The power of apocalyptic imaginations

Today I am writing about the apocalyptic visions that propel climate change discourse forward. In my usual random association kind of way, I decided to look up the Metallica song Enter Sandman to give me some background music that would inspire apocalyptic writings. I found on youtube video footage of what looks to be a truly EPIC concert in Moscow in 1991. There is something truly amazing about this and it is making me think of the influence of this music, this band, these performances on things as profound as international relations and domestic politics. The connections are made explicitly in some of the videos, the Russian police, protests, the quest for freedom, rebellion, and the love shown by the people at the concert not only for the band, but for America. I can't help but think how interesting it would be to do a project, interviewing people in places like Moscow about the influence this music had on them during this time period. I know from my own experience living in Iran in the 1990s that Metallica among others was one of the most influential bands. Though they couldn't come there to play, walls were graffittied with their name and privately people were rocking out to them, releasing all that pent up tension and feeling for a moment the sensation of being FREE, of being master of their own destiny, of indulging in the fantasies of breaking free from the oppressive control enacted by the state.

Watching these videos I find myself filled with energy, enthusiasm, joy! There is something so alive about this music, it's not sitting back and taking anything, it's standing up, jumping up! Expressing freedom and power and life in the face of difficulty and danger and threat and death. I wonder if that kind of power and life fire can only be expressed in the face of the threat of the opposite, powerlessness, apathy, disaster and depression. Listening to those guitar riffs I feel those feelings are being confronted full on, goaded out and fully destroyed. Wahaaaay!

Colour Palettes

I am sitting at my desk in the office that I share with other postgrads. It's a beautiful sunny day outside, though very icy and treacherous. In the morning, all the plants, leaves, blades of grass, twigs, were frosted, as though they had been lightly dusted with icing sugar. The sky is clear and if I turn my head I can see the deep blue sea. In front of me, behind my computer and my desk covered in papers and books, is my corkboard which I have decorated with photographs. My selection of pictures is colourful and quite simple, firey autumn leaves, a red sunset, a pink sky reflected on the wet sand of a beach, green trees, a yellow wall in front of which is a display of rustic food... Daubs of bright colour, simple, beautiful shapes, all outside. The photos lift my spirits and give me something to look at which I find inspiring and calming at the same time. My eyes seem to find the photo that reflects the colour I need an infusion of, bright red and orange for a little fireiness, soothing blues and greens for some calm...

I remember reading a book when I was a child about a man who had had a near death experience, and once he came out of it he decided to set up a centre for colour therapy, where people could come and go into different coloured rooms to achieve different states of mind. I think that would be a fun experiment, to see the effect that different colours had on people. I've heard that people's favourite colours say a lot about their personalities as well, even that people have different coloured souls :-) . I wonder how the same colour might influence different people differently.

Do you have a favourite colour? Why do you like it? Do you find you surround yourself with things of a particular colour? Like to dress in certain colours?

Momentum

I don't know what this blog post is going to be about yet because I'm trying something new. My normal process with this has been to have an idea about something, and then spend a little time constructing a post about it. To that effect, I have several unfinished posts in process. I have started writing about the idea of 'being authentic' or getting in touch with your authentic self. That was inspired by an article I read but I had so much to say about it that the post has never been finished. Then I started writing about food and drink, a series called 'Eat, Drink and Be Merry' about good food, bad food, too much food, too much drink, moderation and so on. Then I thought that sounded really preachy and pretentious so I decided not to post it. Then I started writing about women in the modern world and choices about whether to have a family or not, whether to pursue a full-time career and try to progress like men do or whether to seek out flexible or part-time working in order to fit it in with family life... That didn't get finished either.

There's a pretty clear pattern in other words, things I've started and not finished. The same thing could be seen in my academic work. I have folders full of documents that I have begun writing and never finished. And likewise with creative writing, I start writing stories, developing characters, and then just abandon them and move on to something else.

