“One thing a person cannot do, no matter how rigorous his analysis or heroic his imagination, is to draw up a list of things that would never occur to him.”

– Thomas Schelling, quoted in Seven Types of Serendipity, by Steven Johnson

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“Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.”

– Donald Rumsfeld, DoD News Briefing, February 12, 2002 11:30 AM EDT

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Even if I haven’t got anything noteworthy or interesting to say, I hope I have some skill in recognising and selecting from the works of others things worth repeating and sharing.

I do not have to originate any compelling ideas of my own. There are plenty out there waiting to be discovered.

My reading life is spent linking the knowns with the known unknowns.

But the greatest thrill is in the discovery of the unknown unknowns. An author new to me. A book that is a revelation.

Not everything previously unknown is life changing. But like an addict at a slot machine I know that if I read long enough the odds will provide me with a new discovery every now and then.

I want to stay in the game.

I keep coming back to play.

“Sustained combat produces a ruthlessly Darwinist process in which each item of equipment or supply shows its value over time, and with experience, soldiers bring only what’s needed and use only what works. That is often different from what military planners and logisticians predicted. But a lethal environment is a powerful crucible for shaping soldiers to care about what works over what the manual prescribes.”

Stanley McChrystal, On Character

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“Here’s a simple (if expensive) lifestyle hack. If you would like everything in your kitchen to be dishwasher-proof, simply treat everything in your kitchen as though it was; after a year or so, anything that isn’t dishwasher-proof will have been either destroyed or rendered unusable. Bingo – everything you have left will now be dishwasher-proof! Think of it as a kind of kitchen-utensil Darwinism.”

Rory Sutherland, Alchemy

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My brain is wired in such a way that I cannot bear to wait for anything I’ve suddenly decided I want.

I am not a saver, nor have ever been described as a patient and methodical planner.

When I start something new I am filled with an inrush of desire for tools and gadgets.

I can spend hours scrolling, constantly on the edge of purchase.

Fortunately I have developed some control over my monkey brain. I can resist for now, but there is a regular tug of wanting.

The areas where I have the least self control is in book buying.

Fortunately I don’t have expensive tastes. My books don’t need to be Near Fine First Editions. I want to read, not admire them.

What actually matters in any enterprise is the doing. Not the collecting and inventorying.

For most activities you need less stuff than you think.

Experience is the physical act of practicing.

The best way of knowing what you need is to do the activity and observe what you use or wish you had most often.

I recently started rucking. I got excited about buying a new rucksack, special weights to put in the rucksack, new boots.

What I really needed was my 25 year old army surplus burgan, two 5kg dumbells for weight and my running trainers. Off I went, using what I had and having a marvelous time.

By doing a few walks I realise I need nothing else than what I already have. I was close to buying an expensive smartwatch to track my walks and heart rate. But an old chest strap heart rate monitor and iPhone work just fine.

I’m struggling to splurge here!

I want to practice what works, using what I have, which is a pretty good strategy for resisting the siren call of New Stuff.

I have everything I need right here.

But can I ever have enough books?

A question to answer another day…

“You are greater than the Bible

And the Conference of the Birds

And the Upanishads

All put together

You are more severe

Than the Scriptures

And Hammurabi’s Code

More dangerous than Luther’s paper

Nailed to the Cathedral door

You are sweeter

Than the Song of Songs

Mightier by far

Than the Epic of Gilgamesh

And braver

Than the Sagas of Iceland

I bow my head in gratitude

To the ones who give their lives

To keep the secret

The daily secret

Under lock and key

Dear Diary

I mean no disrespect

But you are more sublime

Than any Sacred Text

Sometimes just a list

Of my events

Is holier than the Bill of Rights

And more intense.”

– Leonard Cohen, Dear Diary, in Book of Longing

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“I am writing all of this in my room and I must stop as supper is waiting for me at the rooming house, Las Delicias. Farewell for now, little diary, faithful dog of my soul. Don’t howl—your master is leaving, it is true, but he will return.”

– Witold Gombrowicz, Diary

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I’m sure we all have an internal monologue yapping through a large part of the day.

Often this yapping grows serious and admonishing.

Some thoughts left within the mind grow insistent, clawing at the door to get out.

Writing engages directly with my yapping self.

Dogs need walking otherwise they start chewing on the furniture.

Minds need walking otherwise they start devouring a person from the inside.

I show love and respect for myself by writing daily, creating my own sacred text.

I am piecing together the world as I see it.

But writing guides me only as far as the next sentence.

To find out how I must live, the writing must continue.

I’ve enjoyed my daily excursion, but cannot help starting to plan tomorrow’s trip across the page.

“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way.”

