Play On

Walked past some down and outs yesterday, they sit on a park bench in Chelsea Green, i say they are down and out without really knowing, it's just they tend to drink beer or such first thing in the morning and look slightly ruffled, bit like me minus the beer - anyway yesterday whilst walking past at 5 in the afternoon - during a beautiful spring like moment, they were there playing guitar, harmonica and dancing, it was magical, totally magical - i would have paid for a ticket, they were talented and zesty and full of fun, clearly the credit crunch has made no difference to their state of mind.

The waiting is over

So now we know. Looking around there are people who are not waiting they are passing their time. they are serving tea, talking about their latest computer or phone, talking, blogging. I am watching them to see, one man is puzzling with a tech card, what is it? I am reading tribes, they are talking about property and tax and money. Moments of inspiration come and go, I am addicted to it. What sort am I? Is it that Darwin missed the mark? Do I just need to find my kind? The lesser spotted version only found in parks, tends to lie in a deckchair reading or staring. Not to be confused with the greater spotted variety mostly found looking down on others - who am I is the wrong question, which species of the human race am I? - I will be able to tell you soon, to define, now the waiting is over.

Why wait?

Sometimes we are made to wait. Things are so fast now that to wait is alien and rather disorienting. Surely we should be doing something, making something happen. To wait is to appear impotent and unimportant. So what can be the purpose of waiting. What is there in the wait. There is obviously an abundance of time, stretching out into the distance, there is space and then there are the demons. The demons that prey on the waiting few. Perhaps it is these demons that make waiting so difficult. After all it can't be all that time and space. We want that so much when we are busy, so it can only be the demons. The demons are quietened when we are busy they live somewhere else in someone else's mind, on someone else's shoulder. When the demons are believable they speak of penury and friendlessness and pointlessness. When they are beyond this point they whisper in the shadows things you can't understand from far away lands. They whisper devoid of usual language. So is the waiting all about seeing? What and see? See what? See when? Wait for the birds to come from another distant shore and tell you it's time, the tide is turning it's time to swim again, to be on the move, the wait is over and now you see.

How To Ride The Waves? Grace or Graze

Been through some waves over the last few years. The thing with riding waves is it's quite tiring. There's the concentration of staying the right way up, keeping your balance, the adrenal response, making you feel a bit worn out, the lows of going down perhaps never to come back up, the uncertainty of the surroundings - going up and down can be quite disorienting. There are undoubtedly the amazing highs of winning against all the odds which serve to make you stay the course. However, it's quite unimaginable when you are surfing in these high tides that others could be sitting in harbour somewhere drinking in the sunshine. It's quite shocking to think perhaps we could turn into the quiet square of blue and rest and relax. The guilt monkey looking at us amazed at our cheek for stepping off the merry go round. Perhaps that is as good a way to spend a day or even a life as surfing just because you can. So thinking about this I am not sure if it's just a response to a fatiguing set of waves and a sense of disorientation or a wisening up from experience that means you live and learn. How to enjoy life, enjoy challenge, enjoy whichever path is marked for you and yours? How to avoid being addicted to pressure and to challenge and to learn to treat these two imposters of success and failure the same. It's only Monday. Obviously the waters are deep today.

Why Categorise?

One of the problems with organising things from books, to clothes to cupboards to businesses, to schools is the first thing you have to do is put like things together in a category that unites them, this immediately drops the points of difference the uniqueness of each one because, in the case of a book, it becomes a work of fiction or non fiction, a romance or a thriller. But many thrillers are romantic and many romances are thrilling, so already things have become greyer or changed by classification. The more these categories are organised into sub categories the more difficult it is to stay away from making a judgement - this one is better than that one, because everyone wants to read between the lines when you say this one is different to that one. Because many of us care about the way others think of us, it is important to know if I choose this one it will be seen as OK or right or what would be expected of us and the perception of us. I think this is a major flaw in our intelligence system. But how to undesign it and to what purpose? Charles Darwin has given us a legacy of classifications of our surrounding natural life forms, certainly David Attenborough has now put a catalogue of lifeforms on film so we can refer to things we are interested in. Perhaps we can take these natural classifications where it is entirely impossible to say a black widow spider is better or worse than a snow leopard and put those thoughts onto schools and all agree it is entirely impossible to say if one school is better than another at a category level and perhaps parents can really understand that all schools are really different and each school is very special, just like every child we love.

Power?

If you are head to head with someone else, they are right you are right, you have a stalemate, if someone else joins in and says well actually you have a point and they have a point but really i tend to agree with you, your power increases by 2 to 1 - if more people join the discussion and more people tend to agree with you then your power increases and the other person is proved to be wrong just by the weight of numbers. But if through that period things could be unravelled and the rightness of the arguments identified would things be different? let's say each of you is making 5points and 3 of your points are good and 2 of their points are good you win - but why not just dump the bad points and move forward together? The next person joining says well i'll keep those 5 points and drop those 5 points and here are 5 points of my own and after discussion we agree only 1 point is worth keeping... how would that help keep us together rather than drive us apart? Debate.

Social Networks

There is no language. If we say social networks our mind goes to our social life, if we say business network our mind brings up work commitments. There is no language for what we are doing when we are connecting via the electronic world we have built. Like eagle-mail our ideas and thoughts soar to others that want to receive them. We are building a world of thoughtfulness, full of thoughts, we can choose our direction according to our thinking. People can join up according to their philosophy, thought leaders can get followers irrespective of their social life or their business life. I am not a socialite, a socialist, a business woman, an entrepreneur, i am just me, doing me things, saying me things, i am interested in other people who can help me think better, express better, explore better, i am interested in returning the favour and helping them achieve more, in leaving things better, in laughing and crying with people who seem to share common experiences, who are working towards an open, helpful, kind world. So we don't yet have the language to name this thing we are doing, because social networks and business networks don't begin to describe the activity.