I've always envied people who throw themselves into things with full attention and focus, and keep going with that thing until it's done to the best of their ability. Instead I flit like a butterfly from one thing to the next, never fully paying attention to the thing at hand because my mind is all over the place. Yesterday in one of my tutorials (I teach small groups of first year undergraduates) we were discussing the research process. One of the things they have to do is interview a member of staff about their research. They were expressing surprise at how specific you have to get at the PhD level of research and saying that they'd have a hard time being that focused on something so specific. I was thinking: "no kidding!" I've often wondered if it actually takes that first kind of person, the really focused, detail-oriented type to do a PhD, or if there is in fact room for the dabbler type like me. One thing that I find heartening in this respect though is the pace at which I move. In other words, slowly (except when shooting down a zip line and busting up my knee). I think the effect of the fact that I move slowly is that things seem to go by really fast. Therefore, the initially interminable-seeming 3-4 years of a PhD actually will not seem that long to me. Especially since there are only two years left! I think it's going to go by really fast and in that respect, hopefully I won't significantly lose focus again over the course of that time (I've already done it once).

I think there are certain time biases built into our society. For instance, if you are an early riser and get to work early in the morning, that gets respect. Sleeping late is seen to be lazy, even if the person is more of a night person and likes to work late into the quiet of the night. There are also certain paces at which we are meant to do things, which are also affected by culture, social class etc. Like having children for instance, recently there was a girl of 10 who had a baby much to the shock of the British middle class, to which 30 is probably a pretty average age for procreating, which would be seen as shocking to the Roma people to which the 10-year-old girl belonged.

On the subject of socio-cultural perceptions of time, RSA has made a nice little video of a book written about this:

One of the articles I was going to post regarding women was about women in the Netherlands and their attitude towards work. In short, rather than wishing to compete at a level with men, and to relentlessly climb the career ladder, they valued being able to work, but in a more casual way, so that they could still invest much of their time into their lives outside work, with friends and family. The article compared this attitude with a more North American attitude wherein women are in fierce competition with their male counterparts and wish to be treated in the same way and climb the career ladder in the same way too. This modern expression of feminism as it were has the flipside of being potentially really hard on women to the extent that many may not wish to participate in careers to this level and would prefer a more flexible and balanced, or slower-paced life. There is so much pressure to be the superwoman with a high-flying career as well as a perfect homelife, perfect body, perfect children, perfect everything...

I think this TV ad sums up the attitude pretty well:

We are being told all kinds of things by society all the time. Not just by advertising on TV, but also through our peer groups, our families, through our work colleagues, through products that are created (ready meals for busy families anyone?), through the options that are offered to us... We internalize so many of these messages without even noticing them, and start to think we have to be certain ways. In many cases, there are good reasons for the messages society gives us, like the general social norm that you do not hurt other people. Such norms mean that society functions reasonably well and that people who don't conform can be punished. However, many of the messages we get are much more arbitrary, perhaps unnecessary, and serving the aims of particular sectors or members of society. Is it possible to decipher all the messages we get from society and then make critical choices about them? Is it necessary? And, how do we know how many of the messages we've received have been internalised so that we now think they are ours, part of ourselves? Indeed, do we have selves outside of the messages we've absorbed? What does it mean to be 'authentic'? Does it mean that we've confronted some of these societal norms and decided to fight back against them? Or are we authentic regardless, simply through having either accepted or rejected various societal norms?

Eat, Drink and Be Merry... (Part I: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly)

Let's kick off with a little music shall we?

I've been thinking a lot lately about what we put into our bodies, and why, and to what effect. I guess I've always had a bit of an interest in food and nutrition. My mother was a stay-at-home parent when I was growing up and that along with the way she was brought up meant that everything we ate was made from scratch, often using vegetables and fruit from our own garden. Having veg and fruit growing in the garden also meant we ate a lot of it. There was also a wholesale produce shop pretty much across the road from where we lived, so we'd buy boxes of oranges in the winter and so on. In short, we ate a lot of whole foods, freshly prepared and home cooked. We would have a Sunday roast without fail every Sunday, often followed by an apple, rhurbarb, blackcurrant or gooseberry crumble. (If you aren't jealous by now you don't know what you're missing!). We did used to eat out occasionally, if we were in town for shopping or something, and I used to enjoy the donuts at our local fast food restaurant (Wimpy). We'd have icecream, chocolates and sweets in moderation. For example, we'd often go for a walk on the weekend, and we would stop at the sweet shop on the way home and could buy one kind of sweet. Or after a swim we were allowed something out of the vending machine. I don't recall ever being told I couldn't have something, and I don't ever recall over-indulging in anything either.

