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People are people because of other people

An unknown flower, Madeira 2017

People are people because of other people.

Ndebele saying

I love this quote. It comes from the Ndebele tribe in the north-eastern part of South Africa and was quoted by Bryce Courtenay in his story in the Lonely Planet’s Better than Fiction travel writing collection.

Courtenay goes onto explain that ‘Translated, this simply means that we only recognize and get to know ourselves, who and what we are and may become, by the presence, experiences and observations of other people.’

The other night, my father poured me a glass of whisky

And amid a longer conversation, he expressed his discomfort with correcting my writing, and I found myself wanting to laugh at him. Because of my work, I find myself constantly providing corrections to people’s language. I have done a fair amount of red penning my father’s texts. Heavy-handedly. I tend to ignore his ego and get on with stating my thoughts. If he’s asked me for my opinion, then I’m going to give him it. Obviously, there’s a difference between criticizing and providing constructive criticism and I wouldn’t want him to feel that a criticism of his word choice was a criticism of him.
Sometimes, of course, we get a bit defensive and blur the distinction between the criticism of our work and ourselves. This isn’t unusual. Some people aren’t ready to receive criticism of their work because they have confused the two and need to first develop better recognition of the value of themselves before they can embrace feedback. Sometimes in teaching, corrections are ignored because accuracy isn’t the imminent goal. There are times when, as a teacher, I will encourage a student to keep producing language regardless of its accuracy because they need to build confidence and get used to the sound of their own voice.

When my father expressed his discomfort at correcting my writing, I smiled at him and tried to explain that his feedback (even when it was negative) was valuable to me. I wasn’t going to be offended because he points out I’ve used a word entirely wrongly or that my sentence doesn’t make sense. I’m not going to hold it against him if he provides criticism constructively.

Providing feedback that’s actually helpful isn’t always easy

What doesn’t work is a vague adjective describing what isn’t likeable about my personality, anything that comes from a place of defence rather than care, anything that comes from a place of jealousy – and pointing out my spots. That much I’m sure of. Some cultures are more direct about feedback, others create indirect ways of getting the message across, but we have to get feedback from each other to grow. Imagine a student whose teacher never provides feedback. How much are they ever going to learn? How well are they going to be motivated?

People are people because of other people

We grow and learn who we are through the interactions we have with the people around us. We need people to learn from and understand ourselves through. Other people show us who we are, and I’m a firm believer in the value of being self-aware.

Feedback wholeheartedly welcomed.

How being crap at meditation is beside the point

A chap messaged me recently because he’d read what I’d said about my ‘bullet train’ mother, and he wanted to know more.

And since I am not an expert at meditation and all that, (although yes, I do it daily), I asked my mother, who happened to be visiting me in Spain. I created a mega mind-map, and this has resulted from that conversation. I wrote it, the mother edited it, and here it is.

From a walk with the Mother over the easter holidays. Spain, April 2019.

Travelling means bumping into other travellers

This week there’s a woman staying in the house with me, another Brit, another fed up soul who decided that the office didn’t suit her. She’s on her journey and I’m on mine, and for a week or two our paths run parallel.

The inevitable exchange of stories took place. Not where and who and what – although we dropped some place names and mentioned some activities and described some memorable characters – but the story about how we each became who we are, and how we’re going to become the people that we will be.

And it’s these people, running parallel, sometimes for a long time, sometimes a short time, who feed us with stories, who open our minds, who influence where we go.

And this woman, a yoga teacher, is one of the many who have reaffirmed that my journey involves meditation.

In this article, I’m going to talk about how meditation fits within my life:

  1. I’m going to talk about what I do on a bad day
  2. Then I’m going to talk about having a formal foundation
  3. Finally, I’m going to speak about how being crap at meditation is beside the point

To begin, I want you to imagine I’m having a bad day

My head is whirring. I’m thinking all the thoughts I shouldn’t. I feel small and vulnerable and helpless, yet at the same time as if I must act now. I crave the reassurance of busyness and chocolate cake. No… give me chocolate cake on the move. And yet, if I had chocolate cake, I would be bewildered by it, and were I to move, I’d end up going in circles.

On occasion I seem to lose all my marbles and I have no idea who I am or what I am doing. It’s possible I’m not the only person who does this, maybe there are other people as dramatic as me out there.

