image: hackdaddy
Polonius:
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell, my blessing season this in thee!
Laertes:
Most humbly do I take my leave, my lord.
image: jam343
This is cathartic for me. Currently I am ill. Not debilitatingly ill but ill enough to be pissed off with it. It’s some kind of ear infection thing which gives the impression that you could put your finger in your ear and keep on reaching in like it was a tunnel. Also moving the jaw is painful.
This is why I made three posts yesterday, I’m avoiding things I have to do because my energies are low. I went to the gym and knew that I couldn’t get myself in the place I like to be, the one where I am sweating enough to feel like I’ve pushed myself and am tired but not exhausted from my exertions.
I should have trimmed the hedges and cut the grass on the lawns, I should’ve washed the car, we went away for a family wedding at the weekend so the car needed a freshen up but I managed to procrastinate. That’s not like me so I know that I’m out of sorts.
I attended meetings I had to, and will do so again today. People told me I looked serious, more serious than usual, I went into the office and also arranged a delivery of a consignment that I had to take to the carrier’s depot personally to make the deadline so I’m not on my back but I’m not firing on all cylinders.
The reason I’m writing this is not pure self indulgence, although I’m sure that is in there, but because I want to make the mark of doing this, of writing something and of putting a certain signal out. You become what you think about, you are the synthesis of your efforts and what you want to be is what you become.
Each morning I get up at 6.00am and think about things. I set my mental process for the day, and plan what I will do with that day. That has to fit into a cohesive plan that puts me where I want to be.
I am acutely aware that I live a life of comparative luxury, I can define pretty much what I want to do and what I want my days to be filled with. It’s not something that happened overnight, it’s what we all work for all our lives, to place ourselves in the driving seat and to assert as much self determination as possible. My focus has to be on complacency, I run successful businesses and to many people I would seem to have made it, but that isn’t it, that isn’t enough, they are a means to an end. The end being that I have spent over thirty years amassing a wealth of learning and wisdom. When I was a child in a completely dysfunctional setting I pondered the significance of these things, my setting, who I was, why sometimes outrageous fortune landed itself upon the innocent, why villains got away with it and prospered.
I wondered what exactly made the Universe tick, who had the answers, where and what was the truth. So I began searching hard, since I was very young I was inspired by the masters of the Renaissance and viewed them as friends, companions, I assumed that they were the natural synthesis of what we all become in our lives and so determined to be a renaissance man myself.
I then discovered that there was no need for renaissance men or women in the place where I grew up, a vast industrial city that made its fortune on supplying the paraphernalia of world domination to the empire. The strange thing was I grew up in it as it exhaled and was being replaced on the world stage by the fledgling manufacturing industries of south east Asia. Little yellow men somewhere on the other side of the world who were prepared to work a week for a bowl of rice stole my heritage and robbed me of the opportunity to become apprentice to a metal presser or a machine operator. Thank god for those people whoever they were because it shook up the old order, the status quo.
Now I have lived my life in an era of change, rapid and unprecedented change. Doing things like this is an enigma for the generation that precedes my own yet they did things that had a history of centuries and many generations with little or no change. So my brothers and sisters are like chameleons, we are the shape shifting agents of change who are both witness and protagonists in seismic shifting of the weights and balances of human culture and societies.
The desire to know and to understand has always compelled me, why do people do what they do, how did we become like this and where to next? These are issues I have given much thought and reasoning to. I had to find out or, as William Blake so eruditely put it, be enslaved by another man’s system.
So here I am this morning, leading up to the start of the working day, my jaw aches and my ear hurts, I don’t feel 100%, yet I live in absolute luxury and am bathed by privileges that most of the human race can only dream of. My question to myself is what will I do today that pays back for the magnificence of my existence and the unparalleled opportunity my life represents?
image: shapeshift
Tell me something: what will you be remembered for?
Let me surround this question with irresistible reasoning. The Mayans, now they are remembered for stepped pyramids in what are presently jungles, complicated mathematics and also for disappearing from the face of the earth without a trace. The Spanish at the time of Phillip II as dogmatic hysteria prone bigots, if you feel that’s harsh read some of the works of Sepulveda, their spin doctor at the time, to have your eyes opened. The Romans at the collapse of the Empire as feeble, weak and unworthy of their heritage. The British at the height of their Empire as ruthless power brokers. The Germans of the 1920s and 30s as somewhat gullible and susceptible to fanaticism.
