ZEN TODAY

Age tenderises meat.

FATHERS AND SONS

At an airport I watch fathers and sons, queueing, as they go on their holidays.

The fathers say stop that. Think about your behaviour. I’ve told you not to do this. Stop it now. I have told you about this before. This is your last warning. Listen to me. Don’t do this. Don’t do that. Stop doing this. Stop doing that. If you carry on like this. Stop this silliness. Grow up.

And these big men tower over these little boys. And the little boys cower, or glower. And the men frown and growl. And sometimes they grip the little boys. And sometimes they even – just a little – shake the little boys. This is to make them see sense. And sometimes the little boys cry. And more than once the men say, man up. And I guess that means grow up. Become a man. Become a big man. Be like me. A man. A big man. Like me.

SWEETIES

At first choir practice was sixpence. But in 1971, when money went decimal, it went up to 10p. Cash in hand. Not bad. It was enough to buy yourself something at the shop. There was a MACE shop which smelt of a mixture of washing powder and ham, which is what it sold. But you could get crisps there too. You could try a new flavour each week. Pickled Onion, savoury onion, cheese and onion. There was a lot of onion.

But if you wanted sweets you went to the sweetshop. It was a purist sweetshop, and it only sold sweets. Crisps or drinks? Go to the MACE.

The sweetshop was run by a cripple. One of his legs was a lot shorter than the other. He could get around, bent at an odd angle, but he had to wear a built up surgical boot. He limped dreadfully.

When we went to the sweetshop, we would crowd in. Someone would ask for one of the more exotic types of sweets, sold in jars, one on the top shelf. Then the crippled sweetshop man had to get his step ladder to get at them, and contort his broken body to reach up and bring down the jar. It took him ages. During this time you could steal quite large amounts of the more expensive chocolate bars, which were displayed at a convenient height for children to reach.

BUDDHISM 1.02

 

A friend of mine went to a retreat, held at a Buddhist centre, in the countryside. He went there with his partner and his niece, 9 years old, who they thought might enjoy the calm, meditative environment and the nice grounds. It was one of those retreats where there is a big name guru – Kelsang this or that – and, at a point in the retreat, the attendees could have a personal audience with the guru. It was a lovely warm day, and the gardens were beautiful in the sunshine. When the time came for the personal audiences, the people were asked to queue for their turn in a corridor, until the guru was ready to receive them. It was a long queue and a long wait so the little girl went out to play in the grounds and enjoy the sunshine. After a long time waiting, my friend went to check on his niece. She was fine, playing happily under a tree with the guru.

 

 

BUDDHISM 1.01

 

I was sitting with some Buddhists and they had this book about attachment. Attachment, they were saying, is the cause of all suffering. In the book there was a kind of quiz – how attached are you? Or something like that. And there we were, rating ourselves. So I took the book, and got in my hand a dozen or so pages, and ripped them out, and then for good measure ripped them into pieces. It was delightful how quickly angry the Buddhists became. A lady called me a bastard and threatened to kick me in the bollocks. I felt it prudent under this threat to leave the room and go to another. So I went. Laughing.

 

 

WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU LISTENING TO?

GATE

I was following you

Had been all afternoon
As we walked
And you talked
And all I could do
Was the helpless act of listening
And we reached a gate
Darkened by laurel
A robin was singing
And I was thinking
God, if I were your therapist
I wouldn’t know where to start
And you turned to me
And said
“These talks.
These talks we have.
They do me so much good.”

DRAGONFLIES

There was this guy

Not a bad boss, but fired me,
Kicked, propelled me,
Shook me from the corporate tree,
Without knowing
How grateful I was to fall,
How much opportunity
Then lifted above my horizon -
New dawns, new suns -
New ways of being me.
And truthfully I think
He’d been better firing himself
Which, eventually, he did,
Going out of offices,
Tripping way beyond those corporate walls
And into Andalucian hills
To a lake
Of his dawn’s finding,
Seeing on a branch
A dragonfly
Attacked by wasps
(Which, with his meditation beads,
He shooed)
Chanting, picking up that lifeless thing -
That still stick of blue green life
Apparently extinguished.
And, not knowing what to do,
Went on chanting
Till the wings chirred,
The dragonfly rose
Flew again to the lake
And like a victory roll made off
Into some new, blue future.
Like that guy found.
Like I, fired, found.
Dragonflies,
All three of us.

