Joe's Jottings

Author: Joe

  • Today you, tomorrow me

    The first thing I do when I get up in the morning is feed the cats, then make tea, then sit and allow some of my higher brain functions to come online, usually whilst browsing Facebook.  There then comes a point where abstract thought is possible and then I like to write.

    The nice thing about the Facebook browse is that sometimes it gives me the idea for the day’s blog post.  That was the case today – I came across the phrase “Today you, tomorrow me” in a set of stories about people being given help by total strangers with nothing being wanted or expected – or even accepted – in return.

    The phrase apparently comes from the Spanish; an entry on an ‘urban dictionary’ website tells us:

    From the Spanish “hoy por tí, mañana por yo”, it is used to “justify”acts of kindness toward strangers.  For example:

    “Thanks for helping me with my flat tire. Please accept this $50 as a token of my gratitude. ”
    “No need. Today you, tomorrow me”

    I guess it’s a more graceful response than my usual ‘Fuggedaboutit’!

    I had to sit and think for a few minutes about it. Today you – today, you are the one needing help. Tomorrow me – tomorrow I may be the one needing help.  It’s ‘Pay it forward’ – I guess that it’s easy for us to think of such a gesture of kindness as a form of enlightened self interest, or spiritual insurance of some sort.  If that works for you, then go for it – help someone out because you never know when you yourself will need help.

    As a Christian, I look at it slightly differently; for me, as a recipient of that help, I’m aware that I’ve done NOTHING to warrant it from the people giving it, except share the planet. That’s how we also look upon the love of God – we’ve done nothing to warrant it, but we get it.  And on giving help out, a Christian isn’t being helpful to get in to God’s good-books, but because the grace of God is working through them to  do good works.

    However, you view it – it’s an excellent philosophy to live by.  I’ve benefited from the kindness of strangers over the years, and I hope that I have managed to give something back to other strangers.

    I’ve also experienced incredible kindness from people who I do know – albeit slightly – when other people who I might have expected to offer help to me in difficult times have not been able or willing to do so.

    Apart from the actual ‘getting me out of the mire’ gratitude I’m also grateful to all those who’ve helped me  in this way because they have added to my faith in human nature. They’ve also helped me to not be judgmental, and to remember the times when I was possibly not as helpful as I could have been.

    Take a look at how you might be able to ‘pay something forward’ in your lives. You don’t have to have spare money, or even masses of time available. And it needn’t be a big thing. We have no idea how important the relatively trivial events of life may prove to be in the great scheme of things.

    Today you, tomorrow me….

     

  • The JAMs

    A new set of initials entered the language of British politics this week – JAM.  They stand for ‘Just About Managing’ and refer to families or individuals who are just about getting by in the current financial climate, but who, by implication, might feel the pinch hard if the economic situation in the UK worsens.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-38049245

    I realised that I’d been a JAM for about twenty years, – in fact, I was a JAM WELL before it was trendy and had it’s own set of initials. I think I entered JAMness in the late 1990s and have meandered around the edges of it since.

    So, leaving the political commentaries aside, what has being a JAM meant to me and mine?  I should add that we’re a single income household,  don’t have children, and to be honest I chose a career path that whilst it’s given me flexibility, hasn’t given me a load of cash!

    So…what might new JAMmies start to realise after being on the JAMline for a few months.

    Financial planning is something of a joke.  The idea of putting a portion of my income away in to savings. I manage to contribute to a pension because it’s taken at source.

    You reach the end of the money before the end of the month.  Having said that, I do have the option of doing a little more freelance work to take up the slack; at least I have something sellable.  Of course, time is an issue.

    Socialising, holidays, buying folks you love nice gifts – forget it. These are things that require planning to generate the spare money. Christmas planning for us starts 2-3 months ahead of the start of shopping in order to work out how to get the money together.

    Decisions as to whether to eat or heat. When you have ‘pay as you go’ electricity and gas it genuinely can boil down to feeding the meters before feeding yourself.  You realise how expensive energy is and end up running the house at a lower temperature and wearing more clothes.