– William Blake, quoted in Epiphany of a Middle-Aged Pilgrim by Peter Wortsman

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“I have said my life has been passed in the shade of a nonexistent tree…It was planted sixty years ago by a boy with a bucket and a toy spade in a little Nebraska town. That boy was myself. It was a cottonwood sapling and the boy remembered it because of some words spoken by his father and because everyone died or moved away who was supposed to wait and grow old under its shade. The boy was passed from hand to hand, but the tree for some intangible reason had taken root in his mind. It was under its branches that he sheltered; it was from this tree that his memories, which are my memories, led away into the world. After sixty years the mood of the brown wasps grows heavier upon one. During a long inward struggle I thought it would do me good to go and look upon that actual tree. I found a rational excuse in which to clothe this madness. I purchased a ticket and at the end of two thousand miles I walked another mile to an address that was still the same. The house had not been altered. I came close to the white picket fence and reluctantly, with great effort, looked down the long vista of the yard. There was nothing there to see. For sixty years that cottonwood had been growing in my mind. Season by season its seeds had been floating farther on the hot prairie winds. We had planted it lovingly there, my father and I, because he had a great hunger for soil and live things growing, and because none of these things had long been ours to protect. We had planted the little sapling and watered it faithfully, and I remembered that I had run out with my small bucket to drench its roots the day we moved away. And all the years since it had been growing in my mind, a huge tree that somehow stood for my father and the love I bore him. I took a grasp on the picket fence and forced myself to look again.”

– Loren Eiseley, The Night Country

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Loren Eiseley breaks my heart. There is such heavy sadness in his writing. And a sense of loneliness.

I cannot read too much at a time for fear of being tipped into my own undercurrents of melancholy.

But Eiseley’s view of the world connects to something deep within me. I am so glad to have found him.

Dealing with the practicalities of a single lifetime, there are an infinite number of occasions, events, conversations and memories for us to wrest into some sort of coherence.

However, we are saved from overwhelm by our subconscious self: that part of us that knows if we find something interesting or not.

I do not need to deliberately select a memory for it to hold significance. It is already held aloft in my mind for me to simply notice.

Why some memories and not others?

I don’t know. I’ll probably never know for sure.

Perhaps that is why I read and write – I want to figure out what is important to me.

I am attempting to cultivate my recognition of significance.

What claws at my brain demanding recognition?

Who shall I share it with? Everyone and no one.

There are no physical barriers preventing the billions of internet users from accessing my thoughts here.

But because every other human being has their own automatic search and sort mechanism, it is natural that I remain unnoticed.

It is enough for me to notice what moves me and to leave my brief remarks.

Like a skin shed and left aside, if I address what troubles me, will I be able to slither along anew?

Or am I adding layers to my shell as protection from the outside world, waddling ever slower?

Whatever the consequences, seen or unseen, from engaging and writing about what I find significant, I have done it. And it feels good.

“A gift that cannot be given away ceases to be a gift. The spirit of a gift is kept alive by its constant donation.”

– Lewis Hyde, The Gift

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“Of course I never considered myself the owner of these things, only their custodian for a certain time. I was not tempted by a sense of possession, of having them for myself, but I was intrigued by the idea of bringing them together, making a collection into a work of art. I was aware that in this collection I had created something that in itself was worthier to last than my own works.”

– Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday

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Like a distant bell, I’ve been called once more to pass comment.

Why maintain this blog? Is it for riches? Fame? A slap on the back from the internet?

Of course not. As is clear in writing this, I am writing for myself. This is my record: my collection of thoughts and ideas.

I happily intermingle with the words of the wise during my intellectual journey toward the mythical lands of comprehension.

I have a love for words and ideas. I am unique in as much that I read what I am drawn to. No other person on this planet, nor any all encompassing AI thinks, selects, intrigues and wonders as I do.

This doesn’t make me special. But how many other people stop to attempt to process and organise the sandstorm of information that daily blows through us? I attempt here to shake out from my crevices grains of thought worth remembering.

I appreciate this feeling. Of having stopped and written.

A little momento to add to my archive.

I owe it to myself to return tomorrow…

“The spark, the ideas, the emotions of a novel can come from anywhere. They do not have one source, but they convect and converge to a centre, a place that concentrates and expresses their essence; a place that I know. And in the physical particulars and the spirit of that place I find the distillation, which is the book.”

– Alan Garner, Powsels and Thrums

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“How much more we would see, I sometimes think, if the world were lit solely by lightning flashes from the Elizabethan stage. What miraculous insights and perceptions might our senses be trained to receive amidst the alternate crash of thunder and the hurtling force that give a peculiar and momentary shine to an old tree on a wet night. Our world might be transformed interiorly from its staid arrangement of laws and uniformity of expression into one where the unexpected and blinding illumination constituted our faith in reality.”

– Loren Eiseley The Night Country.

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Sometimes metaphors start up in my mind, take a turn or two then dead end.

Reading and eating are not similar.

We need to eat at regular intervals to avoid perishing.

We don’t need to read for the same reason.

And yet: without intellectual sustenance I begin to wither. I need a steady stream of thought calories.

It doesn’t all have to be high minded, bran filled worthy ideas.

I crave trash every now and then.

It’s natural.

But Reading is not eating, otherwise I’d have to liken writing to shitting on the page.

There are all sorts of chemical changes that happen fthrough digestion. I cannot feel the effect of that specific nut or seed I’ve eaten.

But I can trace the change caused by a new idea.

Reading is revelation. A single strike of Understanding.

My DNA is altered irrecoverably and immediately.

