Joe's Jottings

Author: Joe

  • To Peace….

    …and before everyone leaps up, glasses and coffee mugs in hands, and shouts ‘To Peace’ back to me, I’m not offering a toast here! I’m thinking that it’s about time we made ‘peace’ a verb.

    Henri Nouwens had this to say :

    “Did I offer peace today? Did I bring a smile to someone’s face? Did I say words of healing? Did I let go of my anger and resentment? Did I forgive? Did I love?’ These are the real questions. I must trust that the little bit of love that I sow now will be many fruits, here in this world and the life to come.”

    I read this as saying that all those things – smiles, healing, letting go of anger and resentment, forgiving and loving are all wrapped up in some way in that first phrase ‘Did I offer peace today’.

    We often define peace in terms of the absence of other things. Peace is what we have when we don’t have war or conflict; it’s when there is no noise or tumult, when there is nothing to disturb us.  Sure, we have ‘peace conferences’ designed to create peace, but even these are really about resolving the issues that lead to conflict.

    The word ‘Shalom’ – a Jewish word – is often thought to mean peace, but actually has a deeper and richer meaning.  According to Strong’s Biblical concordance,

    “Shalom means completeness, wholeness, health, peace, welfare, safety, soundness, tranquility, prosperity, perfectness, fullness, rest, harmony, the absence of agitation or discord.”

    Some of that fits with peace, but there’s an awful lot there besides!

    When Jewish people wish each other ‘Shalom’ they are packing an awful lot of good stuff in to that single word.  And it’s a word defined in things that are present, as well as things that are absent.

    I think we need to start bringing some Shalom in to our own lives and the lives of people around us. We need to start ‘peacing’ – doing peace in our day to day lives.

    For me, ‘peacing’ would be about the things from Nouwen’s quote above and the definition of Shalom. When we ‘peace’ we would be looking to bring love, healing, smiles and forgiveness.  We’d be looking to carry out actions or say words that bring about a sense of wholeness and completeness, welfare and safety.  We’d be wanting a sense of harmony and the absence of agitation or discord or conflict in relationships. And we’d be looking to do all we can to bring about a sense of peace and restfulness in a person’s life and relationships.

    As a Christian, the start of the Holy Communion part of a service is that we all give one another ‘a sign of peace’, with words along the line of ‘Peace be with you’.

    In Islam, the greeting “As-Salam-u-Alaikum” is used – (Peace be unto you”.  This is pronounced as “us-saa-laam-muu-ah-lay-kum”, if you ever want to use it.

    The world seems to get nastier and more spiteful and small minded with each passing day; perhaps we all need to start peacing – and if we can’t do it with words (after all, it might seem a bit formal to say ‘Peace be with you’ to the mail man) maybe we need to start doing it with actions.

    When we meet people, speak with people, pass people by – carry in our hearts and minds an attitude of peace and shalom.  Bear in mind whether we can give them any of the gifts listed above. And try to peace everyday.

    After all, practice makes perfect, which is itself one of those traits of Shalom.

     

  • You’ve not walked in my shoes but we use the same shoe-shop

    There’s an old story that goes something like “Never judge a man until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes; you’ll have his shoes and you’re a mile away from him!”

    OK, that’s not the real version – the original stops at the semi-colon and is a call to empathy with others. Don’t judge until you’re where they are.

    I used to be quite a believer in this saying, but in recent years I’ve come to the conclusion that the world and the people in it – even my patch of the UK, here in Sheffield – is so diverse that this saying can come come over as a bit patronising and platitudinous even if it means well.

    The recent US election and the previous Brexit referendum have brought this to my thoughts. In each case the ‘blame’ for the outcome has been placed squarely on (depending upon who you listen to) racists, xenophobes and bigots or the classic ‘blue collar’ working class who feel increasingly alienated and disenfranchised form the modern world, the political process,  and those who run it.

