What you carry = reasons for keeping going

How you carry it = How you keep going

‘People think of good and bad teachers as engaged in the same activity, as if education was a substance, and that bad teachers supply a little of the substance, and good teachers supply a lot. This makes it difficult to understand that education can be a destructive process, and that bad teachers are wrecking talent, and that good and bad teachers are engaged in opposite activities.’

Keith Johnstone, Impro, p.16

We can easliy fall into the trap of telling oursleves of what we should be doing or who we should be. Might it be better to listen out for who we are and what we want to do, and go from there?

SHOULD – ‘to express a duty, obligation, or likelihood.’

The Oxford English Dictionary

SHOULD – ‘an ugly word, not to be used against myself or anyone else.’

Me

“We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.” -Wallace Stegner, Wilderness Letter, 1960.

https://www.wilderness.org/articles/article/wallace-stegner

Serendipity is an unplanned fortunate discovery

Wikipedia

For the past few weeks I have been reflecting on the absence of so much of day to day life in this era of lockdown. I walk past the local theatre, closed. Pubs, closed. Restaurants closed. I reflect on the absence of serendipity. Our lives have no space for physical, unplanned, spontaneous discovery. And I feel that strongest in the absence of social discovery.

I am in my early middle age, with a family and quiet needs. But I have had my years of youth. Of excitement. Of chance encounters, laughter and misbehaviour in public. Now all youth is herded inside as if to shelter from a storm. Where are those faces of joy and animation? Where are those performances glorying in attention and applause?

I have been carrying around with me the kernel of a quote. My mind felt that this quote belonged to the American wilderness writer John Muir. But my search has revealed it is his fellow wilderness advocate, author Wallace Stegner. 

The quote above is about wilderness. It is from a letter outlining Stegner’s view that we need wild spaces. Walking around the shuttered town I cannot help but feel a strong parallel with our urban lives. Pre pandemic I spent very little time out socialising, but it was there, enjoyed by others. The absence of people being social and carefree is a sadness. As Stegner was looking out from the edge of town, reassured that the wilderness was there, so too we need our towns and cities to be teeming with life and activity, even if we remain on the periphery. We need to maintain “our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.”

It seems the social media age has sparked a movement in contrast to the fanatical True Believer, as described in Eric Hoffer’s book (1). Today seems to be the time of the Self Believer. Social media gives a platform for people to spew out egotistical, narcissistic, self celebrating crap at a rate unimaginable in pre smartphone times. These self believers want to create their own mini cults of personalities. They believe so sincerely in what they say. Their self delusion invites us in. They betray no self doubt or reasonableness. We must stand guard against these fanatics (2).

(1) The True Believer, Eric Hoffer, 1951. I have recently read the excellent Eric Hoffer: The Longshoreman Philosopher by Tom Bethell. This is a great introduction to Hoffer’s work which reveals that Hoffer never intended for his book to be titled The True Believer. In fact the main focus of the book is on mass movements, e.g. Facism and Communism. But the true believer is such a great title! Bethell’s book also reveals Hoffer’s love of quotations, that he collected on notecards. He planned to write a book called Conversations with Quotations. I love that title and am tempted to steal it for my blog. Obviously there were plenty of great quotations in this book. Hat tip to Ryan Holiday for introducing me to notecards https://ryanholiday.net/the-notecard-system-the-key-for-remembering-organizing-and-using-everything-you-read/

(2) Obviously not everyone online is a fanatic (I’m not. Honest!) This is aimed at the cult of the influencer. I will write about all the wonderful people online in the near future.

I love footnotes. It might be my training as a historian, but looking at the footnotes, the brief mentions, the fleeting glances in books opens up a whole new way of reading. The footnotes often tell a deeper story. They show the influences of the author, a way to look back at how they shaped their thoughts and ideas. Footnotes take you out of the immediate narrative. As a reader you can digress. Follow your curiosity. That is my right as a reader. To strip a book bare and find what I need. I love hearing a reference to something I’m unfamiliar with, googling it and picking out anything of interest. It is a form of independent research, undertaken with no clear aim or responsibility. It’s curiosity. You can stop what you are reading any time and move on to something else if you feel the tug of curiosity.

“Most people don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing. They imitate others, go with the flow, and follow paths without making their own. They spend decades in pursuit of something that someone convinced them they should want, without realising that it won’t make them happy.

“Don’t be on your deathbed someday, having squandered your one chance at life, full of regret because you pursued little distractions instead of big dreams. You need to know your personal philosphy of what makes you happy and what’s worth doing.

– Derek Sivers, Anything You Want

I think I need to read this every morning…

Some problems are seemingly forever problems. Like healthy eating and exercise. To some of us the solutions are fairly simple. But they do require time. And thought. And for many of us, a lot of effort. The links between chronic disease and a sedentry life coupled with an unhealthy diet are pretty well established narratives in popular culture. Why do most fail to take heed? Becasue we are immersed in a world of abundance, comfort and ease. We are part of the modern world. And the modern world provides cheap food and cheap comfort. We can’t, en masse, outthink these physical (absence of) constraints.

Can we solve this problem individually, one person at a time? Probably not.

Perhaps we need an intervention.

When was the last time you though about how you went to the toilet? What was your strategy for not getting cholera or typhoid? Can we even give an accurate description of these diseases? We don’t need to think about sanitation at all. Its been taken care of because we benefit from that greatest of inventions: the flushing toilet.

Before the toilet, there was quite literally shit in the streets. In London the Victorians built a huge sewer system and encouraged some inventors to solve the problem of efficiently depositing human waste into it.

The first flushing toilets came out in the late 19th century. Today we don’t have to think for a second how we are going to spend a penny. Imagine being so complacent when it came to our eating and moving.

Technology solved the shitting. Could it also solve the eating?

I write here, for immediate publication, to commit to a daily practice of blog posts.

What will I write about? I have no idea.

Will anyone read them? Almost certainly not.

Why do it? I feel a little thrill of commitment to the unknown future of my creative thoughts.

See you all tomorrrow. I’ll be here early doors.