I can never be full.

“A book is a machine to think with”

– I. A. Richards, quoted in Writing as Thinking by Keith Oatley and Maja Djikic

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“Thinking, as opposed to making rather superficial distinctions and decisions is, apparently, unnecessary for everyday life. Most people simply go along with their lives, accepting what happens to them, attributing to good and back luck whatever fortune or plight comes their way.”

– Charles Willeford, I Was Looking For a Street

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Book are a defence against cruise control: days can blend into weeks; weeks into months; the journey is a blur.

Reading helps me step out of the everyday into a world of frozen time.

I can enter other worlds, pick up new ways of thinking.

I have conversations with strangers who can so easily become trusted companions.

I can take these new thoughts back with me to use when time starts up again, when my eyes lift from the page.

Filling my head with other people’s ideas, I am better able to think for myself.

I know I do not have all the answers.

I cannot know it all.

I know there are always better ways of doing things.

But there is always another great book awaiting to be discovered.

Fed one by one into my subconscious, these books power the machinery of my imagination.

“When I was training to become a green beret medic, I had a small road map of Wyoming and Montana I always carried with me. I kept it hidden in the notebook in which I was supposed to keep my military notes. I stared at it, especially at the blank spaces, for several hours of every day for over a year as I pulled duty on different military bases scattered over the deep South, where the soil was always the color of clotted blood.

With this map, I would travel in my mind over the ridges and peaks into hidden basins and high cirques of the Wind River Range and the Yellowstone Plateau, or explore the emptiness of the Bob Marshall Wilderness up north.

In those days the image of a single wild place- a great canyon of the Southwest, a cascading mountain stream, or a high ridge of tundra dropping off steeply into a hidden alpine basin-could bring on a bottomless homesickness.”

– Doug Peacock, Grizzly Years

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“And I had to get home. ‘Home’, here, does not mean a house. In Russian the word is rodina. Rodina is the land, our life force. If we were to be taken from it we should know only the dead slab of the fallen wood.”

– Alan Garner, Powsels and Thrums

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I would love to be someone connected to the land.

But my suburban upbringing failed to place me in contact with any wild places.

I do not live near where I grew up.

I feel no especial pull to go back.

But I do have an understanding of home.

For me it’s not a place but a season.

Early spring.

The first verdant greens and lengthening days.

The promise of just a little more, tomorrow.

I can’t quite remember the sensation during winter but I know something isn’t quite right.

Now I feel a renewal of my life force: I am becoming more myself.

Closer to where I started.

In total ignorance of the cycle repeating itself.

Not too long for now I will be slowly taken away again, packed away for winter.

But not today.

“Then, late one night deep into a mystery novel and a fresh bottle of bourbon, and after a copious snack when such resolutions are possible, the Beginner stood in front of the mirror and said, “I will get in shape or die trying.””

– Jim Harrison, The Search for the Genuine

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“There were stories of prisoners being incarcerated for years in such places. I sat down again and began to prepare myself for an ordeal. First, I would strengthen my will by fasting; I would refuse all food for at least a week. Second, I would make three resolutions to support me through whatever was to come: no regrets, no sentimentality, no self-pity. Then I did what generations of prisoners have done before me. I stood up and, bending my head, I began to walk round and round and round and round . . .”

Terry Waite, Taken on Trust

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Some resolutions are optional. Others are mandatory.

If it would be nice to do something then it will be equally nice not to do it.

If you have to do something then there is no going back.

It’s not a resolution, it’s a necessity.

Not leisure, but survival.

Often a resolution will bubble up from the mulch of shame, whilst we are doing, or have just done the very thing we want to renounce.

The future is solvable with a drink in your hand.

It’s easy to be bold when we can begin tomorrow.

The alternative to resolutions is simply doing a little of what you’d like to do a lot of right now.

I’d love to have more time to write: it would be an easy resolution to boldly declare that I will dedicate one hour a day to it.

The trouble begins when I have to subtract that hour from whatever else I must do.

Instead I write here and there. I have adapted to my circumstances.

But most importantly I have proven to myself that I do want to write. It is not wishful thinking. I am doing it right now.

No resolutions needed.

No promises I will inevitably break.

A simple commitment to take a step forward every day, if I can.

I start to circle the room.

Committing one word at a time.

I might not be a Writer.

But I write…

“I once saw graffiti written on a blackboard over the urinal that said BLOW ME, ASSHOLE. I ran home, got my camera, came back, took a photo of it, and later sold it in a New York art gallery for $5,000. Art is everywhere. You just have to notice.”

– John Waters, Mr Know-it-all

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“It’s not who says it, it’s who spots it.”

– Dave Trott, Creative Mischief

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Opportunity surrounds us.

The constant invitation to take notice.

Ignorance is to miss.

To miss out on knowing more.

I love the discovery of new ideas but also the joy in a noticed turn of phrase.

It helps the world go round.

To be starved of new words is a serious challenge for me.

I need a constant stream of reading, a conveyor belt of words. The more I read the better I am at picking out what matters to me.

The rest can pass me by.

I’ll grab what I need and move on.