So feeling terrible, I lay down. On the floor. And I breath. First out, then in, but slow, gentle, soothing breaths. Like the air is caressing my insides. And I don’t bother moving. I want to, but I know it would only make things worse. It would fuel the need for more movement which, in turn, would make me more likely to break things or upset people. Plus, when I’m overwhelmed, my body has an awkward habit of giving in anyway, I become dysfunctional.

So instead of moving, I focus on breathing

Exhalation follows inhalation, one after another. I let the manic thoughts dance through my brain, kicking their legs up in a conga line until my mind begins to quieten down.

I stay there, lying on the floor, until I have felt calmness in my mind, a period of tranquillity, and then I lie there a bit longer. Now though, I begin to let myself plan what I will do when I stand up. More Cuban dancing starts up, and I let that die down, breathe, and then return to my planning.

I wait until I have a solid plan

That means I know where I’m going to move, how I’m going to move and why I’m moving. Only then do I let myself sit up. I take my pulse, check it’s normal, and breathe-in, breathe-out, repeat a few times. The pulse checking is an oddity that came about from the PTSD, but it does make me more aware of how my stress affects my body. Once I’m happy that I have a sensible heart rate, a plan and steady breathing, I stand up.

If you aren’t as bananas as me, maybe your mind doesn’t flake out with such drama. Maybe you can continue (or at least sustain yourself) through the overwhelm? But what with my amygdala having a trauma shaped dent in it, my brutal truth is, I can’t.

There’s no point pretending otherwise

If necessary, I would lay down on the floor multiple times a day, building up space within my mind. Much of what trauma taught me is wrapped up in this idea of getting myself lined up for what I want to do next. Now I can generally calm my mind much quicker. Now I am better prepared to go after bigger goals.

But I get the fundamentals back in place first. Yes, it sounds odd, but when I was fighting trauma, and things were particularly rough going, I did need to fight for the fundamentals. I don’t think people place high enough value on them.

Which is why having a system for emergencies is all well and good

But it’s not enough. You want car insurance before you drive into the lamp-post. As you want a foundation in meditation before life has a hiccup or big, unanswerable question starts to grow in your mind.

I believe that regular formal meditation helps

After much reading, I’m convinced that it strengthens my mind in such a way that I can be less reactionary and more deliberate in my actions. My mother has a wonderful formal meditation practice, whereas mine is less disciplined. I tend to, but not always, meditate before bed, seated, with a straight back, bum raised on a cushion, on my bed. I can meditate for hours if I have people around me, for example on a retreat, but in my own bedroom, with distractions abound, I sometimes find ten minutes to be hard work.

What though do those ten minutes look like?

Once comfortable, I either set a timer, or start an audio track, or load up a video. Then I stay there, fidgeting as little as possible, until the timer goes off or the media ends. If, when I sit down, I know I’m going to have a hard time concentrating, I make sure that I either have a guided meditation playing, or a sing-a-long meditation. My sing-along meditation involves repetitive finger movements. These stop me fidgeting. And the instructions in guided meditations (such as Headspace) were particularly useful when I first started.

When it’s me and the egg-timer (and yes I might peek at it every now and again if I’m bored) I sit and observe my breath. Every breath in, every breath out.

It’s easy, isn’t it

Sit down, observe yourself breathing for a while, done.

Or maybe not. You’ve found a cushion, sat down, noticed your breathing and then, you find yourself thinking. Your mind is sabotaging your efforts. Which brings me to my final point…

Being crap at meditation is irrelevant

Sometimes, we run around because we’re scared of what might happen when we stop. The more scared we get, the faster we run.

When we stop thoughts explode in our minds, we realise that we’re feeling things that moments before we were oblivious to. Our organised life loses clarity. Uncertainty builds. Are we doing this right? Is this what happens for other people?

These thoughts are discomforting, and to ease discomfort, if you’re anything like me, you desire action. You want results!

(Exclamation mark there belongs to the Mother.)

You need to do something. Anything. Now.

And feeling this urge and letting it pass ain’t easy. Perhaps we feel it should be, because we’re not doing anything. Yet it’s not.

Our brains like things to be at an equilibrium

They spend much of their energy making sure that when we’re hungry, we eat; when we’re tired, we sleep; when we’re cold, we put on a jumper. Whatever our norm, our brains and bodies try to maintain it. However, when you start a meditation practice, you begin a journey of change. Your defence goes to full alert. Sirens sound. Your brain is going to fight hard to make sure that its equilibrium is kept.

Even if your equilibrium happens to be sending you to an early grave.