My mother also grew up making everything from scratch from whole foods, in a culture that uses a lot of herbs, vegetables, fruit and legumes. She is also reasonably nutritionally aware and would tell us about the various vitamins and minerals in various things we were eating. I always found this very interesting. I think watching her eat fruits and vegetables with relish is also an early memory of mine that encouraged my own love of these things. Perhaps at the time I didn't fully realize it, but I think our tastes were being shaped through all these things. We grew up with a healthy appreciation for good, largely unprocessed food, which has carried on through my life. As for less healthy processed foods, being allowed to have them but in moderation meant that I did not develop any kind of excessive desire for them (which I might have done had they been forbidden), and neither was I overly exposed to their effects.

It seems clear to me that our childhood experiences with food have such a profound shaping effect on our tastes and ultimate food habits. I feel lucky that I happened to have had the experiences I did with food growing up, but recognize that in today's world where in many cases both parents work and time (as well as space) are of a premium, that perhaps most people do not get the kind of benefits I had the luxury of in terms of home-grown and home-cooked foods. In fact, there are many pressures to eat in a much different way to this.

The other night we were talking about the way that the state tries to influence people's eating and activity habits through various types of marketing. A recent book titled 'Nudge' talks about how the placement of foods in different places in cafeterias for example has the effect of promoting either healthy or unhealthy eating. Many people find this controversial, as though the state were trying to control people and that has to be bad. Personally, I find it heartening. The thing is that whether we like it or not, we are being subjected to nudges all the time, but most of them come from the marketers of products. Junk food especially, with bright colours and loads of artificial colours, flavours, massive amounts of sugar and very little nutritional value is often marketed almost exclusively at children. See this assessment of common breakfast cereals for instance. The effects of these pushes towards such eating patterns are manifold. They have the effect of shaping the tastes of people for one thing, tastes that may continue for the rest of their lives. On top of that, in such cases, what is being promoted is something like a drug. The massive amounts of refined sugar, and the lack of fibre or anything else that may take longer to digest causes a sudden high, a temporary elevation of mood... followed by a crash which is often only remedied by another dose of sugar.

And that is besides all the artificial flavourings, colourings, preservatives, sweeteners, etc. All of which I have to admit I find a bit suspect. Several colourings have been linked for instance to various disorders in children as well as increased cancer risk. At one point, in an effort to slim down I was using artificial sweeteners (Sweet n Low and Equal) in my tea and coffee. I found I started getting headaches with a frequency and severity that didn't seem to correspond to anything else. This stopped when I stopped using them. The evidence on the potential dangerous effects of sweeteners is currently lacking, and in the UK at least, almost all drinks contain such sweeteners, regardless of whether they are diet drinks or not. I think it's only a matter of time before studies start to emerge showing the long-term effects of consuming such things.

My point of this post is that sometimes identifying the goods and the bads in terms of food options is really hard work. And while various governmental bodies do exist to try and keep obviously harmful things out of reach, it's still possible to do a lot of harm to ourselves through what we eat and drink, particularly if we do so in excess. What's the solution? I guess that people like Jamie Oliver, and other celebrity chefs focusing on school food and the connection between the raw ingredients and what we end up eating are trying to take the place of the parent in encouraging healthy food consumption. This is probably one good way forwards, but better still it will start inside the families, with parents making healthy choices for themselves as well as their children.

On Owning It, or Dancing like No One's Watching

In my last post, I considered the reaction we have to people who are "morbidly obese" as it is now termed. I figured that the reaction we sometimes have to watching someone who is so fat that they have difficulty moving is something like pity and stems from the fact that we are sort of programmed to enjoy seeing people happy and healthy, and people who are morbidly obese are often neither. Overeating is often a symptom of psychological distress. And besides that, being so large that most every day activities are very difficult cannot be pleasant. Now, I'm not saying it is right that we feel uncomfortable about this. I'm also NOT saying that people who are of a healthy weight are necessarily either happy or in control of their lives, indeed many are not. There are thin people and even very fit people who are unhappy or in other ways psychologically disturbed. So being of a healthy weight is only a start, but size is one of the first things we see when we look at someone, along with a myriad of other clues about them, their posture, their clothing, how they carry themselves (is it with pride? with confidence? with apology and shame?). We all read people like books, without even being aware of it much of the time. Likewise we are being read as well, and sometimes people like what they read and other times they don't.

