Euan Semple's Blog, page 45

The road to nowhere

I wrote yesterday’s post lying in my bed. At my Dad’s. Not that I have a bed in my Dad’s house but now that we have our little campervan I can be lying in my bed anywhere.

In fact I was there to “take my Dad somewhere”. He had chosen to spend Christmas and New Year alone and, predictably it had got him down.  Getting out the house and going somewhere, anywhere, seemed like a good thing. In fact my taste for going places came from him and the motorbike trips we used to do together.

Penny and I got the van to enable us to go lots of places. We love going places. Unlike me though she is still in full time work so it’s going to be me who is going even more places, hopefully lots and lots of them.

But I am always aware of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s truism that “wherever you go there you are”. Add to that that “the grass is always greener”, and “it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive” and you get some sense of the excitement tinged with realism, that I feel as we grow into our use of our new toy and set off on our road to nowhere.

I have always loved going places and being places. I am lucky enough to have traveled the world with my speaking career. But the paradox is that as I get better at being present, not escaping this moment by living in the future or the past, I will be spending more time now, here, the only time we ever have, and I will be spending it wherever I am – like it or not!

[The photo was taken at dawn on top of The South Downs on one of my first trips]

Scratching the blogging itch

I’ve been missing blogging – missing having a reason to get my thoughts and reactions to life down in writing where I can see them, and, yes, missing sharing them.

I have surprised myself by how little I have been missing social media. I miss the connection it affords with my friends around the world, but I haven’t missed the “indignation engine” that it has mostly become.

I have been writing in my personal diary, Day One, but there is less reason to do so when the only person reading it is going to be some future me.

So I’ve decided to scratch the itch again and to do so regularly. Not as some sort of New Year’s resolution that I can fail to sustain beyond February, but in an attempt to rediscover the joys of blogging and to reach out to the many people around the world that I am fortunate to know.

[I am going to experiment with sharing these posts on the social media platforms as a means of reaching out but will hope to focus any ensuing conversation on the blog itself]

Rest in peace Rageboy

I’ve just learned, from a lovely post by AKMA, of the death of Chris Locke aka Rageboy. One of the Cluetrain authors and writer of the wonderful EGR blog he had a huge influence on my early enthusiasm for blogging and in fact I brought him over from the US to talk to an assembled group of senior BBC folks. Chris didn’t let me down and no one ever forgot the event!

So sad that such a brilliant mind and lovely bloke had such a hard last few years. Very sad.

Memories

I decided to have a touristy day today. Travelling past hills I’ve climbed is always dodgy as I need to remember to keep my eye on the road but had a great trip past Loch Tulla, through Glen Coe, through Ballachulish, down the coast to Connel, then back along Loch Awe to Tyndrum.

These were also roads my dad and I knew like the back of our hands in our biking days when we barely gave the hills a glance as we screamed past at silly speeds. One time when I was on the back of his bike he reduced me to tears drifting the back wheel round the tight, twisting bends just north of Loch Lomond.

Today I felt very sedate pootling along in my little camper.

Nah…

Oh well, I got about 2/3 of the way up Ben Vane today and then turned back. A number of reasons. It’s a couple of years since I’ve been up a hill and I’m out of shape, it’s pretty steep all the way and there had already been a couple of bits that I didn’t fancy reversing as tired as I was, and as there was another hour’s worth at least of climbing I decided better not.

Add to this the fact the weather was coming in and getting colder, wetter, and windier. By the time I got back down to the van it was, to use a technical term, shit.

A grand day out all the same as you can see from the photographs.

Finally…

Not only is it “Finally I’ve written another blog post”, but more importantly, finally after Covid, Brexit, and Suez incurred delays we at last took possession of our new camper car a couple of weeks ago. Since then we’ve had a really nice overnight in The New Forest, and I’ve done a couple of other overnights, but this is the first multi-day trip.

As you will see from the photographs I’m at the northern end of Loch Lomond, in the car park opposite Inveruglas power station. The hill you can see behind the photograph of the powerstation is Ben Vane which I’m going to go up tomorrow. It’s a lovely quiet car park with views down the loch and at this time of year is free to park in.