    One unexpected expenditure – dental work, unexpected vet’s bill, new shoes, etc. will knock the carefully planned weekly expenditure totally off kilter. You can try creating a ‘rainy day’ fund but trust me, unless you can top it up regularly, it soon runs dry.

    Spur of the moment spending is not possible.

    Having said that, what advice do I have for new JAMmies?  Of course, many of you are there already but now you have a name for yourselves.  For those who may become JAMmies in the near future….

    Well, welcome to the club. It’s a bit of a pain in the arse, but these days it’s no longer the perceived refuge of the  the idle and feckless that it used to be.  After all, we’re here. 🙂

    As soon as possible, work out your spending and income – do a budget and attempt wholeheartedly to stick to it.  In fact, most people don’t have a grip on where there money goes – if you can get a handle on that then you’re already ahead of the game.  Saving money on occasional, small things that you really enjoy is pointless – you don’t actually save that much and you make yourself miserable. Factor some ‘me money’ in to your budget.

    If you feel JAMminess approaching, get to work on reducing credit card debt as soon as you can; that credit card may well be the thing that keeps you fed some months, assuming it’s not maxed out with computer games and handbags.

    Prepare family and friends for the new regime. Explain that whilst you love them dearly, you can no longer afford the big presents, the frequent (and mainly expensive) nights out.  You may find that they too are approaching the JAM status and can see where you’re coming from.

    Be prepared to swallow pride; if you need help from friends, food-banks, etc. go for it.  State help is, as you’ll be aware, a decreasingly common option (and of decreasing value) so don’t assume that ‘the Government’ will help you out.  They won’t; they only help you IN to the JAM Today club.

    I don’t expect this situation to change; for me it’s so much a part of day to day life that I forget the shock to the system that it can be for people when they find their life changed in this way.

    It will be tough; but you will survive. After 20 years at it, trust me; it’s possible. Just don’t expect your view of the world to stay the same!

  • The Why of Spam…

    Not the delicious and non-nutritious tinned pork product, but the unsolicited email.

    Spam has a long history:

    “On May 3, 1978, the Internet witnessed a glorious and not particularly welcome birth: The first ever spam email. Gary Thuerk, a marketer for the Digital Equipment Corporation, blasted out his message to 400 of the 2600 people on ARPAnet, the DARPA-funded so-called “first Internet.””

    It’s almost 40 years old and older than the public Internet.  But why does it still continue.  After all, for there to be any sense to sending mails out – even automatically – someone, somewhere, must make some money or get some sort of payback from it.  This requires someone to open the spam and either act on it – i.e. buy something form it, visit a website, etc. – or be acted upon by the spam – e.g. it’s carrying malware which puts trojan horse and virus software on their PC and probably gives them athlete’s foot at the same time.

    I have a ‘throwaway’ email account that I use when I don’t want to give my main email address.  It’s on my own domain, so any anti-spam protection I apply to it is purely up to me.  And for the sake of entertainment and education I’ve applied the absolute minimum anti-spam filtering that my hosting service will allow.  I check the account occasionally, primarily to see whether there’s anything ‘doing the rounds’ that might look realistic enough to fool some of my freelance clients in to accidentally getting themselves in to deep water.

    For your entertainment today, therefore, I present a few subject lines.  Who with at least a few working brain-cells could ersist the following :

    • 7 second fat flush trick
    • Stirling Generator – Big Electricity bans media cover on Stirling Generator plans
    • Kirsten Cote – re. your invoice
    • Charwin Mortgages – consider hundreds of remortgage deals
    • Hibbert, Sasha – Overdue Invoice
    • Yes Option – read this legendary story

    and so on.  I now know that in the fevered world of conspiracy nutters there is now ‘Big Electricity’ who’re trying to stop you getting free electricity from inefficient generator sets or getting electricity from the air for free (Ben Franklin tried that, guys…)  As for free energy – well, I’m with Homer Simpson…this house obeys the laws of thermodynamics!

    I hope that one day ‘Big Cupcake’ will emerge, crushing us all under demands that we must purchase more and more cupcakes so that our diabetes will need drugs prepared by ‘Big Pharma’ in factories powered by ‘Big Electricity’.