    I was born and raised in a small town in Nottinghamshire called Warsop. I left to go to university when I was 18, returned for a few months when I was 21, and haven’t been back for longer than a few hours at a time in the last 30 years.  My initial world view was moulded there; when I was a child I could see 5 collieries from my bedroom window, and the career prospects for most young men seemed to be ‘go down the pit – there are plenty to choose from’.

    Of course, that all changed in the 1980s and I saw Warsop change like many small villages and towns; the pits closed, to be replaced (nowadays) by large warehousing or light industrial or agri-business at a minimum wage.  The recent furore over the Shirebook facility of JB Sports (just a couple of miles form Warsop) sums up a lot of what’s happened in such places.

    Closer to home there are places like the Dearne Valley, where the steel works and collieries are now closed, and again a similar pattern of low skill, low wage business has taken root, with a larger number of unskilled and semi-skilled workers coming in from the EU to do some of the work.

    In the Brexit vote, Mansfield, the nearest town to Warsop, voted 70% for Brexit.   The ‘Dearne Valley’ has parts that border on Barnsley, Doncaster and Rotherham – all of which voted for Brexit with an ‘out’ vote of above 65% in each place.

    This is one of those very unscientific analyses that would get me kicked out of the political statisticians club, but would seem to reflect that feeling that those who feel that they’ve been let down in recent years voted for Brexit.  Whether as a slap in the face to the political elites, a wish for change or a genuine feeling that the EU was to blame for their predicament isn’t so certain.  And in the US, people in the ‘rust belt’ states supported Trump because he offered the prospect of change. I remember years ago hearing many states away from either coast and the Chicago area referred to as the ‘flyover states’ by people who’d probably describe themselves as liberals.  They were the states you flew over when you were going to somewhere that mattered.

    I’m a middle class professional but have seen rates in my line of work ‘chased to the bottom’ as people cut their rates to win business away from low price contract bids from places like India, Eastern Europe and Russia and China. The true impact of globalization is not just that Christmas comes on 3 container ships from China; it’s that a lot of our jobs in manufacturing and increasingly service based businesses go to other parts of the world as well.

    I’ve not walked a mile in the shoes of someone I grew up with in Warsop, but I have been shod in the same shoe-shop. I know what it’s like to feel your way of life and professional life threatened by ‘market forces’ that you can’t compete with, and that the major political parties seem unable or unwilling to acknowledge such fears and changes.

    Lots of folks are drawing comparisons with the years of the great Depression and the rise of Fascism in Europe; I beg to differ; the EU already has many aspects of a corporatist state and it may well be that isolationism may be the best way for the UK to actually avoid being drawn closer in to it.

    I can empathise with those who feel disenfranchised and alienated. I can empathise with the desire for change. It’s now up to politicians of all colours to realise that the model of the last 30 years is now broken here in the west, and that we need new solutions – a few new shoe-shops, please.

  • Due Diligence….

    My reading habits – OK, I tend to read everything that’s put in front of me, from books to the backs of toothpaste tubes – lead me in to all sorts of places.  As part of my daily spiritual development I often read essays / blog posts from a number of Christian websites, and today encountered the following phrase:

    a diligent person must learn to be neglectful

    If you’re interested, the article it came from is here.  It’s quite an eye-opener, isn’t it?  I have to say that when I read it I did a little re-take and then started thinking.

    What does the word diligence mean? It’s probably one of those words which we all have a similar but slightly different meaning for.  It’s one of those old words which carries with it a hint of adult responsibility and legalism.  We speak of being diligent in our duties and responsibilities; we have phrases like ‘due diligence’ that have special meaning in law and business.  But what does the word actually mean?

    The best (to me) definition I found was :

    constant and earnest effort to accomplish what is undertaken; persistent exertion of body or mind.

    I also learned that diligence is one of the seven heavenly virtues.

    I should also point out that in much of what I do I am probably less than diligent. I can be diligent when I want to be or need to be, but let’s say it’s one of those aspects of my character that is still under development and, given that I’m now 55 years old, is likely to continue to be a work in progress.