Whether we like the idea or not, and yes there are exceptions to every rule, history views events, places and people with a very precise sextant that dismisses the grey areas mercilessly.
It begs the question, how will our age be viewed by those who look back on it? Will we be seen as responsible, enlightened or developed? Are we to be the Generation Xers, the Me Generation, the post war baby boom first trans-global community emancipated from the tedium of national boundaries? Or will we be seen by history as something else? Americans call the generation of men and women who rallied to the call of resistance to fascism in the 1940s and who paid, in many instances, the ultimate sacrifice, the Great Generation. What will we be?
Narrow this down to the personal, how will you be seen when you have gone? Shift the temporal aspect and ask yourself, how are you seen now? How would you want to be seen? What would you like the abiding view others have of you to be?
Where do you see yourself to be limited in your expression of the hopes and ambitions that you would wish to fulfil? Here is the killer blow, history views that which is passed, the defining characteristic of history is that it is a done deal, it’s gone, events that have graced the stage of human affairs have taken their bow and been relegated to the already as opposed to the yet to be. You are still here, if you’re reading this, you are not yet history but very much in the here and now with the ability to define the as yet unappeared.
History will view you perhaps as a big noise, perhaps not. The ace in your hand is that you are here now and still have the option to choose. Exercise your option well.
image: metropol 21
Ultimately, what defines our lives as adults are the choices and decisions that we make. Upon these do we stand or fall. They may be split second things or they may be the result of a lengthy process of rationalisation, it is these that drive our life and give us direction.
Choice can be a frightening thing because inherent within it is responsibility. It means that you are taking responsibility for yourself. Consider your life as a child or an adolescent and you will see that choice was an occasional visitor and mostly concerned such things as do you want vanilla or strawberry?
Choice is also a dramatically empowering thing, because the exercise of it is life affirming. What you do, who you are, where you end up and the journey that you take are all underlined and given definition by the choices that you make.
Hence our interest in the subject of happiness. The ulterior motive of our decision making process is to facilitate that thing the Greeks called eudaimonia or the good life. Its living is the ultimate preoccupation of us all, and if that is not so then there is a flaw in our basic constitution.
Good decision making is based upon a foundation of good information. The flow of information that we subject ourselves to is a matter of choice. So if an individual gorges on the wrong kind of foods for their physiological assembly, feeds their brain with a diet of soap opera and celebrity gossip then it is clear that their intake is not going to be high quality. Subsequently their decision making process is going to be persuaded by their intake because those are the terms of reference that they have chosen to immerse themselves in.
Good quality information is imperative to the decision making process, your choices are informed by what you know. Your potential is limited or enhanced by the choices that you make. No-one can be held responsible for what they don’t know, but personal responsibility is about defining a basic position that you adopt in your life, a kind of default setting. It is prudent, therefore, to make the decision that you will try to obtain quality information always, even if it means from time to time that you don’t particularly like what you find out.
I learned many years ago to check the source for any information that came my way. This is about putting filters in place so that suspect or biased information does not get past the first gate. It is wise and prudent in the information age to have definite procedures in place that filter what comes your way. Over time it becomes automatic and you will deflect certain types of thing before they even enter your sphere of awareness and conversely you will attract things to yourself that reinforce whatever it is you want.
The choice, of course, is yours.
image: stuck in customs
Following on from my earlier post, it must be remembered that the majority of discord in a society comes from a small but persistent group of the population.
Teaching happiness, which is only a loose form of language that covers a whole paradigm, is essential if our societies are to become more settled and positive places to live. The only alternative is to create ghettos within our major conurbations and de facto no-go areas where the law abiding and upstanding members of the community wouldn’t want to try to do business or build lives for themselves.
A process of aggregation occurs and the neglected and ostracised of society gather together in a form of perverse mutuality where they then perpetrate crimes and abuses upon one another. It’s a little like the attitude of turning a blind eye to criminals shooting each other, let’s face it, who’s bothered if there are a couple less gun toting hoods roaming the streets? But that isn’t the crux of the matter, that attitude rears its head only when the situation has already spiralled out of control, and serves no-one well. The art in creating a society fit to live in and worthy of its members is to put useful linings in place well before young people start to go astray.
Crimes against people and property are committed by criminals who don’t respect the integrity or lives of others. Why is that? How have they got to the point where they consider then own self serving ends to be of greater importance than the well-being of others? How has a misplaced sense of entitlement come to characterize those most likely to fall into the role of pariahs upon the body of society?
