Euan Semple's Blog, page 50

Right, wrong, and righteousness

During lockdown the number of people out walking, cycling and running has increased enormously and to such an extent that a lot of footpaths have become quagmires.  As a consequence I am now more inclined to walk on our local network of single lane roads.

When growing up in Scotland I was always aware of the Highway Code instructions that if there is no footpath to walk on the right hand side of the road so that you are facing oncoming traffic – unless you are on a blind bend when you can briefly cross to the left then return to the right once you are back on the straight.

I am not sure why, but a large number of the folks now out running on the roads appear to be unaware of this “rule” and run on the left. I couldn’t do it with the traffic coming unseen behind me! But the other consequence is that they are now running straight at me – and a disconcerting number of them keep running straight at me clearly thinking that I am in the wrong for walking on the right.

Each time it happens I hold my ground. I am 6’3″ and about 15 stone so a pretty immovable object but they still keep running at me until eventually they capitulate and swerve past.

What is interesting is how this affects me. To begin with I was getting bent out of shape about it, indulging in righteous indignation, making sweeping generalisations about runners, and character assassinations of the individuals involved.

But I am getting better at letting this go. I am “right” and I am more than able to keep walking in the face of oncoming bodies, but what I don’t have to do is to add the extra layers of moral indignation.

This is good practice for other areas of my life…

Missing building sites

One of my tighter reverses…

Watching DIY SOS last night there were various trucks and vans delivering to the build and I found myself missing it. Missing the traffic marshals and their banter, the puzzle of navigating through complex sites, the cleverness of the unloading processes, and the sense of relief at having made my way through it all without incident.

The experiences I had driving large trucks were among the most terrifying of my life – but they were also amongst the most satisfying. I may at some stage return to them.

Writing as an end in itself

It is so easy to get caught up in writing to achieve an outcome rather than writing as an end in itself. We become trapped in worrying about if we write well enough, worrying that people might read what we write, even worrying if we will be able to read our own handwriting at some future point!

But just the act of getting your thoughts out of your head and onto “paper” is a worthwhile pursuit in itself – with no regard for what becomes of it at some future point. It is the process of thinking out loud that is worthwhile, “seeing” your thoughts as you think them, slowing down your racing brain long enough to be able to relate to your thoughts and understand them.

I have so many notebooks that start off with the intention of bullet journaling, or recording gratitude, or whatever other extrinsic outcome that end up slowing to a halt as I give up on their original “purpose”.

But I now know that just writing, with no aim in mind other than to enjoy the process, is something that I get great value from and return to again and again.

Being confidently wrong

While on a walk with Mollie yesterday we passed through a wood that I have walked through hundreds of times. I was going to show her a different footpath through that wood than we would normally take. Not sure whether it was due to everything looking different in the snow but I took a wrong turn somewhere and we ended up on the path we would have usually taken.

But I didn’t realise! My brain was trying to make the path we were on look like the path I thought we were on, waffling on about the helpful arrows painted on the trees by The Chiltern Society. Even when we came out of the wood, where we usually would expect to, I didn’t recognise it because my brain was still trying to make it look like where I thought we were!

When I was playing my clarinet in orchestras and wood bands my tutor used to say “If you are going to make a mistake make it sound like you meant it”. In other words don’t be diffident. Do whatever you are doing with confidence.

But I have learned, especially on mountains, that false confidence can be dangerous. Admitting you don’t know where you are as early as possible and doing something about it rather than marching on in the wrong direction is so important.

I reckon the same is true in business. How many hugely expensive mistakes have been made either because people ignored the signs that the path they were on was the wrong one, or when they knew they were on the wrong path but were trying to bluff it out?

There is a lot of power in life generally in admitting that you’re not sure…

Nowhere to fall

Today I was thinking back over the various mountain ridge walks I have done. Some of them were very narrow, with steep drops on either side, and I remembered advice I used to give myself, and those with me, that there was “nowhere to fall”.

(OK, to be fair, the photo above is of Penny on Crib Goch on Snowdon and people kill themselves falling off that most years, and to be doubly fair to her she was doing this having taken a tumble on a steel slope in Torridon a couple of months before, but hey let’s not allow the facts to spoil a good principle!)

Even on the steepest ridge, there is usually some sort of gradient. It is not like climbing straight up a cliff face. Admittedly in snowy or icy conditions if you do fall you are more likely to keep going and not stop, but in any other weather, on even the most frightening ridge, if you look hard you realise that you won’t fall all the way to the bottom. You will bounce at least once!