I’ve got a few days to play with and, depending on how knackered I am after the first Munro tomorrow (it’s been more than a year since my last hill) I will try to get a few more in this week.

When 2+2 = 5

I have written and spoken many times about the risk of the data collected on our behalf at some time in the future being combined in ways that we don’t know about, can do nothing about, but affect our ability to do things. This could be databases that in themselves at the time don’t appear contentious, but when combined in the future are perceived to have meaning that couldn’t be anticipated.

I have just had a small taste of this. For some completely unknown reason Google suspended my YouTube account – and I genuinely can’t think of, or imagine, what might have triggered this. (Since reinstated with no explanation). Thankfully it wasn’t an issue as I stopped trusting Google years ago and don’t use any of their products other than YouTube. However, if I did rely on their services, having them suddenly withdrawn without an apparent reason could cause considerable difficulty.

As it is the impact was minimal, other than reinforcing my instincts not to touch Google with a bargepole.

Old man’s hands.

It is strange to look down at my own hands resting in my lap and see old man’s hands. How did that happen?

I am very lucky. I have the sort of skin that doesn’t age or wrinkle much (it drives my wife nuts).

If I put in a bit of effort I can still be relatively slim.

And someone I met the other day thought that I was younger than them and they were 50! (I am 61)

All the same, age creeps up on you…

Good works

I remember being in Amsterdam many years ago and looking at the canals and the town houses and the evidence of the growth of the industrious mindset. I was struck by the amount of activity and energy that it took to manufacture, sell, and distribute things all around the world and the wealth that was created in the process.

But it is that whole Protestant, Northern European, urge to have an impact on the world, to improve the world, that has ended up with us having a huge and damaging impact on the planet. And has it made us any happier?

I contrasted this with the efforts of an Indian swami who rather than impacting the world outside attempts to explore and change the world inside. The inward journey alters how we react to the world, how we interact with the world, and that activity, collectively, over time changes the world. But it changes it in a very different way. It is not forcing it to be any way particularly, to bend to our will. It changes through our behaviour, our actions, our relationships to each other and to nature.

We held a memorial service for my mum on Saturday (it had been delayed by COVID). Sitting in her church, with her nice, good, friends around me made think again about her inclination to be good and to do good in the world. Through her Christian faith she had a high standard to meet up to which she didn’t always achieve and I certainly didn’t. That feeling that I’ve never been good enough, that I needed to improve, was imbued in me from an early age. It is probably the single biggest bit of baggage that I have to learn to get rid off. Even after 61 years I am still trying.

A lot of the mindfulness stuff in fashion these days, mostly because it is being driven by the American culture, feels like a reinvention of the Protestant good works in the world mentality. It’s all about improvement, self improvement, improving the world.

But what is fascinating when you get into this is that the problem isn’t the improvement bit it is the self bit. It is the false self, the created self, the combination of all of our stories and should’s and shouldn’t’s and enculturated norms that we selfishly protect and that we try to make the world fit in with. That is the problem. That is the source of all of our suffering. In the absence of that false self we get to be the real us, the calm peaceful loving self that remains when you strip everything else away. And if we all manage to do that then the world becomes a better place.

Sitting quietly in a room on my own

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

– Blaise Pascal

Currently my family are on holiday in Devon and I am at home looking after the cat. Well, that was my excuse. I actually wanted to spend time on my own and to take the opportunity to do nothing.

It is surprising how difficult it is to do nothing. Our brains don’t like being left to their own devices. It is fascinating what they do to try and avoid this. Just sitting, as the Zen tradition refers to meditation, is ridiculously difficult. The temptation to get up and do something, to pick up my phone and read something, to feel justified in tidying up or tinkering, or to replay events from the past, is enormous.

But doing nothing doesn’t half teach you about yourself. You get to learn what occupies the constant stream of chatter in your head. You get to see what you think is incredibly important, and what isn’t. You get to peel back the layers on what you think. Layers upon layers…

The idea is that by stripping back these endless layers of chatter, self obsessed thinking, culturally induced guilt, and on and on … that you finally get to the calm, peaceful, contented true nature that we hide from ourselves.

I’m not there yet …