    I have quite a few invoices that either I haven’t paid or someone wants to pay and can’t.  The details are, of course, in the attached zip file…

    Who opens this sort of crap? Does anyone believe it? Or are there people out there with the cognitive capability of a mung-bean who believe this bollocks?

    The amount of spam sent keeps rising – take a look here at this report from Kapersky Labs.  Spams on the back of world events, treatments for ailments that ‘Big Pharma’ are keeping from us (usually pointing to sites run by someone who makes ‘Doctor Nick’ from The Simpsons look like the winner of the Nobel Prize for medicine.

    I’m not looking to provide any answers here, but am genuinely interested in how it is that potentially:

    “Spam is still a big business. Unsolicited junk mail accounts for 86 percent of the world’s e-mail traffic, with about 400 billion spam messages sent a day, according to Talos, a digital threat research division of Cisco Systems.”

    And this isn’t including the hand-crafted stuff deliberately designed with a particular person in mind as an attempt to hack their systems.  This is the ‘blanket bombing’ stuff.

    The spammers make money from the sellers of snake oil.  The snake oil salesmen must feel it worthwhile to give spammers money. Who are the morons who give money to the snake oil salesmen? The only thing I can think of is that things are so, so desperate in the world now that people will believe any and all crap they see ‘on the Internet’ no matter how outlandish and no matter who from.

    We’re getting dumber by the day.

     

     

     

  • Practicing thanksgiving

    In a rare example of timeliness, I want to talk about thanksgiving. However, not just about the American holiday, but about the general idea of giving thanks for stuff.  I know it sounds a bit Pollyanna-ish – if such a word exists – but I genuinely believe that to be thankful and to express those thanks in some way is one of the greatest things we can do as human beings.

    As a Christian, giving thanks to God is part and parcel of my religious beliefs. Yes, it’s sometimes hard to do when you feel that the world is giving you a good kicking, but I always try and include something in my daily prayers.

    And that does make me aware that on the whole most of us who can read this in the comfort of their own home have a couple of things at least to be thankful for immediately; you currently have a roof over your head, and you have the facilities and money required to at least for the moment give you Internet access.  And I think that that is where our ‘practising thankfulness’ has to start; much of what we take for granted is worthy of being grateful for, even if we’ve worked for it and think that we deserve it.

    There’s actually some suggestion that being grateful and saying thank you is actually good for you. I’ve always been a better giver than receiver; I’m not terribly good at taking compliments, or receiving help, or being on the receiving end of thanks or congratulations – it makes me rather uncomfortable.  But saying thanks to folks – never really been a problem for me.

    It’s something that is so easy to do, and it makes a difference to people.  Even I, with my reluctance to take thanks-yous well, feel better when someone thanks me.  I’ll be a bit embarrassed about it, but I try to take it well and it usually does end up bringing a smile to my face.  It certainly does me more good than the times when I put myself out for someone and they ignore it or take it for granted!  It’s not that I do stuff and expect thanks; it’s just nice to be appreciated.

    And as for being thankful – it seems logical to me.  I think when you offer thanks – to the world, the universe, God, the next door neighbour, whatever – you’re actually acknowledging that you’ve been part of something collaborative; that you’re aware at some level that you needed something or someone else to help you bring about something that you’ve done.  It’s a source of humility; it’s something that brings you down to earth. It prevents you from being arrogant and overly proud.  Genuine gratitude for anything is the means by which we can connect with something bigger than ourselves.

    By saying thank you to the chap who held the door open, we establish – albeit briefly and temporarily – a new relationship.  By thanking folks for those small impacts on our lives, we might be helping them feel better and perhaps encouraging them to ‘spread the word’ in some way.

    Which these days has got to be worth doing!

  • It’s a dangerous world….

    The Advertising Standards Authority managed to drag a wry smile out of me this morning as I read the news that they’d banned an advert for Heinz Baked Beans because it might encourage children to hurt themselves.

