Euan Semple's Blog, page 60

Just a thought…

“The past does not decide now. It is our now that decides the past.”

I’m not sure where I got this note from but when I came across it this morning it stuck with me.

We are so convinced that what has happened to us in the past dictates how we feel in the present. And yet our only experience of our past is in the the thoughts that we have about it in the present. Those thoughts emerge unbidden, they change all the time, and they are fleeting glimpses rather than a consistent narrative.

This is true even of the immediate past. That row you just had can either feel like a major tragedy or something that will blow over. Which it is, is just a thought and the next moment that thought can change.

Rather than getting locked into the ruminative circles that keep us stuck, what if we consistently noticed that our past is just a thought?

YouTube audio

YouTube audio

There are so many really interesting and informative YouTube videos but I don’t always have the time or patience to sit and watch them. Unless there is some sort of visual demonstration or diagram involved, especially if the content is simply a talking head or a discussion, I have no need for the video.

Fortunately the paid version of the podcast app Castro has a share sheet extension for iOS that at the click of a button strips the audio out of YouTube and adds it to what it calls a Sideload playlist. I can then listen as I drive or walk around and this has massively increased my ability to learn.

Well informed

I was musing, yet again, over the pros and cons of Facebook this morning. There are days when I feel like closing all of my social media accounts and reverting to just blogging. These thoughts are triggered by the balance of signal to noise in my feeds and also the levels of righteous indignation. Too much noise and too much indignation and I grow wearied with it all.

But there are two reasons that I don’t leave. One is the connection to smart people all around the world that I would be very sorry to lose. The second, and I know this is going to stretch your credibility, is that without my various feeds I would feel less well informed!

Yes, I really said that. Because I make an effort to have a range of views in my networks, and do my best to follow people who have an eye for interesting and well written content, I generally feel up to date and “well informed” on most big issues.

Perhaps more importantly for me the alternatives are increasingly unattractive. I haven’t bought a newspaper in decades and never watch television news if I can avoid it. Admittedly some of the well informed and well written content that I rely on through my networks comes from those sources but the thought of having to wade through all the other badly written, partially understood, and biased rubbish they contain is untenable.

The ghost in the machine

This morning a message from a social media platform reminded me that it was a friend’s birthday. Sadly that friend died a few years ago.

I used to feel awkward about these messages which come from the accounts of a few friends who are sadly no longer with us.

Now I enjoy taking a moment to remember that friend and hope that the various platforms continue to remind me for years to come.

Civil society is a thin veneer.

Why is it that outwardly nice, respectable people can turn nasty at the drop of a hat? Why do they get so wound up by movements like #metoo and #blacklivesmattter? What’s their problem?

I am beginning to suspect that deep down they know that they have enjoyed privilege through their race, class, nationality etc. and know how lucky they have been.

They also know how unfair and untenable their position is. They don’t let on that they know this of course, perhaps not even to themselves, but this is why they get so bent out of shape when someone less privileged than them dares to question the status quo. The teeth are bared and the knives are out. They feel as if their very existence is challenged and react as if they are involved in a fight to the death.

But they needn’t be, and nice people don’t really want that… do they?

Toxicity or growth?

The internet amplifies and accelerates everything, both good and bad. This includes office politics.

If you had a toxic organisational culture before lockdown there is a real chance that you will have a more toxic one now.

Conversely the opportunity for greater transparency, and the avoidance of behind closed doors misbehaviour, can enhance a more open way of working and as result amplify and accelerate the growth of a positive culture.

It’s a choice…

Life On Mars

We watched the last of the TV series Life On Mars again last night. For me it was the third time. Thankfully this is where my lack of ability to remember anything I have watched or read comes in handy, as the ending came as a complete surprise! All four of us sat there stunned and in tears.

Such clever story telling. Despite his toe curlingly appaling attitudes Gene Hunt manages to be one of the greatest screen heroes ever.

The main reason that we are watching both Life On Mars and Ashes to Ashes again is that there is apparently a third series coming. Can’t wait!

Clouds over Whitstable

As I lay on Whitstable beach on Saturday, watching clouds constantly forming and reforming in the sky above me, I found myself thinking, yet again, what a loose approximation for reality words and concepts are.

There is no such thing as a cloud. The word is an apparently convenient way to refer to something that is constantly changing. This is obvious with a cloud, but it is also true of ourselves. The cells that make up our bodies change at a bewildering rate and those cells are mostly made up of space. Even the apparently solid cells are made up of particles that are themselves mostly space. The distance from the nucleus to an electron (which itself doesn’t really orbit its nucleus but exists in a so called electron cloud with only probable positions – a bit like the cloud we started with) is approximately 1325 times this distance from the earth to the sun! This is why Buddhists refer to emptiness!

This is also why I bang on about our very fixed ideas of reality being totally made up. The words I choose to describe the reality around me, even the separation of the word me from reality, are nothing but concepts. And like the clouds my concept of reality changes. Thoughts pop in and out of my head without my bidding or control. Emotions and moods form and dissipate just like the clouds above Whitstable.

No cloud ever stays the same, ever, even for the briefest second. I never stay the same, even for the briefest second, and nor do you.

And then we make up stories about “I am a…”, “You are a…”, “We are…”. We expect reality to conform to our stories and get upset when it doesn’t. Very upset. Existentially upset. We pick fights over the fact that your story differs from mine.

What struck me about all this is that for years we have banged on about change as if it wasn’t the way the world was anyway! We have so deluded ourselves that the world around us is fixed, predictable, and controllable, that we have to pay “change experts” to realise that it’s not. And what those people invariably give us is yet more delusion about a planned transition to another apparently fixed reality!

Change and complexity have been seen as outside of the norm. As if simplicity, understandability, and a fixed stable world were real and anything else is unreal. But the next time you feel stuck or trapped in this delusional reality, this cage of your own making, remember the clouds over Whitstable. It might help a little.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall.

The world that we see around is a reflection of our own personalities, warts and all. Sure there is a “real” physical world out there but what it “means” is entirely made up. What your made up stories are is a result of your culture, background, and personal experience and they are inevitably totally different from mine.

As it does with everything else the internet speeds up and amplifies this truth. It is worth remembering that the next time you let it bend you out of shape. It is your own self created shape that it is bending. That’s why it hurts.

Practicing compassion – now.

I was aware of the risk of some people misinterpreting my recent post about getting stuck in stories about the past – but that is the risk one takes In attempting to challenge deeply held assumptions.

I had no intention of diminishing the pain and distress inflicted on people of colour every day around the world. Now. Quite the opposite.

Nor do I negate the pain and distress caused to people in the past. Standing on the steps at the entrance to the industrial scale gas chambers in Birkenau is a memory that will never leave me.

But that felt sense of mankind’s ability to inflict pain and suffering is a different thing from getting stuck in the stories about it, the differing interpretations of the what and the why, which trigger the tit for tat that keep the endless cycle of suffering going.

Yes, make the effort to understand man’s inhumanity to man, definitely change laws and policies to protect the vulnerable, but don’t let pulling down statues distract you from facing up to your own capacity to cause hurt and distress the next time you meet someone whose stories about the past are at odds with your own.