    To some degree I guess that if we do what we plan to do we’re all capable of being diligent.  Constant and genuine effort, exerting the body and mind over time and repeatedly.  The ‘persistent’ part of that definition is probably where I fall down – I’m usually capable of being diligent for a while but then what I call the ‘Oooh….squirrel’ moment occurs when I get distracted. Within this definition is also the idea of ‘focus’ – keeping at it, not being distracted by those squirrels or your phone or your social media feeds.

    And then we have that phrase I found earlier this morning :

    a diligent person must learn to be neglectful

    How does this all gel together?

    I need to be neglectful of my social media when I’m being diligent about doing something else.  I need to be neglectful of those distractions. I need to be neglectful of the niggling worries and anxieties that I may have brought to the desk with me when I started to write this piece so that I may be best able to exercise that ‘constant and earnest effort to accomplish what is undertaken’.

    I’m currently attempting to be diligent with my writing – I’ve sent a time in my diary for each day at which point I will do 30 minutes of writing.  It’s a test of my own self-discipline and a desire to get creating again after some years of neglect. The diligence I’m exhibiting has positive behaviours for me to engage in – a set time, set place, stay there writing until the 30 minutes is up.  And it has things to ignore – or neglect – no social media, no faffing about getting tea or going to the loo, ignore the day job, ignore the money worries.

    I think that being diligent involves a picking up and a laying down of things. The word diligence has a weight about it – perhaps it’s worth regarding it as a habit that can be practiced for and hopefully attained, at least to start with in small doses around certain aspects of our lives.  Being diligent in all we do would be great but I think for me, right now, un-achievable.  But if I can exhibit diligence in 30 minutes of writing here at my desk, I can also exhibit diligence in how I answer my emails at work, how I approach my daily errands, how I find new work. As the article I read pointed out, there’s a scriptural take on diligence which I also need to take on board!

    Maybe ‘neglectful diligence’ is something we can all practice under a less loaded name.  Perhaps it’s the same as ‘focus’.

    And on that, I need to diligently save this article and write for another 10 minutes.

     

     

  • FOMO and FOHMO

    As always, late to the picnic, but I recently encountered the acronymn FOMO. It’s not a new type of washing powder, but short for Fear Of Missing Out.  It’s defined in Wikipedia as :

    Fear of missing out or FoMO is “a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent”. This social angst is characterized by “a desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing”.

    Some commentators and researchers have laid the blame for FOMO firmly at the door of social media – http://time.com/4358140/overcome-fomo/ – and I think that they’re probably spot on the money. I know from my own experiences that it’s easy to portray a totally different lifestyle on Facebook than actually happens.  One gets to be able to interpret the status posts you sometimes see : “Another Saturday evening partying hard.” translates to “After watching Strictly I went out but couldn’t get in any clubs. I ended up drowning my sorrows sitting on the kerb outside the cheap off-license”

    I’ve been lucky – I think I’ve a bunch of friends on facebook who put over quite an accurate view of the world they inhabit.  Maybe they’re all as ‘stay at home’ as I am, or maybe they’re mature enough to not have to post every aspect of their lives online to try and create envy.

    It started me thinking about whether a similar phenomenon existed when I was a teenager and a young adult, and I THINK that it probably did.

    It was the Monday morning debrief, when you got together with friends and colleagues and actually talked about the weekend just gone.

    It was the stories you told when you met friends about what you did the last time you were out without them – often exaggerated, frequently for comic effect, occasionally to big yourself up.  The concept of ‘what happens in Vegas (or more likely Skegness) stays in Vegas was not stated; discretion (at least amongst my friends) seemed to be expected.

    I think it’s safe to say that FOMO doesn’t bother me anymore; I think it did once upon a time, and even now there are the occasional times when I see a social media post and think ‘You could have invited me’ or ‘I wish I’d been there’. I have seen posts where people are doing something of a ‘party hop’ to ensure that they get to multiple events that are taking place at the same time – definitely the ultimate in FOMO generated behaviour!