Maybe you practice for some time and then your brain says no

It doesn’t want to right now. It’s too busy. It feels like you have no choice. You tell yourself that if only you had time, you’d do it, but you’re very busy, too busy. There are other, more important things to do than meditate. There’s no time. Wait… is that the truth? There’s not ten minutes in the day where you can sit still? No, maybe that one’s a lie. Maybe, you can’t face the idea of sitting down, still, doing nothing. Not a nice truth, but better than a lie. Anyway, you don’t want to. So you don’t.

Your brain is so used to being full that it’s become comfortable that way. It wants to maintain that fullness, it isn’t happy about having space in there, let alone awareness. Your brain’s doing very well at keeping you safe by hiding you from all that awareness of what you feel.

So you struggle.

 ‘Cause you’re normal

And you signed up to becoming a tranquil person. You wanted your stress-reduced in a proven-by-scientists method. The free health supplement. You didn’t think about how this would mean living, for months and months, years perhaps, on the edge of your comfort zone, in a place of change.

You thought it was sitting and breathing

Inhale, exhale.

You thought it was something you did

It’s not. It’s something that happens to you, in you, whilst you’re building the space for it to take place.

You thought it was private

And it’s not. Because whilst you may sit cross-legged in a locked room, the fact that you are changing is going to affect everyone around you. Sooner or later, you’re going to stop being quite as predictable in your reactions as you once were. You’re going to have a little more space between the BAM of an event and your RARH of a reaction, and this may make some of the people around you uneasy. They’re expecting an instant RARH.

But as you progress with meditation you start to realise that things don’t stay the same, they are always changing.

Meanwhile, you may still sit down and, by accident, find yourself planning a holiday

Or writing a complaint, imagining an argument with the neighbour, sobbing, fidgeting, trying to roll your rr instead of singing the mantra, slumping against the wall, cheating yourself out of the last thirty seconds, starting the timer before you’ve settled, or whatever.

That’s the embarrassing truth of meditation. Sometimes your brain is like a monkey. However, and of course there’s a huge ‘however’ here, if you stick at it regardless of what happens, you do change.

And one day, when you’re least expecting it, someone will say something that makes you stop. Something sweet, like they wish they could live more in the moment, aware of what goes on around them, more like you.

So in summary (because as I said, we’re practicing writing articles here):

  1. On a bad day, I lay down until I have a solid plan.
  2. But meditation isn’t a quick fix, you need to build a solid foundation.
  3. And building that foundation can be a strange and uncomfortable process. Change always feels a bit weird.

But it’s worth it

You remember how, at the beginning, I said that the traveller passing though my life this week and I exchanged stories: the stories about how we each became who we are, and how we’re going to become the people that we will be. Meditation has been part of these stories, and it’s clear, when we listen to each other, that the change it has brought has helped us craft the lives we want.

And keeps on doing so.

As for the chap who wrote to me, what I say is this, get your bum on a chair, or on the floor, and start practicing.

Start today.

Lessons from my mother – part two: People don’t stay the same

We spent quite a while staring at the changing landscape here. The rock worn away by the river, the man-made dam, the broken bridge… Comunidad Valenciana, February 2019.

A few weeks back I found myself having a drink with an acquaintance, who turned out to be a reader of tarot cards.

I have a literary fascination with tarot cards, by which I mean I love a bit of magic realism sprinkled into literature and so my tarot card knowledge comes almost entirely from Chocolat (and the sequel the Lollipop Shoes) by Joanne Harris, and one of the Philippa Gregory historical fiction novels which touches upon the life of Joan of Arc.

So later that evening, quietly, I asked if I could possibly see the tarot cards for myself. Sate my curiosity. Which is how, in a mixture of English and Spanish (for the session was conducted in Spanish but I was instructed to think in English) I learnt that things in my life would change, in a good way, but not in the expected way. And that I apparently have issue with the patriarchy…

Which perhaps means nothing, but at the same time did get me thinking about how people change.

In the last article I wrote about meditation and how I’d slowly, and reluctantly, gone from random commitments to meditation to a more consistent approach. And that this idea of daily practice, had impacted my daily routine, forcing it to change.

Now I’m going to start part two of ‘things I learnt from my mother’ by looking at the early hours of that daily routine.

I have never been good at mornings

Going back a bit it used to be that I was simply grumpy in the mornings. Having a strong cup of coffee didn’t seem to help much. The only cure for my grumpiness was time, and so I simply got on with accepting myself as a grumpy morning person. My dressing-gown through my teenage years read ‘grumpy but gorgeous’ on the back, but I can assure you that in the early hours of the day, weighed down with so much grumpiness, I am far from gorgeous.

