“We’re in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it’s all gone.”

– Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

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The actual speed of life

is so much slower

we could have lived

exactly seven times as long

as we did.

– Jim Harrison, Time Suite, After Ikkyu

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It’s easy to let life rush by like the blur of hedgerows through the train window.

Who is driving the train?

Where am I going?

Why is it going so fast?

Good questions, perhaps not asked enough.

How do I slow down time?

Wouldn’t it be nicer to go for a walk?

Then I could make out the individual leaves in the hedge.

I can also swing my head round to see the sky, the ground, where I’m going and where I’ve come from.

Life at walking pace.

I think walking and reading work at the same physical speed.

I don’t need to rush either of them. Why bother?

Rushing will just ruin both activities.

I’ll add writing, to make a trifecta of slowness and attention.

Writing these posts I slow this part of the day to a pace where I can think and focus.

Because I write them every day, these moments of slowness accumulate.

My mind enjoys its walk.

I gain a little more life.

“The British-Egyptian heart surgeon Magdi Habib Yacoub goes for a walk every day…

I was curious and asked Yacoub what he had learned from studying thousands of beating human hearts. Yacoub replied, without much ado: “Go for a walk every day.” He assured me that this advice would never grow outdated.”

– Erling Kagge, Walking

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“Many years ago, while walking the streets of Berkeley, my eyes met those of a very old man coming toward me.            

He was very thin and wore a pair of white tennis shoes.  It was an unusual sight to see a man that old with such bounce in his step.  We automatically stopped to talk to each other.   

“I’m a walker,” he said.           

“That’s what I gather. I’m a walker, too.”            

“I walk forty blocks every day.”            

I was amazed.  “That far?  That’s equivalent to three or four miles.”            

“That’s right. When I was a young man I used to walk forty blocks without stopping.  I still walk that far, but nowadays it doesn’t matter how long it takes me to do it.”            

“How old are you?”            

“Eighty-five.”            

A year or so later I ran/walked into him again.

“Walk every day,” he told me.  “It doesn’t matter if it’s in the morning or evening, rain or shine, hot or cold, just get outside every day and walk.”

“Do you still walk forty blocks a day?”            

“I’ve changed my mind about that,” he said. “Walk fifteen, thirty, or forty minutes a day. The important thing is to get out and walk. You don’t have to walk fast or go up steep hills, any type of walking is fine.  If you keep at it you’ll last as long as me.”

…I sometimes think of that vibrant old man when I’m out for my daily walk.  What an inspiration he was to me.  Walking made him lively, aware, and in tune with the world.  If he was like that in his eighties, then there’s a good chance I can be that old and healthy, too.”

– Joseph Sutton, Morning Pages: The Almost True Story of My Life

__________

I recently started taking an evening walk myself.

It is good for de-stressing my mind and body.

Often the only other people I encounter are those walking their dog.

They are out and about on behalf of someone else.

I am out for myself.

I don’t need the excuse or duty of a dog.

I know my animal self enough to know that if I’ve been cooped up in car and classroom I need to stretch my legs and lungs.

I have been scratching at the door demanding to go out and exercise.

The walk transforms me.

I return content, happy to curl up in my bed.

I have regained the day for me.

I am my own master and companion on these walks.

“If you’ve just spent ten hours digging ditches on a hot summer day you don’t enter the tavern and begin to talk about the virtues of hard work and thrift, the beauty of Calvinism as a moral system. You want several mugs of beer.”

– Jim Harrison, Off to the Side

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“I don’t mind the middle of the ocean, or a garden choked with hot peppers, eggplants, and tomatoes, but idealized nature has always struck me as a fool’s paradise.

The cow lets fall an even Golden stream of shit, Terence, you lie under And never mind a bit of it.

I forget where I read this gem, but these verses always come to my mind when I read pastoral poetry. Very nice, one says to oneself, but what about the farmer beyond that gorgeous meadow who works seven days a week from morning to night and is still starving? What about his sickly wife and their boy, who tortures cats? As my father used to say, if country living was any good, all these cities would not be so packed.”

– Charles Simic, The Life of Images

__________

We all have work to do.

Not all of us have poetry written about our vocation.

It’s easy to idealise what we don’t know and to fool ourselves that we want what others have.

At the same time we don’t like being preached to about someone else’s ideals.

Often we are simply tired and in need of a little refreshment.

Wherever we live and whatever we do, there is always hard work.

