Euan Semple's Blog, page 55

Same world, different universe.

I try to call my Dad every second day but we both struggle to find enough to talk about. After “How are you?” and “Fine” there is always a long and awkward pause.

My wife, on the other hand, calls her mother every morning, sometimes more than once a day, and they find enough to talk about to fill a twenty minute call.

And we all think we exist in a shared reality…

Frustration

I recently tried to buy a pair of replacement boots. I selected the right size and colour from the only available options on the Amazon page but was sent a different size altogether. What then ensued was a to and fro about EU verses UK sizes with the marketplace seller not taking responsibility for what was clearly their mistake. Not helped by language challenges (the supplier is based in Germany) I tried to keep calm through the various email exchanges. But I failed. Miserably.

Should I just let things go? Doesn’t it matter that I have the wrong boots? Is it fair that I have to go through the pain of re-packaging them, taking them to the post office, re-ordering them all of which take time?

It might not be fair but, at one level, it doesn’t matter. Not in the grand scheme of things.

Yes, if I insist on the world being the way that I expect it to be, I should do battle when it doesn’t. But if I remember that all that is at stake here is my misguided idea that life is/should be predictably as I would like it then I should let go, chill, enjoy my trip to the Post Office and wait for the boots which will give me years of pleasure.

Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.

Emotions

We watched Sleepless in Seattle last night for the umpteenth time. I know what happens. There are no surprises. But I still gasped out loud at the end when they come out of the lift and I then proceeded to blub for a good five minutes afterwards.

These are fictional characters for goodness sake. I knew what the ending was going to be. But I still got hooked. The story still tugged at my heart strings. Literally. You can see where that phrase came from. The feeling is as much physical as mental. Emotions are. They are physical reactions that we are not in control of and aren’t driven by conscious thought.

There is something about seeing other people in emotional situations that, for me at least, is frequently more powerful than my own emotions. When my Mum was dying recently for instance I was more triggered by seeing other people upset than I was by my own situation.

I guess this is down to what they call the empathy gene, something in us that feels compassion for others around us. It is a powerful force and one to be celebrated and encouraged rather than hidden in embarrassment.

Cat conundrums

Now that we have decided to let Alby off his long rope the mouse population in the field behind us is dropping by the day. I hate watching him playing with them, and in fact will often step in and bring him into the house, but nonetheless the casualty rate is increasing.

The girls make the case that it is his instinct to do this but I counter with the fact that it might be a dog’s instinct to savage little children but that doesn’t mean we let them do it. If Alby ends up psychologically scarred by my attempts to save the mice then I’ll pay for the therapy.

But…

If he’s playing with mice in the back garden, within sight of the house, then he is not dicing with death crossing the main road in front of us. It seems that he too is worried about the mouse population of the field reducing and is researching other sources of entertainment. He might be savvy enough to dodge the traffic but there are no guarantees.

So, sit back and watch him torturing mice or watch him dodging traffic? A rock and a hard place.

Knowledge Nirvana

There is a persistent myth along the lines of “if we just pay enough money for a fancy enough search engine then all the stuff that our staff know will become available to us and we will make better decisions and become incredibly efficient and successful”

Bollocks, all you usually end up with, if you’re lucky, is someone else’s badly written out of date document.

Much better to take the time and effort it takes to build lively and engaging online conversations amongst staff so that what people know surfaces in a timely and contextual manner.

Don’t worry if you think the question has been asked before, ask it again. The answer will probably have changed over time and someone else who is prompted by the question will think hard about the subject again and probably come up with something new. At the very least someone in the network will realise that your question is answered by one of those badly written out of date documents and point you to it with a URL.

Oh and don’t be suckered into spending the money you would have spent on a search engine on a “enterprise social media platform” instead. Same mugs game. The reason staff don’t take part in lively online work conversations isn’t because of the tools you have, or haven’t, given them, it goes way deeper than that and is much harder to sort.

Letting things go

I have mentioned before that the road in front of us is currently blocked off for repairs and I am enjoying walking towards Chesham and back each day. Given that there isn’t meant to be any traffic going up and down the road whenever anything passes me, especially if they are driving fast and don’t move over, it was beginning to wind me up. There’s a whole empty road in both directions. Why not move over to the other lane as you go past me, especially as you’re going so fast?!