    The story is here : http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-38073866 and the advert is based around playing the rhythm of a song on full and empty bean tins. Now, apart from the risk of such tympanic efforts entering in to the nation’s psyche like the ‘Heinz Beanz Song’ from my childhood:

    “A million housewives every day,

    Pick up a tin of beans and say

    Beanz meanz Heinz”

    I was hard pressed to think what harm could come to kids from playing the Heinz Bongoes. OK, particularly hard pressed parents might throw the odd tin at their offspring to get them to stop, but that was it…but then it was made clear that the risks to kids were from possibly cutting their fingers on the open ends of a tin.

    Now, at first glance I thought – fair enough.  Then I started thinking,

    “No. Not fair enough. The world is a tough place. Kids need to learn that occasionally you’ll get cut, scratched, grazed, burned and bruised when you play and learn.  Don’t take dumb risks, but don’t live in a cotton wool world where folks try and stop everything happening to you.”

    Because if you try and control the small stuff that gives a painful reminder of the dangers of the world, when the big, uncontrollable, nasty shit comes along out of nowhere on a Saturday afternoon the kids have no experience of what it’s like to get whacked. More importantly, they have no way to judge risk; a world in which you never get exposed to mild risk is not a healthy world.

    There’s a lovely line from the god-like alien ‘Q’ in Star Trek: The Next Generation, where he is explaining something about the universe to Captain Picard who’s just had a VERY narrow squeak:

    If you can’t take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It’s not safe out here. It’s wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross; but it’s not for the timid.

    He’s right. A world perfectly safe and with no risk couldn’t have generated the human race; and certainly won’t generate a healthy generation of children.  There’s a big difference between being safe and being timid; between taking stupid risks and entering for this year’s Darwin Awards and engaging in an activity that has a small amount of risk as a by-product

    There was an interesting study done about the ‘range’ of children today and over the last 100 years – the maximum distance that a child was from home during their free time and play.  It was quite un-scientific and probably non-representative but suggested that a radius of 10 or more miles was not uncommon a hundred years ago; my personal radius in the 1960s/70s was down to about 5 miles or so; today in many cases it’s less than a mile, and little outside.

    Activities are often now virtual; the biggest risk of harm is likely to be a pulled thumb muscle or repetitive strain injury.

    So, here’s the start of a helpful guide for children of all ages to be used when adverts don’t contain the necessary health and safety small print.

    1. Sharp stuff can cut you. Really sharp stuff can cut deeply. So can paper. Watch those books.
    2. Hot things burn you.
    3. Anything electrical can potentially hurt you badly. Don’t screw around with anything bigger than a 9 volt PP3.
    4. Don’t eat anything that isn’t a recognised food.
    5. Jumping from heights has a risk of twisted ankles.

    The list can go on and on….but you get the picture. It is a potentially risky world out there and play is one of the ways in which we get our abilities to function in the world honed to a fine point.

    We never really finish learning; as Kipling said in ‘The God of the copy-book headings‘ “And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;”

    May your day be full of small, manageable risks and may your bumps and bruises be safe ones.

    WARNING – Nothing in this blog post should be taken as advocating risky activities. All safety guidelines should be read as humorous asides. (OK…legal guys…is that OK?)

     

  • The knees…a Friday afternoon design….

    When I started coding, over 30 years ago, the backup and restore code in one version of Microsoft DOS was quite grim.  In particular, it would allow you to backup your massive 10Mb hard disc (yes, 10 MEGAbyte) onto multiple floppies….and then fail when you tried to restore somewhere around disc 12 or 13.  After a while you got used to splitting your backups in to sets so that you never got near the magic failure number….

    We used to joke that the code had either been written or designed on a Friday afternoon, when the software guys in Seattle were more worried about the weekend ahead than doing a good job.  I know this is grossly unfair; at the time I was working in a culture that had Friday lunchtime as the ‘go to the pub for a few beers and be chill when you got back to the office’ day, so I was probably projecting!

    As the years have gone by I’ve still used the phrase ‘a Friday afternoon design’ as an indication that something seemed a bit botched or half-arsed.  And today I offer what is for me one of the major Friday afternoon jobs I’ve encountered, committed by evolution itself.  The human knee.  (Yes, as a Christian I am allowed to believe in evolution – I think that God keeps things simple where He can and evolution is a great way – usually – of getting an optimal solution for biological problems).