    No, I think as an older man I’ve noticed a new source of angst in recent years, but one that I think I can keep under control.  And it’s probably as old as the hills, in one form or another – FOHMO.

    Fear Of Having Missed Out – that feeling you get when you see younger folks that you know taking part in social activities that are now past you due to your age, or that you’d have loved to have done when you were that age but that didn’t actually exist!  I think it’s related to the things that lead to mid-life crises, which are never good to have.

    FOMO and FOHMO are both polite ways of saying ‘envy’ – the difference is that FOHMO is you being envious of things and situations you can never have; FOMO has within it the possibility that by keeping in touch, keeping watching the statuses, hopping from event to event you can become one of the ‘in crowd’, the social elite of your world.  FOHMO has within it the past tense; it’s gone, that’s it. You can break yourself against it but the bottom line is that if you suffer from FOHMO you’re on a hiding to nothing as you’re basically railing against lost time – and hence your age.

    My name is Joe; I’m an occasional sufferer from FOHMO; I hope to soon grow out of it!

  • The girl with the parasol

    I’m a bit of a film buff – probably not as much as I once was but I love old films, and unsurprisingly Citizen Kane is up there in my list of favourites.

    There’s a scene in there which I’ve always loved – it’s between the reporter researching the life of Charles Foster Kane and Mr Bernstein, one of Kane’s business colleagues. Of much more importance than the sparse information that Bernstein gives about Kane, is the following monologue:

    “A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn’t think he’d remember. You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn’t see me at all, but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.”

    I used this as the start of a sermon recently (I’m a lay Reader in the Church of England – you might like to take a look  here…) about the importance of memory.  I’m often staggered by the way in which tiny incidents seem to stick in our minds – I’m one of these folks who can barely remember my own phone number, but a tiny event from 40 years ago will often spring in to my thoughts as if it had happened 5 minutes ago.  Maybe it’s the onset of dementia – I don’t know.  But I expect ALL of us have our own ‘girl with the parasol’ –  a person that may have engaged us for but a few moments but that we remember for decades afterwards with such strong memories that they can generate powerful emotions.

    I wonder whether these moments are some sort of pivot point in our lives? A point at which we came to a significant fork in the path and had a split second to make a decision. And somehow, our sub-conscious mind, or God’s grace, or the collective unconscious of the world puts a marker in the page of our lives and says ‘Well, you might not have realised it, but THIS moment was very significant”

    Would Bernstein’s life have been different had he somehow managed to leap back to shore and catch up with the girl? Could he have come back at the same time over several days to see whether she showed up again? Or does that way lead to obsession?

    Or when we have these moments, are we getting some sort of insight in to how important this person would have been to us had a different path been taken prior to that split second?

    I have no idea. Maybe our desire for control over our lives stretched backwards in time as well.  Perhaps we look through our life and try to spot those moments when our future would be defined by a few seconds of at the time apparently chance and subtle events. Science Fiction writers are keen to take us to those BIG moments in time and say ‘What if…’ – What if Kennedy had survived the assassination attempt (take a look at Stephen King’s 11/22/63 as an interesting take on this idea) or if Hitler had not invaded Russia? I guess that we can easily see that such events might have a massive impact across the world and on lives, but what about the ‘small stuff’?

    I think that it might be the small stuff of our lives – things like the meetings and near misses indicated by our ‘girl with the parasol’ moments – that are often the most influential. Like steering a massive container ship, a small tweak might not seem like much when it happens, but 40 years later a whole life pattern has been changed.

    Maybe when we remember those split seconds, we’re getting to see the highlights of our journey.

    Just don’t get any ideas about building time machines and fixing things differently – we don’t know where we’ll end up!

     

     

  • Hope springs eternal…

    One of my favourite films is ‘The Shawshank Redemption’. There are a number of reasons for this – one is that I’m a big fan of the novella it’s based on – ‘Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption’ by Stephen King.