We are all familiar with the unique challenges of our present work.

It’s easy to assume the alternative, over the distant hill, will be simpler and more fulfilling.

It’s nice to have a glimpse from time to time.

The trick is not to be fooled by the supposed greener hills.

“When mentally fragile I like to drive to a far city, say at least a few hundred miles from any of the three modest places my family lives, check in to a somewhat pathetic brand-name motel with the pleasant feeling that I wouldn’t know a single soul in the local phone book. And that my own phone won’t ring except in the case of a dire event because my wife is well aware of my motives for staying in the anonymous room. Here I have shorn myself of my support systems and there is a fairly good chance that in a day or two I’ll discover the etiology of what ails me, keeping in mind that the overexamined life is also not worth living.”

– Jim Harrison, Off to the Side

__________

“But I don’t use other people as a reference for where I’m at. I never do that; I never have. I think that’s a mistake.

It doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate somebody else’s performance—or, in a business, appreciate somebody else’s success. I just think that, ultimately, if I believe myself to be so different, or even if it’s something that’s similar—it’s me doing it.

You can’t expect to be the only one that has a good idea. With all the people in the world, the idea that someone somewhere wouldn’t have similar ideas simultaneously? I think that’s unrealistic—it’s going to happen.

But you are the difference. Similar becomes different when an individual takes it and makes it.

I can see how using someone as a reference or benchmark might boost you a little bit—if somebody’s having a success in your area, you check them out—or you try something someone else is doing and you think, That’s interesting, that’s cool—but you have to make it your own.

Your unique twist will always be unique—it will always be something special.”

– Laird Hamilton, LIFERIDER

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It’s vitally important to recognise when I am not feeling my best and I need to do to restore myself.

Time to myself is essential. I need some solitary existence.

I can relate to Jim Harrison’s need to get away from his day to day responsibilities, to renew himself.

I cannot jump in my car and disappear for days at a time. It’s not a practical possibility and I don’t desire the break from my family.

Yet I still need to get away, from time to time.

What do I do?

A modest walk down to the seafront where I live, usually accompanied by an audiobook or podcast.

These walks are usually about an hour in duration. No time at all really.

But they provide me with all the time I need to hit reset.

I return invigorated from the fresh air and exercise. It does me good to stare at the distant horizon over the sea.

I might have learned something interesting or inspiring through my earphones.

I don’t want to mimick another’s practice but I feel free to be inspired.

Jim Harrison reminds me I need to get away to renew my soul.

Laird Hamilton reminds me that my body is remarkable and it needs to be used in unison with my mind.

But I am not Jim Harrison. I don’t wish to smoke American Spirit cigarettes and drink and eat myself into a state of gout.

Nor am I Laird Hamilton. I don’t wish to spend most of my life on the ocean, taking risks and pushing my body to its limits.

By reading widely I increase the chance of being reminded of the obvious.

But I am never obliged to follow in another’s footsteps.

It’s more exciting to make my own.

“WE ALL LIVE IN A STATE OF PROFOUND ISOLATION.

NO OTHER HUMAN BEING CAN EVER KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE YOU FROM THE INSIDE.

AND NO AMOUNT OF REACHING OUT TO OTHERS CAN EVER MAKE THEM FEEL EXACTLY WHAT YOU FEEL.

ALL MEDIA OF COMMUNICATION ARE A BY-PRODUCT OF OUR SAD INABILITY TO COMMUNICATE DIRECTLY FROM MIND TO MIND.

SAD, OF COURSE, BECAUSE NEARLY ALL PROBLEMS IN HUMAN HISTORY STEM FROM THAT INABILITY.

EACH MEDIUM (THE TERM COMES FROM THE LATIN WORD MEANING MIDDLE) SERVES AS A BRIDGE BETWEEN MINDS.

MEDIA CONVERT THOUGHTS INTO FORMS

THAT CAN TRAVERSE THE PHYSICAL WORLD AND BE RE-CONVERTED BY ONE OR MORE SENSES BACK INTO THOUGHTS.”

– Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics

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“The path forward is about curiosity, generosity, and connection. These are the three foundations of art. Art is a tool that gives us the ability to make things better and to create something new on behalf of those who will use it to create the next thing. Human connection is exponential: it scales as we create it, weaving together culture and possibility where none used to exist.”

Seth Godin, The Practice

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Connection makes us human.

It is communication over an infinite time and space.