    I have heard it said that the problems that human beings encounter with our lower backs and our knees are caused by 3 issues:

    1. The knee is prone to injury – partially due to (3)
    2. We in the west tend towards porky and so put excess weight on back and knees.
    3. We’re probably a million years or so early in wandering around on our hind legs, and so they’re not quite ready for it yet.

    Well, there’s nothing I can do about (3) and I definitely suffer from (1) and (2). For the last 15 years – courtesy of an injury acquired playing rugby in my teens – my knees have been rather dodgy. They don’t bend as they should, they make noises that they shouldn’t, and they ache like buggery when it’s too damp, too cold, too hot – my knees are ‘Goldilocks Knees’ – they need everything to be ‘just right’.

    I’ve had physiotherapy, and drugs, and these days get a lot of relief from exercise (within reason) and something I call my Turmeric Gunk which has been a God-send.  Despite appearances, you do eat this stuff, rather than smear it all over the afflicting joint….

    My knees have provided comic-relief to numerous children; the clunking noise when I bend my knee has often been greeted with cries of ‘Do it again, Uncle Joe’….when the children concerned start getting clunky joints themselves, I’ll propel myself to them in my wheelchair and wheeze ‘Do it again!’ back!

    They’ve also provided me with excuses as to why I can’t play horsey any more – the knees just won’t forgive me!

    I was therefore amused and gratified at the latest US advertising campaign for Amazon.  It features a priest and an imman meeting up and working out the perfect gift for each other….

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXyuq_DdnqI

    This has particular resonance for me; earlier on this year I was on placement as part of my Reader training at a ‘High Anglican’ church where there’s a lot of kneeling and genuflecting involved. If you’ve never genuflected, trust me – it’s hard going with dodgy knees – there’s always that thought that you might not actually manage to straighten up again!

    I spent a few mornings with some serious strapping on my knees!

    Perhaps I need to follow the advice from this advert and get some knee supports.  And whilst I’m down there praying, maybe I’ll just add a little comment to God asking whether evolution couldn’t have been directed a little to give us better knees…..

     

  • To sleep, perchance to…

    …have weird people trying to eat you?

    I’m pretty sure that the Shakespeare quote involved the word ‘dream’ but my latest nocturnal meanderings by my subconscious were not of the peaceful type!

    I’m a great logger and journaler of dreams.  I can remember many dreams that I had when I was a child and a teenager – particularly the unpleasant ones – and since the late 1990s, when I suffered a mild nervous breakdown, I’ve recorded my dreams on waking whenever I am aware of having dreamt and am capable of remembering anything that happened.  When I started the journal, it was on pieces of paper or text files; I toyed with the idea of using a nice, hardback book to put everything in but that never really suited; nowadays I have a section of my OneNote notebook labelled ‘Dreams’ and that does the trick nicely.  It also allows me to easily search previous dream records, and has the additional advantage of allowing me to easily slot in stuff after the event.  Every now and again I come across a Word document or some scribbled notes recording a dream that I had years ago, and it’s easy for me to pop a note in OneNote in the right place and transcribe the contents of my previously lost records.

    Why do I bother?

    Well, it’s been interesting to see when I dream, to start with; I now realise that I’m more likely to dream when I’m slightly mentally agitated – ignoring those dreams that Ebeneezer Scrooge referred to:

    “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you….”

    and the really ‘big’ dreams for me – those that either fit the pattern of deep and important dreams defined by Jung or those that have me waking up feeling strong emotions – tend to take place when my sub-concious is needing to get my attention.  I have to say that sometimes I wish that the message that it attempts to convey was more clearly expressed….

    If I dream when I’m ill, over-heated, still digesting my supper, drunk or just having a ‘bad night’ I’ll record the dreams and ponder them; but if I have a dream that leaves me waking up with strong emotions, kicking the cats off the bed as I flail around like a lunatic or that is particularly vivid and coherent, then THEY are the dreams that I attempt to ‘read, mark and inwardly digest’.