Just like books, the types of physical appearances that we find pleasing are often based on our culture and on what the art forms, and in our era, media such as television, films, advertising, magazines and so on tell us about what is considered to be beautiful. Many people speak against these forms of beauty that are presented to us, realizing that these are limited and limiting ideas, and ones which can often be harmful. When we are told again and again that thin is beautiful (regardless of health), we start to believe it. We only have to look back to artists such as Renoir to see that this idea of beauty is neither timeless nor universal. Nevertheless they are powerful and pervasive ideas. For all of us, not just those who are overweight, such images can be damaging to our self-esteem, and in another ironic vicious cycle, by being self-conscious and ashamed of how we look, we don the most unattractive look of all, that of apologetic shame, a stooped posture, a body hidden behind baggy unflattering clothes, a walk which is more a shuffle than a stride... I would argue that there is little that is more attractive than confidence, and little that is less attractive than its opposite. So whatever size and shape, whatever story you are, if you own that story it will be attractive. And on the other hand, no matter how naturally beautiful you may be, if you don't love yourself it will be hard for others to see your beauty because it will be hiding behind cringing self-denigration.

What made me really think about this was a recent experience at the university sports center. Every Wednesday at lunch time I play an energetic hour of badminton with a girlfriend. The uni sports center is a slightly different environment than the community center where my partner and I sometimes play in the evening, but as I've been enjoying my Wednesday games, on Friday last week I suggested to my partner that we play at uni instead. On the same day in the evening I also went to a "Zumba" class at the same place. Being academics, my partner and I ended up analyzing the gym environment and how various characteristics of it were geared towards a kind of exclusivity that could deter unfit people from partaking. Firstly, almost everyone in there is already very fit. Secondly, wherever you are in the gym, you are in full view of many other people. So much so that people can kind of lazily watch you from a number of different vantage points (even outside!). Thirdly, the showers are communal (though gender-segregated), and only in the women's shower room are there curtains you can pull across if you don't want to be totally on display. The end result of this is that if you are not already reasonably confident with your body, this is not exactly an inviting environment. During the Zumba class for example, in which all manner of strange moves were performed, there was an audience behind me, and one above. I was painfully conscious of my top hiking up and my belly rolls hanging over the top of my pants. A guy sitting on the floor behind me also had his mobile phone out for a very long time and I was having nightmares of a video emerging showing me in all my uncoordinated, flabby glory. I felt very uncomfortable, and though I was enjoying the music and the class, I felt so awkward that I couldn't fully get into it, until that is, I convinced myself through some mental exercise to let go and enjoy it, and to OWN the flab and be defiant about it. To just be myself and be unapologetic that I do not look like all the fitness fanatics that spend all their free time in the gym. Eventually, I managed to stop obsessing about my belly, and I let go and enjoyed myself, and it was great. I'll be going again this week.

The point of all this is simple. In my view, the number one first step towards making any kind of change in life (like losing weight and/or getting healthy) is to tell yourself to love yourself, just the way you are, and to keep repeating it to yourself, keep bolstering your own confidence, telling yourself to walk tall, to be proud, to OWN it, and to dance like no one's watching. Doing so gives you the courage that is necessary for getting through all the other steps, like the exercise classes! And all the many other steps on the path towards your ultimate goals, whatever they may be.

All shapes and sizes?

Since I've rejoined the blogosphere, I re-visited an old blog of mine and harvested the links I had on there. One in particular is http://www.lojomanifesto.com/. Lojo's most recent post was a response to a very insensitive blog post about obesity by someone who writes for Marie Claire (a women's magazine).

Reading through both the original blog post and the response was a thought-provoking experience. I guess on one hand it did confront me about my own biases. Maura Kelly, the author of the blog post which suggests that looking at very overweight people is as disturbing as watching someone stumbling around drunk, using heroin or in other words, abusing a substance and/or themselves - a type of self-harming. Reading her post, offensive though it is, I do find myself understanding where she is coming from. As a survivor of an eating disorder (anorexia) herself, she clearly has severe body issues to begin with. But besides that, there is a degree validity to her argument. Let me tell a story to illustrate.

When I was living in Cardiff, an extremely overweight woman used to shop at my local supermarket. She had difficulty moving, so she would waddle to the baked goods aisle and fill her trolley with boxes of cupcakes, family-sized packages of chocolate bars, and various boxes of prepared frozen foods and the like. She used to take ages in the checkout line, and she always seemed (or acted) shocked by how much money her bill came up to. I gathered from her conversation with the cashiers that she had kids as well. Looking at what was in her cart made my stomach churn a bit, and I'll admit I felt a mixture of pity and something like irritation, even anger, because of what she was doing to herself and her family. I couldn't really understand it. In my mind, it is like an illness. If I consider it as an illness I guess it is easier for me to swallow (pardon the pun). But then I am imposing a category of 'ill' on people who may not consider themselves as such. Nevertheless, I can't seem to shake the idea that this is self-harming behaviour, and in order to continue it, that person would have to be somehow not well.