It occurred to me that this advice works in less extreme circumstances too. What is the worst that could happen? Really imagine that – and nine times out of ten you realise that you could cope.

My Happy Place

I walk every day. Sometimes more than once a day. But the one walk that I love, and that I do every day, come rain or come shine, is the walk from our house to Herbert’s Hole and back.

It is just over three miles and takes me under an hour. The mid point is the bottom of the valley and the short climb back up is nice and steep. Some days I do it a bit faster and enjoy the sense of powering along, other days I just saunter, taking my time to enjoy the surroundings. But one thing I do every time is to stop for a few minutes in the valley and just take it all in.

As you can see from the video above yesterday was spectacular. Hardly a breath of wind, warmth in the sun, and very little noise from distant traffic or airplanes. All you can hear is the silence and the birds enjoying the warmth.

For these few moments I feel totally connected to the world around me. Thoughts start to drop away and intrude less. I get closer to the underlying calm and happiness that is always there for all of us under the noise and bluster of our near constant internal chatter.

I am increasingly aware that I don’t need to go to a physical space to achieve this sense of calm and peace. In fact, as you can see from the video below (looking in the opposite direction), the feeling arises even when the weather is what others would characterise as “bad weather”.

The weather is what it is. It is neither bad nor good. My happy place is independent of the weather, in fact it is independent of the place. I can take it with me wherever I go – if I only remember to do so.

Conflicted attitudes to stuff

We are taking our main family car back to the dealer today. It’s been on a PCP loan that has come to an end. The choice is to renew the loan and get a new car or hand the car back and bring the contract to an end. Given that it has spent most of the last year sitting on the drive, and that any brand new replacement that we might be suckered into buying looks set to do the same this year, it was costing way too much money to just look at it.

I am also increasingly wary of being suckered into buying stuff that you don’t really need just because the norm is that you are expected to do so. Where we live we need cars to get anywhere, as we are too far to cycle to our nearest station and there is no public transport, but small cars fill that need just fine. Sure it is fun to blast along motorways with the sound system cranked up but, especially given my shifting attitudes in this time of COVID, do I really need that?

On the other hand I know it is just stuff, and that this is the right thing to do, but it is surprising how attached you can become to a lump of plastic and metal. It has been great fun to drive, enabled lots of great family memories, and safely carried us all over the UK and Europe, so I will miss it.

Fitness

Paolo and I just published our latest edition of SOTN in which we take a look at Clubhouse – and Euan runs away! But he can run faster thanks to Fitness+. We then go long on capitalism and market forces firstly talking about the upside (yes there is one) and downside of Facebook’s algorithms then end up with the fascinating story of GameStop and the power of Reddit.

What do I really think?

It has been a few weeks now since I stopped visiting Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn regularly. I still check in about once a week to see how close friends and relatives are doing but otherwise I have logged out in all my browsers and removed the apps from all my devices so each visit is a conscious decision. And it feels good.

The one thing I am missing is reaction. I love it when people comment or like the posts on this blog, but my writing used to get much more of a response on the social platforms. It is interesting considering what this change means. Am I only writing to get a response? Do I need approval of my ideas? Or is it enough to get the “down on paper” and shared even in a modest way?

This neediness is true in real life. I remember worrying in work meetings if what I said didn’t get a response, or worse still if someone else’s boring comment got an over the top reaction. I guess we feel the need to relate our thoughts and feelings to others, to gauge their “value”. But the risk is that we lose our way, we don’t know what we really think and become influenced by what we think other people think we think!

Anyway, for the moment, in these times when I am not meeting many people in real life, and my writing is getting less reaction online, I am seeing it as an opportunity to work out what I really think…

Work

Fascinating article on work, how it is perceived, and how things are starting to change.

Some quotes to give you a flavour:

“One pharmaceutical executive told me that observing how his employees had responded to life on a form of basic income had left him wondering if they would accept returning to the kind of working life they had before. “The genie’s out of the bottle,” he said. 

Once something is done, it becomes possible, and scare stories about the world falling apart without workers chained to office desks become less effective.”

As the author Ursula Le Guin put it: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”

The deep link sociologist Max Weber explored over a century ago, between the protestant work ethic and the spirit of capitalism, still sits in the heart of our culture, and anyone who seeks to have us work less will be told that what they are really doing is suggesting we all become lazier. In Britain, successive governments have very effectively fostered an environment in which people feel as though everyone should be working as hard – and suffering as much – as they are, with any thought that life could be improved in any way scornfully derided.