    I’m actually quite reticent to discuss my dreams with lots of people; like most people, I think whatever public standing I have (not much!) would go down the toilet were folks to know of my antics in some of my dreams, and over the years I’ve learnt a great deal about myself from studying my dreams and reading the more ‘serious’ books on the subject.

    I’ve learnt to recognise certain things in my dream as having specific meanings; to you that workbench might be just a workbench; for me, I know that if I dream in detail about a workbench, there is some aspect of my creative life that’s currently lacking and I need to find a new outlet or kick a new project off.  There are also people who turn up repeatedly in my dream – that’s more intimate, and whilst I think know who and what they represent I’m not telling here!

    And as for being eaten by weird people?

    Well, without going in to too much detail, let me advise you never to allow yourself to be followed in to a perfectly dark room by a stranger who then proceeds to start eating your hand…..

    the analysis of THAT little horror will start soon.

     

  • “If I think back, I get depressed. If I think ahead, I get afraid.”

    I came across this quote on the ‘Humans of New York’ page.  If you’ve not encountered it I’d recommend it.  The picture and short quote – and that’s all it was – can be found here.

    It sometimes feels a bit voyeuristic; you can’t help but wonder what goes through someone’s mind when they make such a short, but loaded comment.

    Excuse today’s post – I’m in a bit of a funny place emotionally but want to keep my ‘Write for 30 minutes a day’ thing up.  So today’s offering is a bit of a stream of consciousness one!

    I do find that looking back is something that is likely to trigger strong – and not always helpful – emotions in me.  I noticed this yesterday afternoon when a chance encounter with a zip-locked folder of old cards and letters and a box of my deceased cats’ playthings generated something of a blubbing attack for a short while.  I wouldn’t say it depresses me, but it does make me more aware of what I miss from the past.

    For me, it’s relationships; relationships of all types.  It’s people I can no longer see and talk to because they’re dead. It’s folks who I screwed up with and I’ve lost contact with. It’s missed opportunities, broken and unfulfilled hopes. To be honest, I’m surprised that anyone can spend time wallowing in the past without having some sort of massive emotional reaction – or maybe that’s just me.

    I don’t get depressed, but I get sad and probably a little angry with myself.  Sometimes I do get the opportunity to patch things up – if I encounter something that is fixable, I’ll see what I can do to do it. And sometimes, I’ll come across something like a card or a clipped article or something and just grit my teeth, take a sharp intake of breath and bin it.  Occasionally, there’s just no point in carrying excess broken baggage!

    What’s really odd is when you come across a card or letter or such you’ve kept and can’t work out why; occasionally you can’t even remember the person whose name you’re looking at. I had that experience yesterday afternoon – I dug a bit deeper in the bag and found a card that ‘joined the dots’, so to say.  I was grateful that I could still remember things when the context was supplied, and that I wasn’t peering at dementia to go with the dodgy knees!

    You also get insights; I realised yesterday the frequency with which one particular name keeps showing up in my life.  I’ve encountered people with this name 3 times – and each time it’s proven to be quite a formative relationship for me.

    And you also realise that sometimes you’ve been a grade A1 c**t. And that is something that I’m definitely ashamed of. Places where I’ve buggered up relationships so badly, that there’s no way back.  4 of those; two of the people dead, two lost contact with.  Of the latter, I’m still too cowardly to approach the people concerned – after 20 and 35 years it’s a long time.

    The ‘Ziplock Bag of Fate’ is likely to be incarcerated in a biscuit tin soon to avoid future accidental viewings – sort of like an emotional Chernobyl Sarcophagous.  I’ll know where it is, I’ll leave myself a note on the tin as to what’s in there, but only access it when I’m ready for the potential results – good and bad feels.

    And thinking ahead?  Oddly enough that doesn’t scare me as much as it once might have done; a lot may happen in the world that I can’t control, and of the stuff that I CAN control I’m probably better equipped to deal with it than I’ve ever been.  There will be ups and downs; hard times and good times; good shit and bad shit.  I’m not as afraid as I once would have been because I’ve learnt from the past that some of the things that upset me most are where I’ve ballsed up relationships or not been able to end relationships properly; I like to think that I’ve learnt well enough to at least keep on top of that side of things in the future.