Why should this bother me or anyone else though? If someone else wants to eat or drink themself to death, at their own expense, then why should anyone else be bothered about it? I think this ties into my last post, about empathy. We feel a desire to see other people being healthy and happy (which ties into my post about sadness as well). Seeing other people being sick and miserable makes us feel sick and miserable too, so we don't like it. We want to shake them, and make them treat themselves better, and feel better, and spread joy through being an example of health and happiness. This is why watching really obese people doing various things, like eating huge portions of food, or buying loads of cupcakes, is disturbing.

However, there are many obese people out there, and I would think that not many of them are obese out of choice. Instead, I would imagine that many, if not most of them would rather be of a more average size, if only for practical reasons such as health and mobility. Yet as anyone who has tried to lose weight will tell you, it is not easy! Not even when you are perfectly healthy, fit, exercise several times a week and only need to lose a little bit of weight. So if you've become overweight already and are facing health problems, the challenge is even greater, and often requires a full life change, massive willpower, and the help and support of other people. The other thing that irks me is that many people become obese not even due to having chosen an unhealthy path out of more healthy ones. Many people, especially in America are stuck with long commutes, massive portion sizes and junk food every where, and very little time and opportunity to dedicate to healthy lifestyle choices. Cities are not always walkable, jobs and homes are often far away from each other, in families often both parents have to work, often at sedentary jobs. That means little time for cooking healthy, balanced meals, or taking the time to sit and relax with food, instead of just shovelling fuel in to get through the day....

In other words, there are a multitude of societal factors that result in people becoming and staying obese. Just as there are a multitude of societal factors that result in people becoming and staying unemployed (see this BBC Radio 4 broadcast regarding people on state benefits). I think as members of a society what we need to be able to do is recognize the problems that are being caused and perpetuated by various societal factors and direct our dissatisfaction towards those factors, rather than the people who become victims of them. If various aspects of the physical, social, political and economic environment produce particular problems, such as poverty or obesity, we need to be looking for the causes, and part of doing so is to try to understand, and empathise with, people in those situations, which may involve acknowledging and suppressing reactions such as distaste and annoyance as well as any pre-conceived ideas and prejudices. In other words, truly trying to understand the situation in order to be able to consider how to help and promote better alternatives.

The Empathic Civilization

I went to an environmental politics reading group today in which we discussed Jeremy Rifkin's idea that the human animal is actually becoming more empathic. A nutshell animation of the argument can be watched here:



I had been planning on going to the reading group, but what with being away for the weekend, last week working on something else, and this morning running a tutorial (before which I was marking essays), I didn't get around to doing the reading until half an hour before the meeting. Nevertheless I managed to read it all (it was just one chapter), and discovered how strangely appropriate it was to yesterday's blog post.

I think when you start to talk about the spiritual/psychological positives that arise out of a feeling of connection with nature, you run the risk of making people think you are some kind of fruity new age spiritualist hippie. There probably is a little bit of that in me actually. But when you are batting in an intellectual arena there often isn't room for that sort of thing. So it's interesting and sort of appropriate that what I thought was Rifkin's weakness of argument was actually a strength. That is, he argues in a way that suggests some kind of scientific rationale to the argument, using a real variety of examples from many different disciplines, and puts forth the argument as though the things he is mentioning actually do suggest what he's reading into it. The problem is that what he's arguing is actually sort of a spiritual or psychological emotional response, whereas his style of argument is one of rationalism. You'd think it would be contradictory in many ways, but I can see the value in it. There are plenty of deep ecology and other environmental philosophy works out there which suggest a different evaluation of our environment, of nature, as something we are a part of rather than something we stand apart from and utilize. In the academic world, as with most work, these tend to be read only by other like-minded environmentalists. But something like Rifkin could in fact impact upon the more 'sciency' social sciences, such as political science, and even policy discourse because of the way it is presented.

