, getting himself arrested, and the BNP there whipping it all up. Our boys in blue in the middle trying to keep everyone apart. The media, whose protective instincts towards our brave boys are offended, railing at Muslim spokespeople. The politicians joining in condemnation. Lots of people, especially in blazers with medals, disgusted and outraged, saying "what about their fallen comrades?" A Muslim cleric saying "what about the 100,000 civilian body count in Iraq?" Journalists remonstrating "but surely you should be protesting to the government not these soldiers". And an obvious riposte: 1,500,000 people (myself amongst them) did that on February 15th 2003. It didn't make any difference then. Why should it now?
Glorious.
A knickerbocker glory of opinion and counter opinion.
Served on the frayed edges of national sensibility.
With a tow row row row row row row.
Tuesday, 10 March 2009
Friday, 6 March 2009
SNIFFING MOLE HILLS
Never thought I'd ever be doing this but I have been sniffing them. Man, that's how sad my life is. They smell very strange. Like nothing I've ever smelt before. Very musty. And very warm.
Tuesday, 3 March 2009
NEW FISH
A young friend of mine is about to go to prison. He has yet to be sentenced but it isn't looking good. The sentencing guidelines are clear: 2 years. A two stretch. That, I think, is the correct terminology. He asks me for advice on how to survive it. How am I to know? He is understandably distressed, and especially anxious about his first night banged up. I eschew advice there and then but write a letter. I'm not sure I am going to send it.
Dear Jimmy (name changed to protect the guilty)
In your coming experience there is the same capacity for happiness as in any other. Your imprisonment will only be complete with your own imprisonment of your own mind. Stand aside from where you prefer to be and here you are, right here in the perfect place. You will need to be some kind of warrior against the enemy of your own mind to do that, believe me, but, also believe me, it is possible.
Time exists in your mind. It is possible to dwell through time never being in the time. Without being inside, many ,many of us are just doing time, wishing somehow we were somewhere or someone else. It is up to you. Punishment is obvious and crude when your mind dwells on what it hasn't got. There is no punishment when the mind dwells in what it has. In that sense you can never be anything but a free man, to the extent that you choose your own freedom.
You will have plenty of time for watching. Watch your thoughts.
People you meet where you are going have been harshly judged. There is another view. Taking the time to do so, they are understandable. Leaving aside the harsh judgement they are no different from you or I. If we actually were in their shoes fully, we'd do no different than them.
Give up wanting anything.
Be there.
You will then be free.
There.
I've sent it now.
Dear Jimmy (name changed to protect the guilty)
In your coming experience there is the same capacity for happiness as in any other. Your imprisonment will only be complete with your own imprisonment of your own mind. Stand aside from where you prefer to be and here you are, right here in the perfect place. You will need to be some kind of warrior against the enemy of your own mind to do that, believe me, but, also believe me, it is possible.
Time exists in your mind. It is possible to dwell through time never being in the time. Without being inside, many ,many of us are just doing time, wishing somehow we were somewhere or someone else. It is up to you. Punishment is obvious and crude when your mind dwells on what it hasn't got. There is no punishment when the mind dwells in what it has. In that sense you can never be anything but a free man, to the extent that you choose your own freedom.
You will have plenty of time for watching. Watch your thoughts.
People you meet where you are going have been harshly judged. There is another view. Taking the time to do so, they are understandable. Leaving aside the harsh judgement they are no different from you or I. If we actually were in their shoes fully, we'd do no different than them.
Give up wanting anything.
Be there.
You will then be free.
There.
I've sent it now.
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