Euan Semple's Blog, page 24

Hussle

This morning I was stuck in what turned out to be about a three mile queue. The dual carriageway was reduced to one lane and you could see the congestion disappearing over the horizon. To begin with the traffic wasn’t moving at all and at best we got up to walking speed.

And yet, the young, smartly dressed, business woman in the Audi in front of me kept swinging over to the right as if she was looking for an opportunity to get ahead. What was going through her head!?!

I bet she does that all day in the office…

Saving other people

We can be kind and gentle with each other but the inclination to save other people from themselves is a dangerous one.

Who are we to think we know better? They are on a path that we know nothing about. Their current discomfort could be the greatest learning opportunity of their lives.

“To rescue someone is to oppress them”

Touching a nerve.

People who annoy us are a mirror. The fact that they annoy us indicates that they have touched a nerve. If they hadn’t we wouldn’t even notice them. The nerve they have touched is something sensitive in us. Something that causes discomfort.

When we think “They shouldn’t have done that”, “They shouldn’t have said that”, “They shouldn’t be like that”, the “shouldn’t” is because they have transgressed against our sense of should. What we should say, what we should do, what we should be.

The trouble is that we know what we should be and that we’re not. This hurts and we want it to go away.

I couldn’t do it…

I couldn’t do a highly paid job in finance or business, no matter what the apparent value, when I knew that people are getting paid a pittance for taking life and death decisions day in and day out in hospitals all around the country.

There’s a level of remuneration above which it just gets patently silly. It would take too much mental effort to justify that level of bollocks to myself.

I just couldn’t do it.

Aye, there’s the rub

What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a
long, a superfluous, labor of verification.

 E. M. Cioran from The Trouble With Being Born

Standards

While walking through the pretty town of Stockbridge yesterday, enjoying the sparkling streams and the warmth of the sunshine, Mollie and I noticed a raised angry voice.

We turned around to witness an older man getting really irate with a young woman shopkeeper on the pavement outside her shop. Really irate.

Her crime?

She had flown the Union Jack, flying above them outside her shop, upside down…

Picking fights

Conflict starts with thinking you know better.

The more fragile the ego the greater it’s need to know better.

If you find yourself in conflict with the world around you all the time, ask yourself why.

Bam!

Every year it catches me out. One moment the view from my office window is an intricate crisscrossing of branches against the light of the sky. The next moment it is dense, intense, enticing green that you just want to dive into and rub your face in.

I might get this engraved on Connie’s windscreen…

Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.
– St. Augustine

Teetering…

It’s a fine line between leading a life of quiet contemplation and sitting around doing nothing.