Perhaps the best thing about his argument is that it endorses the idea of feeling a bond with, an empathy for, and a desire to be a part of a wider community that includes not only humans of all sorts, but also other creatures, frogs even! Though we found many ways to dissect his argument, I think we all enjoyed the positive message he implies, and I feel heartened that such thoughts are emerging from the academic community which is so often dedicated to pulling things apart and being critical and negative about everything. The positive message is that through encouraging our empathetic natures, and by following our instincts to do things in the interests of others (human and otherwise), we in fact fulfill a desire in ourselves and make ourselves feel more connected, more part of something bigger, and perhaps just more good. The irony in how I translated that is that it still has to do with being selfish. We are empathetic because it makes ourselves feel good, once again centering the focus upon ourselves. Still, if the product is good for all involved, does it matter if it is done out of a selfish desire to feel good?

Friends come in all shapes and sizes...

On Friday evening I was walking home in the rain with bags of groceries and sort of stewing away with all these negative thoughts that I posted about earlier. I was trying hard to fight them but I just kept running up against bad feelings: anger, annoyance, disappointment (directed at myself) and the general feeling that the inside of my head was a bit chaotic and scrambled. And then something amazing (to me) happened. Just as I was walking up the path to my house, I encountered a little friend. A red frog! Why is this special? Well, until last year, I had never seen a red frog before. Then, last year in September I went for a longish bike ride because I was feeling a bit down then as well. On may way home on the bike path I had seen something red just in front of me. I stopped and met this little guy:

I was so amazed and intrigued by the bright colouring of this frog that I completely forgot my worries and I cycled home with a heart full of joy and wonder, as excited as when I was a child and I was bringing home some new creature to show to my mum (I used to do this a lot... sometimes to her horror). These days I only take photos home rather than my little friends, but the sentiment is the same. I find these encounters wonderful and soul-lifting, just like how a cute cat or dog might make you feel.

Anyway, discovering a second red frog on an evening when I was feeling confused and down, felt like a gift. Actually it felt that way the first time as well. I'm probably making myself sound increasingly strange with this post, but hey, everyone has things that make them happy, and this is one of mine. :-) A while back I posted on here about affinity with various animals, sort of like how in some cultures people are considered to resemble a particular animal spirit. Frogs are such a creature for me, I used to befriend them as a child and even had one that would follow me around. They are lovely creatures. And to see one with such beautiful an unusual colouring, and twice now! I know it sounds superstitious but sometimes things just feel lucky, like good omens. Like my animal friends are watching over me and there when I need them. Haha! Ok, that sounds crazy, but hopefully you can understand and know that I'm still a rational person, but there's nothing wrong with retaining that sense of wonder.

On Friday night after my encounter, I cooked dinner for my Bear (boyfriend), and on Saturday morning we drove down to Cardiff to visit with a couple of my dear friends. We had a lovely, relaxing weekend with plenty of good food and conversation and I feel refreshed and ready to carry on with renewed energy and enthusiasm this week. I'm going to make it a good one :-)

I'd like to thank all the froggies and other wondrous creatures and people out there who are all a part of the great gaia that is our planet, for making me feel whole again.

Here is another picture, which to me captures some of the magic I feel:

Painting it Black

I went to bed thinking about this whole sadness thing, and woke up thinking about it too. The thing is, I already know the answers to many of these issues, which is why it's frustrating that I go through the cycles over and over again. It's like some emotional rollercoaster which I am not in control of.

Firstly, there are plenty of things in life to be sad about, war, diseases, poverty, injustice, abuse, etc. Many of these do not directly affect a lot of us, for which we should be grateful (but not beat ourselves up for being so lucky and not deserving it). Some of these things do affect us, and they legitimately cause us to feel unhappy. Of the things that do affect us I figure there are two types of things.

The two types of things that we can legitimately get upset about are 1) things that we cannot control (e.g. deaths, accidents, wars, illness...). And 2) Things that we can change. Tragedies happen all the time. But that's the thing: They just happen. We are right to feel upset about it I think, because it's important to allow yourself to grieve. Everyone has their own way of dealing, but I think the ultimate goal in case of these things is just to survive them. Sometimes even death is complicated. For instance, a girl I know who is doing a PhD at my University recently returned to her home in Africa because her brother committed suicide. She is understandably depressed about this, and feels like perhaps she could have prevented it. In another case, someone I was living with at one point received news just before Christmas that his mother had committed suicide. And I think he felt the same, like maybe there was something he could have done. So it's complicated. But this brings me to the second kind of thing we get upset about: The things we CAN change.