We don’t need to be in the same room together to communicate.

I am building a bridge to you with these words, one brick at a time.

You cannot cross that bridge to to enter through the door of my mind.

But you can peek through the window.

“For everything written there are thoughts, notes, that no one will use if he has not done something with them. Notes that a writer collects are of no meaning to another, no one else could make the connections. Every time a great scholar dies something unique vanishes out of the universe, a way of thinking that will never be expressed again.”

– Loren Eiseley, The Lost Notebooks of Loren Eiseley

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““The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”

– Henry David Thoreau, quoted in The Life of Images by Charles Simic

__________

We read to unearth the one true point of view of the writer.

We write about what is on our mind.

That is what we sense, what ensnares us: our unique way of seeing.

As a reader, I enjoy the singular, focused view of the individual.

Can AI replace the writer?

I think not.

It provides a blurred composite.

We need leadership of vision rather than a picture by committee.

Isn’t that what AI is? One big committee? A picture by consensus.

We cannot fully explain consciousness- how the mechanics of the body and chemicals of the brain create us.

At the same time, no matter how broad the inputs, AI is artificially created with software and algorithms.

There is no unique point of view.

No soul.

Give me the divine mystery of the individual over the megalomaniac overview of AI

I am an artist. a writer, an individual.

These are my words. I selected the quotes above, taken from books I have read.

For better or worse, these are the connections I have made.

“Well, who are you? (Who are you? Who, who, who, who?)
I really wanna know (who are you? Who, who, who, who?)
Tell me, who are you? (Who are you? Who, who, who, who?)
‘Cause I really wanna know (who are you? Who, who, who, who?)”

– The Who, Who Are You? (Lyrics by Pete Townsend)

__________

“Each one of us is a synthesis of the real and unreal. We all wear a guise. Even within our own minds, we make constant efforts to conceal ourselves from ourselves, only to be repeatedly found out.”

– Charles Simic, The Life of Images

__________

Who am I?

I could give a simple answer based on my job, family, place of birth, physical characteristics.

I can dig a little deeper for an answer: interests, hobbies, goals.

Then I descend into the murky depths of ill defined dreams, desires, fears and hopes.

Is my answer the same as it would have been last year, a decade ago, next year?

No.

That is my main argument against tattoos. I change my mind about what I like all the time.

I can’t imagine committing to a lifetime piece of public artwork.

Of course my choice of physical presentation isn’t an answer to who I am, but certainly others will catch a glimpse.

The mask we choose to wear shows us what we are afraid of showing of ourselves.

The stories we tell ourselves, are told to us, and we share with others are another part of the equation used to attempt to calculate who we are.

Yet no matter what data I collect on myself, I can’t give a clear answer.

Who am I?

Despite the chronic ambiguity, I still ask the question.

Perhaps there is some kind of answer amongst these blog posts.

I write them not for a clamouring public, but for myself.

I am choosing to narrow my focus on what I read and how it makes me think.

So I can say with some certainty: I am a reader and a writer.

Anything else is liable to change.

“Not only do adults avoid disciplining the children of others, they often don’t even discipline their own. They lack confidence in their authority as parents. The children pay a terrible price for this failing because, without authority, adults cannot give children what they need. Love is not enough. Children lack the experience and perspective to deal with the world around them. The role of the parent is to guide children by actively setting limits and teaching them to restrain themselves. Without a strong inner sense of authority, this job is impossible. Children feel you more than they listen to you. They do not decide to accept what you tell them because it makes logical sense. They accept it only because they feel your authority in a positive way. If children do not sense that you are stronger than they are, you are useless to them as a parent. You have not prepared them to deal with reality and in that sense you have failed them.”

– Phil Stutz, Lessons for Living

__________

“But it’s just the fact that if we as parents don’t teach our kids structure, responsibility, they’re gonna be lost. It’s like them being in a country full of anarchism. There’s no control, they do whatever they want, and so on.

And so as kids, they need that. Because when they get out in the real world, that you’re going to be so disappointed, they’re going to be crushed, because somebody is going to tell them the same stuff that we as parents should have taught them when they were kids.

Yeah. And it’s gonna crush him. It’s gonna crush him. So I’d rather prepare my kids now, right, than wait until they become 20 or 21 years old and someone rips them a new one verbally at work because they didn’t do what they supposed to.”

