Euan Semple's Blog, page 49

SOTN 38

As ever Paolo and I had great fun recording the latest podcast. The whole reason we started recording them was that we’d be having these really interesting, fun, conversations and thought why not let others join in!

In this episode we start from vaccines and how conversations and online influence are impacting public health, we move on to celebrities interviews and how many think they must take a side. After a quick debate on handle and hooks, we talk about food, cats and caravans. We end wondering how many of the new behaviours adopted in the last year will end up lasting.

Category errors

A handle is not a hook. If you use a hook as a handle, say for example to hang up your coat, that handle ceases to function as a handle and life becomes harder. 

A sink is not a storage space, it is a space for making things wet. If you use it as a storage place, by leaving mountainous piles of dishes in it, it ceases to function as a place for making things wet. 

Unfortunately my life is beset with people who make category errors. 

Ahead of the game

I have just finished reading Carlo Rovelli’s book Reality Is Not What It Seems. It is a very impressive and exciting romp through physics from the ancient Greeks to the modern day in which he does a great job of clarifying complex topics. 

But one thing kept bugging me all the way through. Despite the fact that much of the book is about how everything around us is constantly changing, and that the minute particles of which the universe is constructed pervades everything, including us, there was no mention of the fact that Buddha sussed this out 2,500 years ago. 

Given how immersed I am in Buddhist philosophy and thinking these days it was interesting to read something so completely oriented to western philosophy and its Greek origins. It left me feeling frustrated and slightly dissatisfied satisfied with the book.

I was also listening to a podcast recently which referred to the experiment done a few years ago with a photograph of a dress where people vehemently disagreed about what colour the dress was. It turned out that our brains adjust colours for natural or artificial light and depending on whether you had spent most of your life in the open air or indoors, the dress is seen as one set of colours or another. 

Buddhist psychology taught that our experience of the world is “conditioned” by previous experience, our biology, and the norms of the society around us. Again something fundamental to the world that physics is “discovering”, that the Buddha sussed out 2,500 years ago.

The NHS

I got my first COVID vaccination this morning. As part of the process they give you a list of possible side effects – but one they didn’t mention was tearing up.

All the effort, all the efficiency, the pleasant staff, the feeling of being in very safe hands. I welled up in the queue and again in the car on the way home.

Any thoughts of damaging the NHS, especially privatising it for corporate gain, should be made a treasonable offence.

Driven

It may be my advancing years, it may be the calming effects of lockdown, but my aversion to the idea of being driven in business is increasing. Driving change, driving acceptance, driving sales. Too much of modern life is driven. Driven to succeed, driven to perform, driven to get ahead of others.

All of this driving is overheating our minds, our bodies, and the even world around us.

How about encouraging, supporting, or even enticing?

Happy 20th Birthday To My Blog

On this day twenty years ago, yes twenty years, I wrote my first blog post.

I thought I had lost any record of it because of a mess when moving domain names back in the early days. But a few years ago I tried finding it on The Internet Archive. Initially I had no success but I then remembered that Ev Williams (one of the founders of Blogger and later Twitter) made me a “blog of note” on his blog way back in the early days and this link had been spidered and stored in The Internet Archive.

So here it is – my very first blog post.

It is odd to think that without this tentative beginning I wouldn’t have got to travel the world, met so many wonderful people, and had a book published.

And perhaps more remarkably I am still blogging after all these years, and in fact increasingly doing so in preference to spending much time on social platforms. So if you want to keep in touch you can always find me here.

One World?

When my mother died her world died with her. What she saw, how she saw it, and what it meant to her no longer exists. The same will happen when I die. The world that I take so seriously, that feels so real, will disappear when I do.

This is not solipsism, there is a “real” world of matter and energy out there. But what I experience and what you experience are fundamentally different. Sure there are broad overlaps, and these are what allow us to communicate and to co-exist, but the reality that we are each so convinced of, and so attached to, is made up.

Remember this the next time you get into an argument about whether that shirt is green or blue – you are both right.

Remember this the next time you get into a bigger argument about bigger stuff too…

The pull of other places

Over the weekend my family were watching a film set in Australia. The story took place on the coast to the north of Sydney and the scenery and the sounds of the wildlife were so, so familiar. I started to feel a strong pang of homesickness.

I have been lucky enough to have been to Australia many times, and have seen more of the country than many Australians, but with the changes in my life and the world around my I find myself wondering if I will ever get to visit that wonderful country again.

In fact the many trips I have been able to experience around the world are taking on an air of unreality. Was I really there? Did it really happen? With the odd effects that lockdown is having on my sense of time and place it is getting hard to tell what happened last week never mind last year.

But this is a good thing. Time and place are much more malleable than we think. Our brains construct our experience of both and that experience changes all the time. Truly being where we are is hard enough never mind worrying about being somewhere else!

A sense of place

As my Apple Watch ups the monthly challenges my daily mileage is increasing to about nine miles a day at the moment. At my usual speed of around 3.5 miles an hour this takes me just under three hours. This is three hours incredibly well spent.

I don’t listen to audio books or podcasts. I just walk. I don’t even think that much. I just walk. I notice what is around me, which even on walks that I have now done hundreds of times changes every time, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in surprisingly significant ways.

My eyes and ears become more attuned to the world around me. I notice the smell of recently ploughed fields long before I see them. I notice the sound of different birds, like the mob of unruly sparrows that has moved into a couple of the trees on my most frequent route. My sight increasingly expands from the next step in front of me to the wider horizon and becomes more attuned to the flash of white as roe deer move away from the sound of my feet.

More than ever, in our disruptive times, feeling grounded matters. The best way to feel grounded is to place your feet on the ground, over and over again, for hours on end…

Latest SOTN

In this episode we first talk about driving (cars, lorries, motorbikes, people crazy), then we hear about Euan’s new HomePod Mini, and finally we discuss about past present and future of some real and some fictional politicians (American, Italian, British).