    And the rest of the future; well, I’ll just have to do what we all do – improvise, prepare the best I can, manage, and put the letters and cards in a labelled biscuit tin.

  • Ooooh…..squirrel!

    My biggest personal productivity shortcoming – and trust me, I have a few – is probably my ability to get easily distracted.  It used be procrastination, but I gradually managed to get that at least a little under control.  But focus is definitely an issue. I guess part of it is that I have something of a butterfly mind,  (oops…just flicked away briefly from here because a Skype message popped up) and I probably do have a low boredom threshold.

    There’s a saying ‘Started is half done’ which I think I’ve misunderstood and turned in to ‘Started is finished, it just needs tidying up, and tidying up can wait…’.  The number of half finished projects around here is still pretty big – but again, not as big as it used to be, thank goodness.

    I call my moments of lost focus and distractedness ‘Oooh….squirrel’ moments. Let me share the reason for this. Many years ago, our neighbours over the back wall used to have a gigantic tree in their garden. I was huge – thicker than a telegraph pole, visible from a mile and a half away, and as far as I was concerned it was poised to come crashing down through our back bedroom every winter.  When the wind blew, the tree added it’s own ‘Dodgy Horror Film’ sound effects, and it blotted out half the sky.

    But the one benefit of this tree was squirrels. Dozens of the times a day we’d see squirrels running up and down it, popping on to the bird table, running around the garden, chasing our cats (Marvin, I’m talking about you….) On at least one occasion one popped up on the back window ledge and looked in whilst I was working at the dining room table.

    Whenever one of these little chaps came in to view, I’d take a look.  There were occasions when my wife and I would be talking and the person with the view of the yard would suddenly stop what they were saying and doing and utter the words ‘Oooh….squirrel!’ to indicate that a ‘tree-rat’ was doing something cute.  OK – or to indicate that a squirrel was doing something….squirrelish.

    It eventually became something of a code-word in household conversations for when one of us became momentarily distracted and lost the thread.

    The tree was eventually removed – I love not having it there but miss the squirrels enormously, although in the last year the odd one has shown up on the edge of the garden near other trees.  But the phrase has stayed with us.

    And it’s now become the code word for one of us being distracted, or losing focus. In fact, I now use it deliberately when I can feel my attention slipping – no squirrel in sight; just uttering the words makes me at least aware that I’ve temporarily lost the plot.  It’s become something of a standing joke in Pritchard towers, and I even have a daft expression on my face – a sort of quizzical look.

    It’s become a helpful tool in my attempts to stay on focus. As soon as I say ‘Oooh…squirrel’, I tend to stop what I’m attempting to do and deliberately break from it. I look around the room and my head for the squirrel; was it an outside distraction, social media, boredom? When I’ve acknowledged my squirrel I’ll often review what I’m doing to see whether I’ve totally blown it in some way, but more often than not I can soon get back to the planned activity with that ‘mind break’ done.

    Just admitting the presence in the room of that virtual squirrel acknowledges that I’ve been distracted, and I’ve dealt with it.

    Of course, sometimes the squirrel just sits there being cute and I have to break off what I’m doing altogether – that’s often when I know I’m bored or distracted beyond saving and need to go and mentally watch the cute little bugger do what it will for a while.

    And on that note…ooooh….SQUIRREL!

  • Dandelion Breaks and how to avoid them

    I have always been a great fan of Berke Breathed’s cartoon strip ‘Bloom County’. For those of you whose life is as yet incomplete, lacking reporting from the strange world of Bloom County, I refer you to https://www.facebook.com/berkeleybreathed/ where the current ongoing daily adventures of the characters can be found.

    Originally Bloom County stopped being published in 1989 or thereabouts, and was reactivated in 2015, and details the adventures of, amongst other characters, a penguin called Opus, a dodgy, sleazy lawyer called Steve and a monster-packed anxiety closet.