Things hardly improved at university and got progressively worse when I had a 9-5 job. Except my job was 9:30 to 6:30 because there was no paid lunch break and my boss recognised that it would be better for all concerned if I was given the extra half-an-hour to become more humane.

My mother meanwhile considers seven o’clock to be a lay in

As a child I would wake up to discover her taking a freshly made shepherd’s pie out of the oven, although it wouldn’t surprise me because I was used to being woken by my mother’s battle with the pan cupboard long before my alarm went off.

I learnt to be a heavy sleeper.

Back home as an adult, dealing with trauma, sleep became challenging in a whole new way. In the evenings I would have to convince myself to go to sleep, knowing that I would wake up amid engrossing nightmares. At times I feared sleep. Even now I occasionally have evenings where the idea of sleep suddenly fills me with a sense of dread. Although, I also believe good sleep to be one of the best things ever.

In my darker days, in the mornings my patient mother would wake me up gently with a cup of tea and slowly I’d emerge from my dreamworld. I couldn’t force myself out of the dreams, but having that moment of being cared for early in the day really helped. It gave me something less frightening to cling to.

And slowly I got better. At which point I moved to Spain and started working again. At a school, where my first class tends to begin at 8:30am!

Which, I admit, was at first a challenge

Which is why I’m obsessive about having a strict bedtime. I used to laugh at my mother for heading to bed at half past nine, but nowadays at half past nine you are very likely to discover me in my pyjamas preparing my coffee for the next morning, whilst my house-mates contemplate what they’re going to have for dinner.

But what’s much more surprising is that by 7am I’m no longer in my pyjamas. In fact, this morning at seven I was in leggings and on my yoga mat, as I have been for the last couple of months.

Now I wish I could give a profound reason for it

I wish I could give you a sensible explanation, but the only one I have found is that I finally got fed up of starting the morning trying to bully myself into waking up. I’ve seen the mother in the morning and she too has a dazed look about her. And yet, she just gets up and starts the day and bakes shepherds pies. And by 7am she’s shook off all grumpiness.

So, having surrendered in my morning battle, I have surprised myself by discovering, I love mornings.

Which brings me to: people change

When I was in the routine of therapy, nightmares and feeling sorry for myself I could have easily become stuck in the idea that ptsd was going to be who I was forever. My psychotherapist described it as a chronic pain, something that I would carry for life.

And then the mother would put on some eighties songs and we’d be hula-hooping in the kitchen and making up silly routines, laughing at ourselves and I would forget that I was broken and miserable and instead stare at the incredible woman in front of me who had taken the place of my mother. Because the mother of my childhood did not suddenly think three o’clock in the afternoon was the time for swivelling her hips to Abba. It was for work, jobs, lists and hoovering.

My mother’s mentality isn’t to say, “Have a nice day.”

My mother says, “Have a productive day.”

But between Super Trooper and Waterloo my mother taught me an incredible lesson

People change.

And if people change, then I can too.

But the question becomes, to what?

At the same time my psychotherapist was drumming home the importance of knowing what it is I want. If you know me quite well you might think this is a bit odd because I am always doing things and am clearly quite ambitious. The difficulty I have had has been that I’m not always sure what it is I want and what it is I think I should want.

My psychotherapist suggested that I needed to practice acting on my frivolous desires. She said that if I wanted to run up the hill to the ice-cream shop and buy an ice-cream then I should run up the hill and buy an ice-cream.

I pondered this. At the time I had no income, and even now my income is erratic. I’m lactose intolerant, so I could not have a milk-based ice-cream unless I took a lactase tablet. If I were to run up the hill for an ice-cream, as my psychotherapist suggested, was I supposed to tell her I’d done it, and could I also do it combined with another task such as posting a letter.

Which, you’ll gather is missing the very valid point

When you extrapolate these analytical thoughts into the whole of life you can begin to comprehend how knowing what I want from the start is a much healthier option. Life’s to short to waste on all this meaningless analysis. Rather than trying to please everyone and then having a tantrum and being manipulative to get my subconscious needs met, I need to pull my wants out into my conscious mind and act on them.

Tomorrow I will probably practice my having what I want by passing by the bakery on the way back from the market.

These little lessons began to congeal

And I began figuring out that I didn’t have to be the person that I’d planned to be when I was fifteen but that I could be the person who I want to be today. As my mother was vibrantly demonstrating.

