Euan Semple's Blog, page 54

The risk of staying safe

Setting aside the differences between extroverts and introverts, and those who are confident online and those who are not, my biggest worry is the number of people I encounter in business who are still playing safe.

Whether it is not speaking up on Zoom calls, saying what you think on work forums, or chipping in in meetings, all too often I see people sitting on their hands and keeping their heads down.

Clearly this is as a result of long and deeply held fears. Fear of being criticised, fear of being found out, fear of conflict.

But the perceived risks that lie behind these fears pale into insignificance in comparison to the ever increasing risk of not being seen, of your contribution never being recognised, and increasingly, in the not too distant future, the risk of being replaced by a bot.

The safest thing you can do these days is to feel risky.

The front room

I was reading a book the other day where the author was talking about her “orange” period in the seventies when everything from carpets to wallpaper had to be orange. As she said “what was I thinking!?”

It took me back to our front room at home in that decade which had an orange shag pile carpet and purple walls. “What were my parents thinking?!”

It also made me ponder the idea of the “front room”. Like so many families at that time, despite not having lots of rooms, we had one which was kept for special occasions or for when guests were visiting. As kids we spent most of our time in the living room at the back of the house and the front room was clearly different. In fact as I write this I can smell the sweet sherry that was consumed in the front room on said special occasions.

It is fun to occasionally look back on the conventions of your youth and to think what different things we aspire to and how differently we view symbols of status these days.

The courage not to react

When walking at the side of our normally busy road there are still occasionally cars who will pass me very fast and too close. I step onto the verge but nonetheless my body still reacts to the proximity of danger. I can’t stop this immediate response, it is involuntary.

What I can stop though is the habit of spinning off into a reaction, getting angry and often gesticulating or yelling. In many ways our usual responses to emotional situations are distractions. They mask the underlying feelings and allow us to run away from them.

Just being with strong feelings is hard. Harder than reacting. Noticing where in our body we feel them, noticing our hearts racing faster, feeling the rush of adrenalin. Turning to face our emotions allows them to exist, acknowledges them, recognises them, and in doing so allows them to dissipate naturally, to run out of steam, to enable us to return to calm rather than getting caught up in the drama of reaction.

It takes courage to do this, to truly experience our feelings. It is easier to fly off the handle, to vent, to indulge. But in the long run letting them flow through us is better for us – and for those around us.

Getting nowhere faster

As we drive down through some woods to reach the A413, and if we look to our right, we are greeted with a beautiful view along the Misbourne Valley. In winter, in the mornings, this valley is often filled with a low fog which creates an otherworldly feel to the view especially if the ground is white with frost. This view has remained unchanged for centuries.

Sadly I will never see this view again. The foreground is now filled with a mountain of earth and teams of earth movers which are carving a massive gouge through the countryside for HS2. All along the valley similar acts of violence are being carried out every day with open wounds spoiling other long enjoyed favourite views.

To the very few of you who are not only inclined to travel after the experience of working remotely through lockdown, but who can also afford what I gather are going to be the steep fares to get to Birmingham quicker, I hope that you make good use of the few minutes that are going to be shaved off your journey.

Delightful repetition

We are very lucky where we live to have 360 degrees of choice of walks from the house. I am currently doing a walk every day and to avoid the muddiest paths I am sticking mostly to tracks and single track roads. This means that most days I walk along a choice of about four routes ranging from 3 miles to nearly 8.

Doing the same four walks could so easily feel repetitive but they are not. Each day the weather is different, my mood is different, I see different things and see them differently each day. From the road surface passing below my feet, to the light catching the rain on the road, to the trees that I pass, to the birds and the animals, each day is so different and, if I choose to see it this way, fascinating and delightful.

Minor Irritations

Notice the tension, usually somewhere in your gut, when you can’t face making your bed, when your spell checker takes on a mind of its own, when you keep putting off filling in that form that you know is really important.

Notice your ego kicking and screaming and putting up a fight against life. Notice it with the little things.

Then, when you are tempted to go berserk at someone in traffic, when you are about to allow your boss to make you feel small and frightened, when a loved one disappears… notice the tension.

If you can notice it with the small things, you can notice it with the big ones, and if you can notice it – it’s not you, it’s not real, it’s a story. You made it up.

It’s the little things

It’s small things, daily things, that are in some ways hardest to deal with. The things that should just happen, that should go well, that we expect to not have to cope with. They add up. The sense of things going wrong, of losing control, of life stacking against us. It builds up over time and we end up losing faith in our ability to cope.

We are brought up to expect life to be manageable, to be predictable, to be safe. But it isn’t. We have no control, anything could happen at any time. Rather than getting bent out of shape about this we could learn to accept it, to not expect things to be otherwise.

Unpredictability is just how life is. In fact it can be seen as a good thing. How boring things would really be if everything went as expected, if nothing surprised or delighted us, if we never had to face challenges and everything was easy?

Lane discipline and the British class system

I’ve realised why so many people stick doggedly to the middle lane on motorways when there is no other vehicle near them for miles around and despite the fact that they are meant to pull over to the left unless they are overtaking and the fact that their refusal to do so causes much of the congestion on the road.

It’s because the inside lane is working class and for grubby things like lorries or people who can only afford little cars that don’t go very fast.

The middle lane is for the middle class. Nice people who have nice cars but don’t like upsetting people, especially themselves, by changing things.

The outside lane is for the upper class. People who can afford speeding fines or middle class people who have ideas above their station.

See, it all makes sense now!

Holier than thou

Being judgemental has to be one of my my least acceptable characteristics.

I grew up in a household where we judged each other, and those we met in the outside world, against some hidden but testing standard.

Not being good enough was a constant threat. Being found wanting, lacking, letting others down, you name it, the implied failure was always there, brooding behind every conversation and every encounter.

The corrosive stain of judgement still seeps into my life.

I wish it didn’t.

Country Matters (channelling Shakespeare’s implied double meaning of the phrase)

This morning while on my walk I noticed the beaters’ van from the local manor. I then heard the beaters making their way through the appropriately named Devil’s Den banging sticks and yelling. Eventually I heard the noise of gunfire starting up and realised that the local pheasants, who I’d thought were lasting longer than usual, had sadly come to an end this morning.

Many years ago, when Mollie was little enough to fit into a rucksack, our walk took us past just such a shoot. The path we were on was a legal right of way and shooters are meant to stop in order to allow us to pass. They did, but before we had fully cleared them this God awful racket started up as some birds rose into the air. Mollie was in tears and really distressed at the loud noise and the sight of birds dropping out of the sky around her.

Before foxhunts were banned there used to be a local hunt near us and one day the hunt, and a large number of hunt saboteurs, ended up in front of our house. I went out and enthusiastically joined in with the saboteurs!

More recently, when visiting my mum and dad in Dorset, the main road home was blocked by a hunt. Large numbers of horses, beaters, hangers-on in Range Rovers, all of them, I’m bloody sure, chasing a fox rather than the artificially laid scent trails that they are meant to be constrained to these days.

As a vegetarian who struggles with the idea of even eating meat for protein, killing animals purely for “fun” is utterly bewildering. On each occasion I have been of a mind to have a reasoned argument along the lines of explaining that what they were doing was barbaric, unnecessary, and incompatible with the norms of modern civilised a society.

However in the interests of expediency and brevity I decided instead to yell “wankers” at the top of my voice.