– Bo Jackson, on The Forward Podcast, 12 December 2016

__________

To be a better parent isn’t about doing more for our children, it’s about showing what enough looks like.

Those of us who didn’t receive that structure in our own childhoods struggle to catch up.

Our inner anarchy causes great turbulence.

Isn’t it better to get something right the first time round?

If we are going to build a house, it needs a strong foundation, solid walls and a roof that doesn’t leak.

We don’t want to have to keep patching leaks and bracing the cracks.

Children need firm foundations.

We, as parents, are responsible for building the initial structure.

If we make mistakes we cannot go back to correct them.

It’s too late. Our children are forced to do that alone.

Are we going to force our children to weather the storms of life in a leaky shack?

Or, through our strength, integrity and high expectations shall we construct something durable.

We have these precious years to do the good work as parents.

The question though is how do we know what good workmanship looks like when we ourselves reside in such fragile abodes?

“Read solid books, history, biography and travel—and above all take notes on what you read. Reading without note taking is as senseless as eating without digesting. It is easy to condense into a single page all that you really want to remember out of a big book, and there you have it for reference for ever. When you have done that systematically, for five years, you will be surprised at the extraordinary amount of available information which you can turn upon any subject, all at the cost of very little trouble.”

– Arthur Conan Doyle, quoted in On Conan Doyle, by Michael Dirda

__________

“Wherever and whatever I read, I have to have a pencil, not a pen—preferably a stub of a pencil so I can get close to the words, underline well-turned sentences, brilliant or stupid ideas, interesting words and bits of information, and write short or elaborate comments in the margins, put question marks, check marks and other private notations next to paragraphs that only I—and sometimes not even I—can later decipher. I would love to see an anthology of comments and underlined passages by readers of history books in public libraries, who despite the strict prohibition of such activity could not help themselves and had to register their complaints about the author of the book or the direction in which humanity has been heading for the last few thousand years.”

– Charles Simic, quoted in The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, by Alan Jacobs

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I love defacing my books.

They are branded as mine.

If we take notes when we read, we are already translating the ideas of others into our own.

We underline where we wish to cut.

We can be brazen, because these heists are done in the privacy of our own books.

I hate not having a pencil to hand when I read.

There is a force that acts so strong when I read a sentence that needs to be preserved for my collection.

I must underline, scribble in the margin, drop breadcrumbs to help me find my way back to it.

I hate not to be able to do this.

It’s not real reading if there isn’t the opportunity to take notes.

It’s like a one-way conversation: the book talks at me. I might aswell not be there.

But with a pencil, I get a word in edgeways.

Then the book talks to me. I am the only intended audience.

Our conversation is preserved forever.

I can share the highlights with others.

My archive of conversations with quotations.

“Thoughts about the degree to which I’m a slave or lowly employee of the system I’ve created: cigarettes smoke me, food eats me, alcohol drinks me, house swallows me, car drives me, etc.”

– Jim Harrison, Just Before Dark

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“An uncomfortable question arises, could we humans be in the same boat as those hapless bees? Have we too been duped by caffeinated plants, not only to do their bidding but to act against our interests in the process? Who’s getting the best of our relationship with the caffeine producing plants?”

– Michael Pollan, Caffeine

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Jim Harrison was writing before social media, even before the internet.

Imagine if we added “the social media that posts me“ to his list, then he would really be in trouble.

But isn’t that most of us, most of the time?

One big FOMO.

We let our technology rule us because it connects us to the rest of the world.

If we don’t check, or post, then we fall behind.

But staying ahead online is like trying to chase a river.

What are you competing against? The river? The individual water molecules? The Pooh stick floating in the current?

There are simply too many people to consider online.

But worse, the algorithm and the AI will always be out there, with a carrot dangling in front of our noses.

I am happy to be manipulated by the coffee plant.

It’s a relationship between me and the few dozen coffee beans I consume daily.

But social media? I am manipulated by a virtual plant that has choked the planet.

A weed.

An invasive species.

A system that I cannot control or fully comprehend.

Technology should work for me rather than I work for technology.

How did I become its slave?

I should be the one snapping my fingers, demanding attention and service.

How do we be more like Odysseus when we venture online?

How do we tie ourselves to the mast and plug our ears against the siren’s call?

This blog passes through no social media.

It’s just me posting on my own domain, a tiny island that I control.

I can hear the river rushing by.

I am happy to turn my back and attend to my own business.

Now, what did I do with my pen…?