Pulling together all these thoughts, here’s a quick summary:

In part one I wrote about meditation, and about how having a daily practice is much healthier than an ad hoc approach.

Then in part two I discussed my history of mornings, and how coming to terms with waking up in the morning and learning to love the early hours has been a process of surrender.

And finally, I wrote about how my mother gave me belief that people can change in the cliché of ‘show not tell’. And how my psychotherapist started me along the process of knowing how it is I want to change.

Okay, I admit it, despite not believing in magic, I want my own set of tarot cards

Old-fashioned ones, softened by age and use. The rational physicist in me says not to be silly or frivolous, but the girl who was fascinated by a book on witchcraft from the school library and stories of magic-realism wants the tactile ownership of the magic for herself.

Maybe, today, there’s something frivolous you can do, just for you. Just because you want to.

I challenge you to do it.

Lessons from my mother – part one: Learning to meditate productively (i.e. like my mother, not like me)

This picture is from my time in Sicily where I was in one of my ‘meditate lots’ phases. November 2016.

My first foray into meditation was accidental

As a child I discovered an engaging tome on witchcraft in the school library.

I remember being captivated. Somewhere in the book I came across what I would now call a guided meditation. Although at the time I would have more likely described it as brain magic. So one evening, when my parents were out of the way and the house was momentarily quiet, I opened the book, settled myself on the carpet with four candles (my smoke alarm took exactly five tea-lights to set off), imaginary pets and my favourite cuddly toys and set myself to work with the enduring seriousness known to geniuses and small children.

I woke from my disorientating trance sometime later, terrified and in awe of the magical powers of my mind.

And then after returning the book to the library. I forgot all about meditation.

My mother’s first attempt to get me interested in meditation failed

Fed up of me complaining about my skin and mouth ulcers when I called her from university she sent me a CD of meditation tracks. I tried it out, figured it was wonderful. With incredible enthusiasm I lent it to a friend, who promptly had terrible nightmares. And then it was popped on the shelf where it stayed. University life came at me like a tornado and between complaining about my skin and the consequences of my ad-hoc impulsive decisions I didn’t have any time for sitting still.

Plus, my father had once said I was a meditative person anyway, so did I really need meditation.

My skin and mouth continued getting worse. Stupidly, I fought on.

Things changed though when my mother started using the Headspace app

Which she has now used daily for years and years. And at some point I cottoned on to the fact that she was changing in front of my eyes. My loving but imperfect father would say things, spiky things, designed to taunt her. My sister and I would tense at the dinner table, waiting for a sharp retort, and that sharp retort just didn’t come.

My sister and I would exchange a confused glance. My father would try again but his comment would not stick.

It seemed like overnight, although in reality it was a process of years, my mother who had been almost as emotionally explosive as me had become grounded. The more stress was poured on her, the taller she seemed to stand.

She started aging backwards

I want to just make this really clear. My mother, version a, the one I grew up with, was like a bullet train. Then the meditation thing started, and well… she’s become aware of the journey she’s taking. She’s still clock orientated, but the seconds tick by slower. Instead of snapping back at things, she’s making astute observations about how other people might feel.

By this point I’d dabbled again in meditation

I didn’t have a regular daily practice. I would start and stop. I read about meditation, tried different methods and frequently decided I was too busy or tired to bother sitting.

As with many of my activities, I would meditate intensely and then stop. I did ten days in a silent retreat and then didn’t sit again for a month. The mother meanwhile incorporated meditation into her daily routine and made it a steady daily practice.

And I was envious

Because my mother was changing before my eyes, proving that complaining and whining and emotional tantrums were unnecessary if only I practiced daily. I was buying books on meditation and she was finishing them and applying them before I’d got through the introduction.

What’s more she was doing yoga every morning. And if meditation is hard to quantify, yoga really is not. When I’m next to her on the mat and my hips don’t bend but her head’s on the floor it’s obvious that her little and often approach is so much better than mine.
Little and often also has other benefits.

There is a saying in sports, ‘too much, too soon’

In my experience, most sport injuries can be put down to people trying to change their routines too quickly. Amusingly I understood this concept easily when it came to something like running. I’m perfectly happy to spend a few weeks doing short slow runs, getting used to the terrain, to my shoes, building up the muscles in my legs, and therefore I have relatively few injuries. I know I can run 15km over the moors, because I have done, but when I first go out I aim for three and avoid the hills.

Applying the same knowledge to writing, or meditation just seemed silly.