Two things have helped me to let this go. Firstly there is an estate the “wrong side” of the roadworks and if they want to get into Chesham they have to come all the way past us, a road trip of about 8 miles. If I was having to do that every time I want to go to the shops I would probably be getting wound up and driving too fast as well.

The other reason that I’m learning to let this go is that I can’t do anything about it. My righteous indignation at their driving affects no one but me. They have no idea that I am annoyed with them. It makes no difference to them but it spoils my walk. Until I learned to let go I would hold onto my irritation for ages after each time it happened. Now I just step onto the grass verge out of their way, smile as they pass, and get on with my walk unperturbed.

Now all I need to do is to apply this learning to all the other things that press my buttons!

Trying to be good

There’s been a bit of a spat recently between a couple of writers I follow on non-duality/Buddhism and it has been fascinating to watch the consequences.

The trigger for the argument was trivial but it was fuelled by the followers each writer has who started ramping up the indignation. Thankfully, after an initial spate of name calling, both writers calmed down, had a Zoom call, and subsequently wrote interesting posts about the event.

The reason I am writing about it here is that here were two people, who write about self awareness and was of achieving calm and equability, losing it in public. Both subscribe to a world view that says that everything that happens is grist for the mill, that even bad things, maybe particularly bad things, give us the opportunity to learn about ourselves and life.

But we overlay this with the perceived need to be good, to be seen to be good. What good is can be incredibly slippery. Trying to be good is hard. We fail as often as we succeed. But somehow it still feels important to try than to give up.

Trucking Memories

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This photo popping up on Facebook reminded me that it is two years ago that I got my Class One HGV licence. Although I drove mostly Class Two trucks like the one below these were my first steps on what became a great adventure, in fact many great adventures.

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Like all great adventures I was stretched, way beyond my comfort zone, on a daily basis. I learned so much about myself and about people. I gained an insight into an industry that we take for granted but without which the world would grind to a halt.

I still look at trucks on the road and wonder if I will ever go back. I occasionally dream that I have, and the dreams are the same mix of excitement and fear that reality was for the eighteen months that I did it.

Maybe one day…

Filtering

One of the questions I have been asked most over the past few weeks is “How do you filter the information coming at you in ever increasing volumes?”

In a word “ruthlessness”. Inevitably sources of information increase all the time and it is easy not to notice until you are feeling overwhelmed and under pressure to keep up. Every once in a while I have a purge, stripping things back ruthlessly to sources that I trust to provide more signal than noise and that are diverse enough to give me confidence that I will hear about things that matter to me.

The biggest casualty of this process is mainstream news. I find little value on the list of scary things that I can do little about that seem to be their main product these days so I never watch TV news, never listen to the radio, and never browse any news sources. What I do is make sure that my network includes a range of people with different perspectives and if a news article has been sufficiently relevant and interesting to share it I will pick up on their links.

Second biggest casualty currently is social media. I have really reduced the amount of time I spend in Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin. I am really enjoying not being subject to the indignation engines and focus on a very small subset of all of the people in those networks. As I said earlier the challenge is to reduce that number to as small as possible without losing signal as well as noise or ending up in an echo chamber.

So I mostly pay attention to my trusty old RSS feeds of certain journalists, bloggers, and experts in my network. I focus on writing posts on my blog and sharing photos via Flicks. Going back to first principles is working for me, it might for you.

There is a fine line between being forthright and being opinionated.

I have been doing a series of webinars recently, one on how to adapt to online communication in  COVID world and the other on how to better share knowledge. Both subjects I know a fair bit about and in both cases I was being paid to say what I think.

I am also aware that when doing online presentations the artifice of it (the fact that I am sitting at my computer rather than on a stage) means there is a risk of coming across as too laid back and so I need to inject some energy into my presentation.

So I get into the story telling, become less restrained, and let rip. I am aware that I might, to some, come across as opinionated. But then they are the ones who are probably not going to agree with my pitch that we all need to become more open and share more and I guess I’d rather take that risk than appear unsure or dispassionate.