    But for me, the most important thing to come from Bloom County was the concept of the ‘Dandelion Break’.  When life became too intense for Opus, he would decamp to the top of a local ‘grassy knoll’ and sit among the dandelions for a while until he gained his composure.  Here’s the strip in which I first saw the concept used…

    dand1

    I doubt a month goes by without me resorting to a virtual dandelion break of some sort.  In fact, with my inability at gardening I can, if needed, indulge in a real life dandelion break for several months of the year by simply going in to my back garden.

    What’s lovely about this particular script is that whilst the details in that first panel have changed, the course of Opus to resolve the anxiety is still valid today…turn off the tech.  For those of us old enough to have been around the first time, the list of news stories being broadcast is a litany of anxiety from the 1980s – the old Soviet Union, teh Lebanon, Central America, Northern Ireland, the Falklands – the great Cold War, Post-Imperial, Contra-Irangate hotch-potch of issues that used to give the rolling TV news consuming folks in the world ulcers.

    Today it’s Trump, ISIS, the Middle East, the Baltic region, Brexit, climate change, fascism, xenophobia, homophobia…you get the picture.  But today we’re equally – if not more – likely to get our drip-feed of anxiety inducing horror through our social media feed as we are through Sky News or CNN. We tool rolling news and rolled it up and put it in our pocket on our phones.

    I was again reminded of this in recent months when I’ve felt the urge for the Dandelion Break growing – not particularly in me, but in lots of people around me and people I know through social media. I recently saw a comment on my Facebook feed to the effect that the person concerned was incredibly depressed to the point of crippling anxiety by the state of the world, and another comment from a gentleman being interviewed:

    “When I look to the past I get depressed, when I look to the future I get scared.”

    I think I’ll be returning to that particular story on another occasion.

    There is certainly enough to make so many people take dandelion breaks that the whole of Bloom County’s grassy knolls would be full of anxiety crippled folks sitting and meditating on the beauty of nature. Everyone has to find their own version of the Dandelion Break to save their sanity…or do we?

    Whilst loving the concept, I’ve managed to cut down my need for Dandelion Breaks caused by the external events in the world by simply not immersing myself in the day to day stream of ‘world news’ stories that buffet us.

    I turn off the tech.

    I’ve chosen instead to put myself on a strict diet of ‘catch the headlines if they’re passing by’ and focus on things closer to home – family, cats, friends, work, church. I strengthen my relationships with people around me; I look after my own community and my job and my church. I guard my soul, and hopefully support the souls of others.

    As I said on Facebook the other day:

    “I catch the headlines online and then that’s it. If WW3 breaks out I’ll know when I see a big flash of light and hear the local ‘Comic Book Guy’ say ‘I have wasted my life.’

    Being aware of the weight and tumult of the world when we’re unable to prevent it is a form of torture; I prefer to work locally and try to make things better that I can make better.”

    We all have circles of action – the world around us in which our doing or not doing something has immediate and lasting action.  The part of our lives where we can do something to reduce our anxieties in a practical manner.  Then we have circles of influence – we might argue a point, make a decision and communicate and delegate action to be done – the part of the world where we don’t necessarily have that direct impact on the world but we stand a fair to middling chance of influencing it.  Then we have the circle of concern – stuff ‘out there’ that we can’t realistically impact.

    Right now, I’m pulling back in to my circle of action. My circles of influence and concern can, for the moment, go screw themselves.  I am not going to cripple myself and by extension my family, cats, friends, work and spiritual life by gaining sleepless night worrying myself stupid about issues I cannot influence.

    I know that people will accuse me of being isolationist, uncaring, selfish – please fill in your own words here.  But I can do nothing for the world if I’m broken; and the constant, daily – no, hourly – forcing of the issues of the world over which we have so little influence in our day to day actions simply kills us.

    One day, I’ll be strong enough to grow my circle of action further in to my circle of influence – to extend the area around my life where I can do things that have a direct impact on reducing my anxieties.  Until then I intend to push my existential anxieties in the my equivalent of the Bloom County anxiety closet, and use my energy on DOING stuff that benefits me and those around me – family, friends, community – rather than getting in to the depths of ‘The world sucks, it’s all pointless.’

    I like having the fallback of a Dandelion Break if needed, but it will be down to earth, practical worries that sends me there.

     

     

     

     

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