My biggest excuse for all the things that I haven’t been practicing daily was that I was the sort of person who does bursts of intense focus

I also used to say that I wasn’t a runner. I didn’t run between the age of 13 and 23, which I though proved my point. But when I did start running (and I only initially ran to prove I couldn’t) I realised that I was wrong

For years I used to not be able to touch my toes. Today I can.

Yesterday I recognised I was getting defensive, and I stopped myself, paused and made sure my next word was ‘sorry’.

Mañana… tomorrow, next week, next month, next year. It’s so easy to put off things because it’s not who we are…

But we become the sort of person we practice being today

So today, when I woke up I proceeded through my daily practices: Spanish flashcards, photography video, yoga, writing… and the last thing before I go to bed tonight I will, as I have done all year now, meditate.

And now to quickly wrap this all up, because I’ve babbled on enough:

My mother tried to persuade me to meditate, but practicing herself is what really got me paying attention.

If bullet-train mother can slow down and find ten minutes a day to meditate then surely I can find ten minutes of my day to do the same. Even if it doesn’t feel like it’s in my nature.

We can learn the concept of ‘too much, too soon’ from sport and apply it into our daily life to balance our enthusiasm and focus instead on a regular training plan.

Nowadays, I feel ever so guilty when I feel like complaining about my skin or mouth ulcers. And when I hear others complain although I am initially frustrated, I know I need to breathe and find some compassion. There are many excuses we tell ourselves for not practicing the things we want to be good at, but in the long term you will be the person you practice being on a day-to-day basis. Not the character you take on once in a blue moon.

I might not have continued meditating from my encounter with the book on becoming a witch, and I haven’t learnt to levitate either, but I have continued the habit I set up back then of obsessively reading. It is through this incredible practice of reading that I realise I can now write the things I write.

And that obsessive reading, I guess I also picked that up from my mother…

If you haven’t tried meditating, or have once tried my CD and it gave you nightmares, I suggest experimenting a bit, there might be a meditation out there that suits your needs.

My mother highly recommends the Headspace App and Andy Puddicombe’s voice. If an app is not for you, he’s also written a book and done a TED Talk.

Finally, thanks to the Mother and Jessika for the very welcome spelling corrections…

Directing your attention towards what really matters (without resorting to a battle cry or tears)

I have a bit of an affinity for building log piles. Throwing logs around forces you to focus on what you’re doing. Otherwise, you bash your fingers.

If your ugliness was remarkable, and you lived in Milan at the end of the fifteenth century, you might have found yourself invited over for drinks with the handsome Leonardo da Vinci. He was keen to meet ugly people.

Leonardo was a gifted story-teller and could induce a plethora of emotions in you though his tales. He’d make sure you were well entertained. His stories would make you crease up with laughter. Laughter so violent your face would contort into extreme expressions.

And then, he would disappear. He’d scamper straight back to his studio, where in painstaking detail he would recreate your fantastical features into drawings designed to entertain his patron and make the Milanese court howl with laughter.

His magic came from his intense ability to focus his attention on your face. As he was telling his stories he would be observing your movements until he knew your expressions better than you’d know the expressions of your own lover.

Such intense attention isn’t something many of us are very good at. Which is a pity really, because intense attention is at the crux of a good life.

In this article I am going to skip speedily through three ideas that changed how I structure my time so that I would be more attentive (and therefore lead a better life):

  1. The relationship between happiness and attention
  2. The ‘attention residue effect’ (or why distractions are doubly bad)
  3. The aim for greatness

Let’s start.

Of the many books I have read, Flow by Mihalyi Cskiszentmihalyi might have had the biggest impact

In his book Cskiszentmihalyi talks about that elusive sensation where we are so immersed in a task that it feels almost like a different reality. We are doing something that’s difficult enough to challenge us, but at the same time is just within our abilities.

For me, painting, when it’s going well gives me some of this feeling… or writing a story, where the characters seem to be leading the way and I am compelled to follow along. Or a conversation with an old friend who knows the right questions to ask and so time disappears.

It’s in this state of activity that people report being the happiest.

This was a bit of a ah-ha moment for me, because I figured that if I could work out how to get to this ‘flow’ state, I could make myself happy more consistently.

As you might have guessed though, attention is a prerequisite for flow.

This point was hammered home again when I was reading Cal Newport’s book Deep Work

He quotes a science writer called Winifred Gallagher who after discovering she had cancer decided to put more effort into choosing what it was she was paying attention to.