Answer these questions in a less than glib soundbite way and you will begin to access the necessity for ‘happiness lessons’ and the whole fundamental process of being a net contributor to society with a committed interest in seeing it flourish rather than seeing it as no more than an opportunistic free for all to be scammed, abused and made lesser.
We are witnessing remarkable increases in the number of violent and sexual crimes committed by young people, the drug related crimes are virtually off the scale in terms of their increase, check the Home Office statistics, and this is part of an integrated situation we find ourselves in. If we come out the other side of this then we will also need to consider the rehabilitation of people who have completely lost their way and become those unfortunate statistics. In the meantime, as we all know, prevention is far better than cure.
image: sara richer
There is indignation abroad in England at the moment. Someone, somewhere has dared to suggest that happiness can be taught. That children might be given ‘happiness lessons’ at school.
The indignation comes from the riposte that this is in some way cultish or sinister. Is it not the case that any organized program of learning can be easily dismissed as cultish? Fancy all those people being taught the same twenty six letters and not asked to think why twenty six but just blindly and slavishly adhering to an imperialist system that they are mercilessly brainwashed by, for example.
There are learned habits that frankly do no-one any good. Many of these are to do with redundant or irrelevant thinking. Simply to expose young people to a way of thinking that opens possibilities rather than closes them down is a step in the right direction.
Do I have any evidence for this assertion? Look at the current climate in western culture. There is a succession of generations who are propagating a negative attitude in such a way that it is becoming accepted as a standard a default position. The idea that nothing is worthwhile, self respect and the respecting of the integrity of others is becoming alien or seen even as a sign of weakness.
This is not to say all young people are like that but the emergence of an underclass in Britain, a soap addicted, obese strata of society whose contributions to that society are minimal is a real and tangible problem. The concept of a life worth living is something that needs to be taught.
In part of my professional life I work with EBD kids and their families. If the majority of society knew exactly what was going on in their midst and the kinds of attitudes that are grafted onto these young people there would be legitimate indignation. It’s seldom within the remit of this blog to talk turkey but this is something that needs to be said.
There is a major strata of our society that is riddled by substance abuse, has no clear focus or role models to base their lives upon and is frankly out of control. If attempting to teach happiness - and without viewing the curriculum I can only presume it addresses such things as self-esteem, valuing others and being a responsible and integrated part of a caring society - is a response to part of that problem then more power to its elbow.
image: cstein96
Suppose for a minute that your life was not just an arbitrary happening. Suppose you came here for a purpose, that you were some intergalactic traveller with a specific reason to be here and a specific set of objectives that you wanted to accomplish.
What happened?
It’s easy to forget, it’s easy to get wrapped up in something you never chose. Develop a strong will, do not sublimate yourself to another’s destiny whether an individual or an organization. Most of the people killed in wars were young men, barely past adolescence, have you ever wondered why?
Ponder these things deeply. Make time to meditate upon them and to contemplate your own purpose. Satisfaction is derived from choices made not fortuitous happenchance. Any person who seeks to live their own life has to make demand at the entrance to the treasury, otherwise they may float upon the eddys of what passes and become the creature of circumstance.
We control only one thing: the way we react to the situations we are in. All else is fantasy, only one thing in this life is real and that is your own personal development journey. Only along this path may the riches of existence be gathered.
image: lightchaser
Think a thought that’s never been thought before.
Have you got it? If it’s the kind of psychedelic thing like an umbrella that sings nursery rhymes while turning into a bicycle then forget it. That’s not new, that’s just jumbling abstract thoughts together.
No, this is the stuff of true genius. This is Euripides writ large, this is Leonardo inventing the parachute before anyone could fly, Newton understanding gravity. The unique thought, the new idea is the pivot upon which the whole of the human race could balance, the right one could be the key to unlocking remarkable things.
Whatever you do in your life, remember that true genius is the art of revealing the new. A Mozart does not write music, they capture the Universe through the medium of music and expose it for the rest of us to see. They share their insight, their inspiration and offer it as their gift to the rest of us. Ask yourself, what is my gift, what have I or will I share with the rest of the human race.
Catch this dragon by the tail and you are on the ride of a lifetime. Chase ‘Eureka!’ moments, have a desire, a purpose, a dream, no matter how bizarre it seems to others, if it fires your cylinders up and gets your mechanism whirring then good, providing your intention is clean and your aim is true the Universe will surrender its secrets to you. Whether through the medium of music, art, language, oratory, leadership, mentorship, whatever discipline you place yourself in you may articulate extraordinary perception through it.