CHILD CARE

I can hear my daughter in the room next door
And she is talking in voices
One doll to another
Names like Skipper and Chelsea
Rehearsing a fashionista life
On beaches, in big houses
Where a ready flow of labels
Is mixed with girl talk
And surfing
And then she runs in to say
Look dad. Look.
I can put my foot higher than my head.
And she can.
Standing on one leg.
And then she does a handstand
Just for the hell of it
Before returning to Barbie world
Seamlessly, without the slightest doubt
That both acts can be performed
With no shred of self consciousness
And I remember
My son dancing once
He danced often
But this time was different
It was a moving of his body
Without plan or design
Just moving
Moving utterly held by each note and beat
And was itself moving –
Moved me to tears
As this morning I feel close to them
Realising these pure things are gone for me
Too held by notions
Of what is right or wrong
What is appropriate, adult,
Too held by what looks or sounds good
Rather than just spilling
Whatever words come
Onto a page.

POPPIES

TIME IS MONEY

Time is money.

People say that.

Money is time.

People don't say that.

But it's true, in ways that change how people think about what they are doing.

One. You pay people to work for you. Wow. That seems ok. But it hides an insidious set of assumptions. That you have bought something less valuable for something more valuable.

But time isn't less valuable than money. Ask anyone diagnosed with a fatal illness. Ask anyone recently bereaved. Ask anyone with any sense.

Reverse the logic and you get something amazing. With a new respect for peoples' time, you hold the possibility of creating something special. By making the time of organizational life special, you cannot help making the experience of your organization special. By making the experience of your organization special, you will actually make more money. They don't teach you that at Harvard. Well, you don't need to go to Harvard to learn it, anyhow.

There's another linkage to time. Everyone is always selling time. They may not see it this way, but they are. Whether you sell goods or services, what you really sell is the quality of time a customer spends with them. Make that special, and you make your product special.

This thinking releases ideas. When asked to help British Airways revitalise their lounges, the trick was to stop thinking about them as physical spaces and start thinking about them as units of time - at that time, often blank meaningless pieces of time in a traveller's life. But waiting, just waiting, for ideas to add value to that time, to the benefit of people visiting them, and as a lever of brand preference.

This thinking about time has an individual consequence too. Spiritual, even. There are few jobs that cannot be defined as adding value to the time of others. Job is just a context for doing so. This is redemptive. Not only for the "others" but for the job holder. It is akin to the man with a broom, who, asked whether his job is the cleaner, replies, "No - I am building a cathedral!"

COSA NOSTRA

I have had my dealings with blackthorn before. It is the plant equivalent of the mafia. Unforgiving, to say the least. I wrote about that on 13.03.2013.

I thought that maybe I had left it too late this year, but today I finally got round to picking the sloes. It turns out they are all the better for leaving. The blue, slightly powdery blush is upon them, and they are big and fat. They are soft, too, and that is  a great advantage in making sloe gin, as, instead of having to prick each individual fruit, you can squidge them between finger and thumb. Not without effort, but far less time consuming. You have to do this, or the fragrant juicy flesh will be unavailable to flavour the gin.

So later turned out to be better.

But there was something else. I don't know if it was my imagination but it was as though the sloes wanted to be picked. I used neither gloves nor goggles. And how many injuries did I pick up from the potentially lethal thorns? None. Could it be that, at the very right moment that the fruit needs to be picked, and thus the seed spread, the blackthorn lets its guard down? Its thorns soften and yield?

Perhaps it is fanciful. Perhaps, even, it is a trap.

But the mafia in the hedgerows let me pass unmolested.

And the illegal hooch trade is on.