    The story was originally published in a book of 4 stories called ‘Different Seasons’. Each story had a subtitle based on a season.  If you’re interested, the other stories were ‘Apt Pupil’ – subtitled ‘Summer of Corruption’, ‘The Body’ – eventually filmed as ‘Stand By Me’, with the subtitle ‘Fall from Innocence’ and the final story was ‘the Breathing Method’, subtitled ‘A Winter’s Tale.

    And ‘Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption’?  That was the story for spring, with the subtitle ‘Hope Springs Eternal’.  And that is another reason why I love this film – because it is about hope in a major way. Indeed, one of my favourite quotations about hope comes from this film:

    “hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”

    I’m a Christian, and in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, there’s the lovely line ‘These three remain; faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.’.  Well, I sometimes beg to disagree with Paul – sometimes I think the greatest thing we can have is hope, especially in times like the ones we’re living through right now.

    This is the closest thing you’ll get from me to a comment about the Paris terror attacks.  I’m not a soldier, not an intelligence operative, policeman, counter-insurgency specialist or witness. Anything I say about the attacks would be second hand – gleaned from mainstream or social media – and I have no answers.

    I want to comment more about the reaction of people; I think it was barely 24 hours after the attacks when someone pointed me at a video someone had put together as to why the whole thing was somehow related to the Illuminati and the Knights Templars. (King Phillip IV of France suppressed the Templars – to whom he owed money – on Friday 13th October 1307)  As Saturday unfolded, I was regaled with ‘the truth’ from all and sundry on the wilder regions of social media – it was an inside job, it was the Jews / CIA / NSA / Boy Scouts (one of those was made up…), it was fault of the refugees in Calais, like Charlie Hebdot the attacks were stage managed (I assume the dead bodies are all some sort of dummies, or is the french government now slaughtering it’s own people?) There’s also the expected reaction from the bigots of ‘Throw out all the refugees and close the borders’, which is interestingly counterpointed by the conspiracy theorists with ‘Ahhh…the EU WANTS the refugees coming in to allow them to blame them for terrorist attacks and hence bring in more totalitarian measures…’  Oh, and it’s all been done to start WW3.

    My take on this whole thing right now is that people are dead – and this week it’s been Beirut and Baghdad as well (whether those attacks were part of the same conspiracy or not I don’t know)  – and that the rest of us need to have some sort of hope that things will get better.  Does the whole conspiracy thing – with it’s endless proselytizing of unproveable ‘truths’ – give hope to anyone? I don’t think it does.  I’ve written on this blog before about this issue – 3 years ago – and it’s sad that nothing changes – here’s the previous posts, and I don’t intend to re-hash my thinking….

    Oops Apocalypse – or get a fricking grip
    Whoops! No Apocalypse!
    Seven of Nine and the Illuminati

    I think that it causes despair. I think the active conspiracy theorists are at best overly imaginative or suffering from problems with fact finding and elucidating cause and effect. At worst they’re just plain evil, and a major problem.  There are undoubtedly some conspiracies around – but sometimes, most of the time, Occam’s Razor Rules.

    A friend put it well today “the thoughts and attitudes of people that I like and love even more scarey than the awful things that are happening in the world“.  When folks you regard as good, intelligent people start spouting this crap, or start becoming bigoted fascists, or start losing their common humanity – what do you do?

    On Facebook today I posted:

    “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” – Fred Rogers

    Today is a day to be a helper for humanity. Be compassionate, hug your friends, bury a few grudges, share food with family, pray, meditate, kill your hate.

    Be good to yourself. I’m engaging with the world for a while as social media is going to be full of anger, hate, conspiracy theories and bigots, and I just don’t need that right now.

    Peace.

    I think I should have added…be a hoper. Keep that good thing alive. Don’t succumb to despair.

    This morning as I pondered this stuff, I looked out of my study window and to my great pleasure saw a rainbow arcing across the sky.  That was a hopeful sign.