Like fingers pointing to the moon, other diverse disciplines from anthropology to education, behavioral economics to family counseling, similarly suggest that the skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience.

Winifred Gallagher, author of Rapt (Quoted by Cal Newport in Deep Work)

For me this translates to setting time aside, free from distraction, to do the things I love.

So I know now that I have to fight to create a distraction free zone within my life

I have complete sympathy for the teenager at school who explained that she waits until her parents and sister have all gone to bed before getting out her books and beginning her homework and exam revision. This is obviously not an ideal situation, but it drums home how if a fourteen-year-old can make it happen, we can too.

There are small steps you can take

For me, having a meditation practice has been a great instructor. It has shown me the difference between trying to control yourself with willpower, and surrendering and accepting. Battle cries, even internal ones, are exhausting.

I also keep my phone at a distance, play dull background music and try to keep a clear desk. Little things, but each contributes to keeping me on track.

This however isn’t enough

I thought I was doing well, but in reality I was still struggling. No surprise really as the brain is terrible at separating one task from another.

When you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn’t immediately follow – a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task.

Cal Newport, Deep Work

It sounds obvious when you read it like that

Before sitting down to write this article I was listening to a podcast, and now, although a bit of time has passed, a small part of my mind is still drawn back to the ideas of the podcast. Part of me is thinking ‘how do I share this information I’ve learnt with my sister’ whilst another part of me is trying to write this article. My attention is subtly divided.

Cal Newport goes on to explain that this residue is worse if Task A was a light task that was not definitively ended… all that instant messaging is bogging down our brains. I can easily be thinking about a number of different conversations at once, but the truth is, I can’t do this and also write this article well.

I try to soften this attention residue effect with a cup of tea before I start working on a new project

Does that sound counter intuitive? Before I thought the best idea what to jump straight into the next task and not waste time. Take my tea to my desk. But now I’m beginning to think that maybe there is a benefit to ‘putting the toys away’ and having a moment of calm before starting something new.

Meditation and moments of calm might make you a little uncomfortable

And some people get a bit embarrassed by the pseudo-science and the self-help label of some of what I read, but what I’m searching for are techniques I can apply which make me better at what I do. Once I have the idea from the book, it’s time to test it.

After all, the end goal of this is that I want to do some solid work
I want my life to be meaningful. I might believe we’re just a speck of dust in an incomprehensibly large universe, but ambition resides amongst these particles of mine.

I imagine you have ambition too.

Not being mediocre, but being great is the main purpose for profound attention

The biggest theme of the Deep Work book is that if you want to be great at something, you need to spend time deliberately practicing in a focused manner at a deep level.

Which led me to my next book.

The church at Sella. Got to practice my painting!


My current read is Walter Isaacson’s biography of Leonardo da Vinci

I picked up this book not because of the artistic merit, but because Cal Newport wrote about how Walter Isaacson could fall into a deep, writerly trance and focus with incredible detail on the work he was doing at any moment. This was a skill that he picked up from his journalism career. It’s not an easy skill to muster.

Of course I was curious. I want to be able to focus intently on writing, even when my life is chaotic because I’m in the midst of travelling. However this ability requires a lot of practice. You can’t just sit down and write at this depth as a matter of willpower. You’ll just exhaust yourself trying. Instead you have to train your attention like a muscle.

I admit, I’m motivated to read the book by envy

I marvel at that crisp elegant writing style. But it’s not enough to stare at the phrasing longing for the skill. My job is to keep on creating distraction free moments for myself. I have to deliberately practice the skills that I want to acquire. With time, and deep attention, I will, inevitably, get better.

But of course, reading the book I am also envious of Leonardo himself. Let’s take the odd piece of work of his known as the Vitruvian man, the famous image of a man stood in a circle and a square, arms outstretched. And briefly look at how Leonardo’s obsessive attention managed to create the version of the Vitruvian man we recognise today.

The first thing I was amazed to learn was that Leonardo wasn’t the first man to try creating this image

It was not a novel idea. There was plenty of competition. He had multiple friends (or colleagues) working in Milan at the time, who also took an interest in the old writings of the Ancient Roman called Vitruvius and set about drawing out the proportional image Vitruvius described.

Each of them drew a man, stood with his feet touching the base of a square, head touching the top. From there though things weren’t quite the same. Some artists took the measurements of the ‘perfect man’ straight from Vitruvius’ writing. Leonardo gave the challenge more attention. He got out a tape measure and corrected the measurements, producing an image of a man with incredibly accurate proportions.