We are a family, and the success of one is the heritage of us all. Earn the right to be human, being born here is simply touching base, magnify your existence with purposeful endeavour and then you may claim to have lived a life rather than just having been here.
Intend to strike such a blow upon the anvil of life as to resonate through the various dominions that make themselves known to human life. Be inspired, be exalted, walk with magnificent things and allow them to express themselves through your actions. Ordinary may get you through the day but extraordinary will carry you to greatness.
The choice is yours.
image: pensiero
There are those things that are caustic and those that are a balm to our lives. Consider your life as being like a ship that sails upon an ocean of possibilities. You are the navigator, the captain, the engineer and all other things. What kind of a craft would yours be if this were to become real?
Some things aid our progress, others hinder it. Extending the ship analogy, there are things that add momentum to our journey and there are becalming influences that position us in the doldrums.
I saw a headline this morning on a newspaper, ‘$3 Trillion to Save The World’. I didn’t read the article and my mind began to play with the headline; I’ve heard estimates that that was something around the figure it might take to shift the balance from a fossil based fuel dependency to a regenerating fuel based dependency. I’ve heard it said that the war in Iraq has cost that much so far and I know the world economy is worth somewhere between $50 and $60 trillion annually. $3 trillion is a big figure but relative to what?
What could it be for, I mused and then I began to think, who wants to save the world anyway? If save the world is a euphemism for preserve the status quo then it isn’t really worth saving, in its current form, unless you’re one of the estimated 9 million millionaires (0.15% of the world’s population) or 1125 billionaires for whom the whole system obviously works pretty well. But that is to fall foul of the trap that money is the solution to the world’s ills, and really it is not. I’m with Sophie Tucker on this, “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. Believe me honey, rich is better.” Better doesn’t equate to problem solving, it just means that the wheels are lubricated more generously and therefore turn without so much fuss and noise.
In terms of a deeper significance to human life there is simply no place for money and yet we live in a world that quantifies everything in fiscal terms, from GDP to GND, from the hourly rate to the annual rate. It’s a system, but no more than a system, yet it has become a religion, the religion of our age. Within this I’m not knocking it, obviously there has to be a way to organise almost 7 billion people and somehow distribute that $50 - $60 trillion annual pot. Yet an estimated 3.25 billion people, virtually half the population of the world are pulling in less than $2.00 per day, so does that seem well managed?
So what exactly is someone wringing their hands about saving? An iniquitous system that condemns most of our human family to an impoverished existence? A crude system that proceeds like a herd of elephants across a well laid out garden?
It’s not about saving, it’s about changing. Face facts, the world as we know it is finished, it’s dead in the water, it can only be sustained in its present form for a few decades longer, assuming no unexpected occurrences. What then? What happens when the oil wells run dry, the coal has all been extracted, the axis about which our civilization spins ceases to exist?
It’s a world of smoke and mirrors. How many times have you been made promises that haven’t been kept by companies, organisations, individuals, gurus? Except for the very upper echelons of this strange society that has come to pass, it is a place that breeds immense frustration, ill will, and fragmentation of various kinds. People are OK in it, but very few experience true fulfilment or satisfaction, and those who do derive it despite the world rather than because of it.
The world has given us remarkable technology but we don’t know what to do with it. Look at the generation of kids coming through who live their lives vicariously through some character in a virtual environment. They never leave their bedrooms and perceive social interaction as a burden rather than an opportunity to explore and develop themselves as individuals. Is it their world that we are trying to protect? Is it our children’s virtual fantasy that is under threat?
Or is it the artificially extended lives of people ready to go whose maintenance systems are pumped up with steroids, and whose misery puts money in the pockets of pharmaceutical companies who create drugs that can do things that maybe we don’t actually need.
This is not me being cynical, it is me trying to extract the reality of the human condition from the fragile world we have created and wondering when push comes to shove just what will survive a serious body blow to the world we have allowed to come into existence. I see a very artificial world struggling to keep itself afloat and I can’t help but wonder if it has run it’s mile and needs to step aside for a more efficient model that offers a greater return to those involved in it.
I’m also reminded that there is no birth without pain. The transition from where we are to where we may need to be will not be without turmoil and huge upheaval. That will come as sure as night follows day but the assumption that all things stay the same will serve its adherents poorly as they try to adapt to and understand the transition period.