     

  • I think I’m officially decrepit…

    The other evening I dropped in to the local Asda on the way home from the office in order to purchase the stuff that I was advised at my ‘Well Man’ appointment this morning to avoid; bread, danish pastries, sausage rolls…the stuff that makes life life and not existence…

    Anyway, there is a problem with the way in which shelves in the fridge are filled up; they’re so tightly stuffed that it’s almost impossible to get things out. Whether this is a genuine problem with the shelving process or whether it’s a further symptom of my inability to cope with the modern world, I have no idea, but for whatever reason I decided that I could extract a a pack of Enchiladas one handed.

    I realised that this was an error of judgment on my part when I managed to extract the Mexican fast food goodness…and break the front of the shelf off as well. I decided that two hands would be required to put the store back together before I was ejected for vandalism, and as I was putting my basket down to wrestle the 4 foot shelf facing back in to position, a young woman took the end of the shelf fitting that I wasn’t holding and started to help me put it back on the shelf.

    Between us we managed to get the shelf re-assembled, with a little banter and chat. I thanked her profusely and she said ‘Well, it looked like you needed some help with it….’

    There you have it; I’m 54 years old, a geek, and being labelled as unable to re-assemble a plastic supermarket shelf by a woman half my age.  At least she didn’t add ‘Things get more difficult as you get older, don’t they….’  I think I’m on the down hill slope to dusty death.

    I encountered her a couple more times whilst I shopped, and whilst we acknowledged each other she didn’t need to check that I was able to manage the basket…

    I have since decided to rescue my dented self-image by thinking that she may have been flirting with me. However, the sensible part of my brain suggests that that WOULD be the sign that I was losing it, and having delusions….

    Now where’s my Werther’s Originals…

  • Michael Meacher – another of the old school leaves us

    I was sad today to hear of the death of Michael Meacher, left wing Labour MP for Oldham West and Royton. He was one of the last of the ‘old school’ Labour politicians who showed true Socialist conviction, having been first elected in 1970 and serving under Harold Wilson, Jim Callaghan and Tony Blair, and was once even suggested as a possible Labour Leader.

    I remember Neil Kinnock referring to Mr Meacher as ‘Tony Benn’s Vicar on Earth’, such was the latter’s support for the left wing firebrand. He was also a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, being one of the Labour MPs who nominated and supported JC at the start of his campaign to become leader of the Labour Party.

    That he died so soon after the election of a party Leader that he admired and supported wholeheartedly is a great and sad irony, but it isn’t the only irony around the timing of his death…

    In late 1985, the BBC broadcast one of the finest thrillers they ever produced ‘Edge of Darkness’.  If you’ve never seen it, treat yourself and try and find it online or on a DVD – well worth 6 hours of anyone’s life, and still astonishingly relevant.  In it, a detective investigates the death of his daughter, murdered when she finds out that Plutonium is being stockpiled illegally in an underground facility in Yorkshire owned by a massive US energy company.

    Meacher plays himself at a political meeting, speaking on environmental issues. And I’m sure he’d appreciate the irony of his death on the day on which the British Government allowed a foreign power to take a substantial degree of control over parts of our nuclear industry…

     

     

  • Mid-life crisis? Don’t mind if I DON’T…

    I’ve recently concluded that I couldn’t handle a mid-life crisis.

    midlife-crisis

    Apart from the fact that I would have had to have had an arithmetically accurate mid-life crisis about 14 years ago, I just don’t think I’m cut out for the role and nor do I want to be, if this list of behaviours is anything to go by.

    The NHS describes a mid-life crisis as follows:

    “A male midlife crisis can happen when men think they’ve reached life’s halfway stage. Anxieties over what they’ve accomplished so far, either in their job or personal life, can cause a period of depression. In men, this usually happens between the ages of 35 and 50, and can last for up to 10 years.”

    So in principle I still have time – I could start at 50 and not finish to 60!