Leonardo was great because he paid such greater attention to the detail of his work

He’s great despite barely finishing anything at all. He’s great because with that power of attention he developed a incredible skill. The skill was recognised for its greatness.

And so history has picked a winner, and the version of the Vitruvian man we know today belonged to Leonardo.

And don’t we all want to be winners?

Which brings us to the end.

To quickly recap what we’ve covered here:

  1. If you want a rewarding life, you need to have skillful management of your attention.
  2. Skillful management of attention includes being aware of what we do before we sit down to work because of the ‘attention residue’ effect.
  3. Greatness typically requires committing our focus to the activity we want to be great at, probably almost obsessively so.

One last thought. Remember those ugly people? Well one of Leonardo’s ‘grotesques’, those super ugly pictures, went on to inspire the image of the vile-looking Queen of Hearts in the original illustrations of Alice in Wonderland. I find it quite formidable to think that the incredible expression of her face (I hated her image as a child) came from a real woman, living in Milan in the 1400s, and her momentary emotion has been shared now to entertain so many children.

If you enjoyed any of these ideas, you might enjoy one of the following books:

  • Walter Isaacson’s beautifully written Leonardo da Vinci
  • Cal Newport’s easy to read Deep Work
  • Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s a bit heavier, but totally worth it book simply called Flow

Or perhaps Mihalyi Csiksentmihalyi’s TED talk

Changed by a conversation and then changed again, and again, and again

An evening walk and time to reflect.

I have a delusion in my mind that life will somehow become a little simpler. It is a delusion because life does not unfold that way. Each crease brings out a more nuanced view of the world. Every person you meet complicates matters. You realize that you are more than you thought, and less than you thought, and that these two, logically contradictory thoughts are simultaneously true.

When you are child existence is only that which you can see and feel

The idea that your parents might have another life outside of you is something that creeps upon you slowly. At some point I realized that the Mother was a nurse, which was good because nurses are good, that she looked after poorly children, which is also good because looking after poorly children is good. And then, sometime a little later, these thoughts coalesced in my brain and I realized that there were other children in the Mother’s life, children who were not me or my sister, and I was jealous.

At first such a jealousy is acute. However, as time passes, whilst it remains, and will most likely always remain, it merges into something else. My mummy is a nurse. She looks after poorly children. The words circulate and embed themselves. Jealousy meets pride and the two emotions, which at first seem to point in opposite directions – I both want my mummy to be saving these poorly children and I really don’t want to share her – collide. More emotions build up, I am simultaneously happy and sad about the Mother’s other existence.

In conversations, the deep moving ones, the ones that put a course correction on our lives we often walk smack bang into these contradictions. For example, you find yourself listening to someone relaying something that it difficult to hear and whilst you are terribly uncomfortable with the listening, you appreciate being the chosen one who is trusted enough to hear.

Hearing great stories of resilience, humbly told, we realize how small our own achievements really are

Just this week I felt the shock hit through my chest as I reflected upon a recent conversation. I pride myself on my resilience, my insistence on loving my life, my determination to appreciate and be grateful for that which I have. The sensation that I felt in my chest, the shock, reminded me how many other, incredibly resilient people there are out there who don’t have things as easy as I do, who don’t have the same levels of support around them, who don’t have a strong foundation of a loving family, who have no anchor, but at the same time are carrying much heavier responsibilities.

And yet, at the same time, that conversation was a dialogue not a monologue. I had earnt that conversation by being me, by trusting, by listening, by being open to a reality that is not so splendidly shiny as we sometimes imagine life should be.

Occasionally someone walks through my life and in the process of assimilating their story, which is not just a moment of listening, but involves deeper reflection and awareness, I am changed. Conversation redirect my thinking. It’s a two-way game. Being heard gives me the confidence to take a step forward. Listening teaches me where to take that step.

A friend who listens reflects my voice back towards me

The more people we encounter and converse with like this, the more stories we immerse ourselves in, the more complex our vision of the world becomes. Through such challenging conversation we can, if we chose, begin to learn what we sound like. It’s not always easy listening. I frequently get the difficult things wrong and have to adjust the acoustics. Time and time again I say the wrong things in the wrong moments, but I know that if I keep adjusting, keep subduing the need to defend myself from every uncertain whisper, then I learn. If you are lucky, you spend your life adjusting the acoustics of you own voice.

Voices after all aren’t found, they are grown.