There are some things we can change. The difference between these things and the things that we cannot change is the difference between present and past. In the situation above, there was nothing that anyone could do about the fact that the person in question was now dead. All anyone could do is try to carry on, try to share the burden of grief with the other surviving family members and friends, and try to banish the feelings of guilt and forgive themselves and find a way of moving on with life.

This might sound really harsh given the examples, and of course this is never simple or easy, and in fact I didn't mean to use such extreme examples, but the message is the same. In fact, I think the first few lines of the 'Serenity Prayer' sum it up well:

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
the courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

I first heard this prayer when attending an AA meeting in a supportive capacity, but felt that it applied to me as much as anyone. I may not have a drinking problem but I struggle with frustration at my own shortcomings and failings (as I perceive them at least), and a lot of this has to do with not knowing the difference between things I can change and things that I can't. I might add to that there is a question of things I 'should' try to change or not, which opens up a can of worms over morality and ethics, authenticity and responsibility. Though I have a feeling that there is something deep within ourselves that will give us most of those answers if we sort of meditate upon them.

Sweet Sorrow?

I've been crying a lot lately. I mean, I cry quite a lot ordinarily anyway, but I've just been having a bit more of a down lately. It happens. I've often wondered why it happens, and I've been through the whole gamut. Nothing makes me more angry nowadays than when someone suggests I'm depressed. It makes me feel like yelling "You don't know me! I've always been like this!". And it's true, and goddammit, it's another one of those things that I'm done being apologetic about. Within reason of course. My poor boyfriend gets to put up with it a lot. But on the plus side, I'm often happy, playful and loving. In fact, I think I'm always that with him, even when I am in the midst of being miserable.

The intensity and ferocity of my misery has gotten milder over the years, or perhaps I've become more adept at handling it. There is a little bit of irony in my misery. To understand this, you have to understand why I get to feeling down quite often. Basically my misery is often (if not always?) related to my feeling down about myself due to my perceptions of my failings. It's really easy to do this because I have plenty of failings, and it's easy for me to list them and bang myself over the head with them. In fact, I accumulate more failings on a daily basis. For example, I decided I'd participate in NaBloPoMo on the 1st. It's the 4th and I have already missed one day of it. FAIL. Now, of course, in the grand scheme of things, this does not matter at all, but if you add this to umpteen other perceived failures pretty soon you have a whole load of FAIL. Great. So then I start to feel down about myself, and I convince myself that I am utterly useless and can't do anything right and that I'm basically a drain on everyone around me, and on life in general, and I'm a waste of space taking up valuable resources and so on and so forth. So usually at some point in the midst of this I start beating myself up about the fact that I'm being a pathetic loser and crying about nothing and meanwhile there are all these people in the world with REAL problems and they are taking it "like a man" as they say! This is the hilarious part. I'm crying because I feel like a loser, then I feel more like a loser because I'm crying, and then I am more convinced than ever that I am a loser and I cry some more about that and search out my escapisms, like sleeping, or spending too much time on the internet. Then I hate myself for hating myself and causing myself to do things that make me hate myself more. Dear. Lord.

These patterns of mine are so tiresome. I sometimes think back to when I was a child and how I used to think I could do anything. What I wasn't prepared for was life, and how no matter how many times you learn something, you keep repeating the same backwards behaviors and it's a bloody hard pattern to shake. In fact, it sometimes feels like I would need to be a totally different person in order to behave differently. But, I don't believe that's true. I think if I keep working on these things, and most importantly, keep forgiving myself every time I have a big ol' pathetic cry, then it will not matter so much anymore and I can keep moving on.

I've known many people who have been on anti-depressants for either short or long periods of time. I was on them for a short time as well, to get through a really severe depression that was brought about by a whole bunch of unfortunate circumstances in my life at the time. Those were dark days for me. Maybe it's because I have that comparison that I feel like my usual state of ups and downs it's normal for me and nothing to worry about. Sure, if I wasn't miserable then perhaps I'd be more productive, though I'm not even so sure about that. I procrastinate a lot when I'm feeling down, but usually during those times I am occupying my mind with other things and sometimes good things come of that as well. And anyway, how capitalist is that thought? Take drugs in order to be more productive? No thanks. I'm also very offended by the suggestion that a person should be happy all the time. What bullshit. Quite frankly, you'd have to be an idiot to be happy all the time. If you ever think about how much misery there is in the world, how many people are suffering, how many wrong things happen every day... it's depressing as hell! I can't even think about it most of the time, and I really hate the news, and consume it only with reluctance out of a feeling that I need to know a little about what's going on. Many things make me angry, many thinks break my heart, and many things make me cry. But quite honestly, I don't think I would want to be any other way. Sadness is a part of the human condition, and it's just as worthy an emotion as happiness. Happiness may be more pleasant for everyone involved and that's great, but I think it's only natural that we feel sadness as well. At least, for me it is and I can't afford to blame myself for that, instead I'd rather just embrace it.