    To be serious, I probably had a mid-life breakdown in the late 1990s, picked myself up in late ’98 and then spent the last 15 years or so just getting on with life.  I have to admit that I’ve done a few of the things on that list, and would have liked to have done a few more, but I have to say that having gotten to 54 I’m delighted to still be alive, with a job, with a roof over my head and with most bits in working order.  I’ve occasionally joked that I’ve been kept on the straight and narrow through life by debt, a sense of duty, lack of imagination and laziness….but seriously, I actually LIKE how I’m turning out as I’m getting older!

    I’m something of a fan of Jung, and he had wise words on the subject of aging:

    “Jung’s view was that the second half of life must not be governed by the principles of the first half of life; that the afternoon of life is just as full of meaning as the morning, only its meaning and purpose are different.”

    This has been a really useful approach for me to take – I have to say that from about 45 onwards I’ve been more inward looking.  There have been odd wobbles – I think like most people I sort of think that I might be missing out on more exciting stuff ‘out there’ (I’ve another blog post on that particular topic brewing, so watch this space) – but when I sit down and think about stuff, I actually realise that I am quite content. I’d like a bit more money, and a bit more security….but mainly so I can carry on peering inwards.

    Well…peering inwards…and outwards.  I’m a trainee reader with the Church of England, and it struck me that I might actually be having my crisis after all. As Christians we’re told to cast our cares on Jesus – and maybe that’s what I’ve been doing.

     

  • Ideas mean shit…it’s doing it that counts!

    product-ideas

    In my last post I described how my mortality had snuck up on me and dumped a rather large poo in my living room in the fact that in 15 years time I’ll be pushing 70.  See here for my thoughts…they have some relevance to the origin of this post.

    I carried on thinking about 30 years ago – and back in 1985 I’d just moved to Sheffield and was living a mile from where I live now; I was doing a lot of writing for various computing and electronics magazines – this was pre-Internet, and pre-Email for most of us. Writing and publishing articles involved wordprocessing the copy, adding a separate sheet with drawings or diagrams on – if you needed photos you had to get 10×8 prints, or slides, and then sending the whole lot off to the magazine editor (or if things were desperate, you faxed them…)  Some magazines were quite advanced – you could actually send stuff on floppy disc or cassette tape as well!

    I just had a look through the magaines piled up here at Pritchard Towers and realised I was producing about 1 or 2 pieces a month for different magazines.  And those were the days when you got paid for writing…soemtiems the editors would ring up and say ‘Can you do 1000 words on xxxxx’ or ‘There’s a box going to be delivered to you tomorrow – it’s a Bambleweeny 350-Z with extra Zoinks – can you write me a review by Friday?’

    I didn’t quite imagine my editors with bottles of scotch in the desk drawer, but it sometimes felt like that.   The odd thing was I never seemed to be short of ideas. I occasionally worried about not having ideas, but was usually able to deliver on demand.

    As well as writing articles, I also did books, and by the mid-1980s I was producing a technical book at the rate of about 1 every 10 months or so – these were practical programming guides, and I was also writing short stories ‘for fun’. The ideas that I couldn’t use immediately got written down for future use.  And so it is that I have a yellow manilla folder in my filing cabinet drawer, dated 1986, that contains drawings, notes, chapter list, book outline, clippings, some photographs, photocopies…everything I need to get started on a book project.  And yet…despite the interest I had in that idea…I never got it started.

    I must have opened that file up every 6 months for the last 29 years. I have seen 3 other books published by other authors with reasonable success that skirted the topic of my idea, and I watch the publisher’s lists for similar stuff. If I see anything, I get worried…but I still haven’t felt motivated enough in all those years to do something with this project.  I think that I’d like to do it, but clearly something stops me.

    And it’s not just this one off; I have a little pile of half finished good ideas and at least one idea that had I taken it to market at the time I had it would have made me a fair amount of money.  Ideas have definitely never been a problem for me. It’s actually doing something with them….

    I hope that my recent ponderings on my mortality will kick me up the arse and get me motivated!

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