Euan Semple's Blog, page 30

Purpose

Purpose is another of those words that the corporate world has hijacked and rendered almost unusable. “Driving purpose”? Really?

The purpose of corporations is maximising shareholder value. Making money. Sure you get a drip down share of that but the purpose is increasing the divide between the insanely rich who have managed to struggle their way to the top of the pile – and the rest of us.

In our personal lives we are terrified of the prospect of being purposeless, perilously close to pointless, and will do anything to be seen to be making a difference.

We then create a sense of purpose for ourselves which, being based on our myopic ego self, is inevitably at odds with others’ sense of purpose and sets us up in competition.

Too often we end up with the madness of “My sense of purpose is greater than yours, I make more of a difference than you do, my good works eclipse your good works and I am higher up the do-gooding ladder than you are.”

Learn to celebrate purposelessness, embrace your pointlessness, and be kind to the next person you encounter, and the next one after that, and the next one after that…

The joys of AI

So my first two attempts at photos for a new passport application were rejected by the automated system that the UK Passport office uses because it said that “I looked as if my eyes were closed”.

My third attempt was accepted but I’m going to have to try to remember to look startled every time I go through ePassport gates at airports for the next ten years!

Creative

CREATIVE

The tree does Live freely

Grows leaves; Flutters in the breeze;

Endures the storm;

Feeds from the earth and the sun

The apple tree doesn’t seem to worry

That the cherry tree is doing it all wrong

But I, being Life Creative,

Make up ways to fight the flow.

Make up meaning; make up trouble;

Make importance out of circumstance,

And ultimate importance out of

MY circumstance,

And supreme importance out of

Life happening as ME

I have sought long and hard

To make meaning out of life,

And see finally,

Now that my turn is almost over,

That I was simply Life

Struggling with Life,

Absorbed in Life,

At odds with Life,

Missing out on Life.

Marilyn Wendler

A hierarchy of birds

As I sat in my van, with the roof up and the side door open, in a pretty woodland car park, enjoying an excellent Aeropress coffee, a pigeon fluttered in and out of view, and I thought “Oh, it’s just a pigeon”

Not only do we separate ourselves from the wonders around us by labelling and categorising them, but we also place them in hierarchies. Pretty, prettier; unusual, more unusual; good, better, best. All the bloody time.

It’s wearying.

Hubris

I’m finding it amusing reading the stories about a new measurement of the W Boson particle which is apparently much bigger than they expected. The articles are saying that this will change our understanding of the universe.

This is to presume that we understand the universe to begin with. We, “understand” a tiny fragment of what we see around us. Whether the vast amount of species that we apparently have no idea about, or the plants yet to be discovered, or what makes gravity happen, or what kicked the whole thing off, or what makes it all hang together and “work”.

In fact we understand fuck all. We don’t even understand our own minds that filter and shape our entire experience of the universe that they have created!

I wish…

I shared a video of Stan Getz the other day. Here is my other favourite sax player, David Sanborn. A highlight of my life was seeing him with this band in an open air amphitheatre in Juan Les Pins as part of the Antibes Jazz Festival. I had all his albums and could play along with most of them, though could only dream of ever having his technique.

[Oh and watch the bass player, Marcus Miller, so understated but so powerful. If I get the chance to come back I’d come back as a bass player or a drummer]

A blast from my past

Hannah finally managed to persuade me to get my sax out of its case for the first time in about ten years. We forgot to warn Alby. Once he’d come down off the ceiling he decided to inspect the new monster in his house.

Leaving a trace

I love watching programmes like Who Do You Think You Are and the really excellent new Art That Made Us which began last night, both of which rely on physical artefacts from our past to tell our shared stories.

I then think “You try making those programmes in the future when the vast majority of the traces we leave are digital, not backed up, subject to degrading media or incompatible software, or simply lost in the sheer volume of noise to signal.”

Battered and bruised

It’s interesting how counterintuitive “letting things go” is. We’re not meant to let things go. We’re meant to sort things. We’re meant to take responsibility for things. We’re meant to have an impact on the world around us and shape it.

I once quoted, I think Steve Jobs, about wanting to make a dent in the world and somebody rightly pointed out that maybe the world didn’t want a dent made in it. And this, I increasingly believe, is the problem.

Too many people are trying to shape the world into something they think it should be. So many people are making a dent in the world that it is looking decidedly battered and bruised.

Rather than trying to make everything outside us conform to how we think it should be, what if we turned inwards and started dealing with our own demons, sorting out our own shit, before we start projecting it onto other people?

Judge not…

It’s a fine line between noticing and judging.

Readers of this blog will have noticed that I regularly cross that line.

Each time I do I am well aware that all of my judgements are projections onto others of things I have tried to hide in myself.

ALL of them.