Learning American

I started writing out a fungi identification of the last post... but it was awfully tedious, and I thought I'd give it a rest. It's 10:30pm after all, and I have had a few beers and am in no mood for poring over my fungi identification guide at present... so let's talk about something else shall we? I'll work on the fungi post and publish it later on.

I went to a training session this afternoon, titled 'Learning Styles for Effective Teaching', which was about trying to understand how people learn in different ways and tailoring classes to suit that. The essential concept was that people have different learning styles, some learn better through understanding how some theory or concept fits into a bigger picture, some learn through doing, some through watching others do and so on. We did an exercise based on four types identified in I think what was called the 'Honey Mumford' typology. The types were: Activist, Reflector, Theorist and Pragmatist. In some ways, you can see how everyone would have a little bit of each of these, but people may be inclined towards one or more of these more so than others. It makes perfect sense to design a lesson around appealing to all these aspects of learning, if only for the fact that surely learning something through four different styles is sure to drive the idea home one way or another.

When we were broken into groups, I was with a German guy who I am friends with and works in my department, a guy from Illinois who is in the English department and an Iranian guy who is studying law. It was quite funny to see the dynamic of the group. The American guy totally took over, though he was willing to listen to others as well. He wanted to be the one writing and took the pen straight away without asking, and then quickly organized our project. The Iranian guy didn't manage to get a work in edgewise but nodded a few times. I sort of put the onus on the German guy to provide the content for our lesson plan so he effectively explained global circulation systems to us and how he might teach them, and I input some suggestions about learning devices like short film clips and demonstrations. I joked that American guy was clearly an Activist, and he jumped on that with enthusiasm, as he did with everything seemingly. He was really funny, you could tell he wanted to be the star of the show.

It did make me think though, with a sort of affection, about the way that you often find Americans are: very impassioned, enthusiastic, and ready to run with almost anything and fully believe in it. Watching Stephen Fry does America the other night, he was talking to the guy who does the product design for the iproducts. He's a Brit actually, but based in California and he was talking about what it is about America that makes it a more favorable place for developing and inventing... and he said it was this kind of wide-eyed, innocent enthusiasm and belief that anything is possible. The sky's the limit. It's different from the British attitude of cynicism and witty sarcasm, which can also equate to restraint. I think it's true, the Brit attitude tends to be more tempered and balanced. There is less drama and passion, sure, but there is a blessed reasonableness about it. The war manifesto of 'Keep Calm and Carry On' is still so poignant. There is a distinct - and for me, much appreciated - lack of mass hysteria, no matter what atrocities are reported by the media, who do their best to stir up strong emotions with little clarity of focus and intent.

I guess as someone now living in the UK and appreciating the relative sanity of it (note: relative sanity), I have the luxury of being able to find American's endearing and amusing. Well actually, the majority of American's I met even when living in Canada tended to be endearing. They can be so loud, as though they think everyone will want to hear what they have to say; have this remarkable amount of confidence, even in ideas, ideologies; and also tend to be as individuals, really open and friendly. On the flip side of this, they voted in Bush twice, might still vote for Sarah Palin, and can hold the most extreme and bizarre of views which can be highly damaging to others. So as always, there are many sides to the story, and it would appear that you can't have that kind of open-faced confident enthusiasm if you also want careful, critically-thinking and more broad-minded types who like to ponder the many sides of an argument and are perhaps less inclined to act.

In short, I think our little group was an interesting cultural microcosm, suggesting that particular cultures have a tendency to produce people with different attitudes, and this applies not only to learning styles but to all forms of communication. When you know how people think you can address them in a way they are most likely to understand. Perhaps that is a strength of the British, and perhaps that suggests that there should be more of a focus an investment in diplomacy and also cultural studies in this country, because many international issues, such as the problems in Afghanistan and Iraq and of course Israel-Palestine seem to be crying out for much better understanding of people, of attitudes, of desires, of ways of thinking, and the careful production of communication and interaction that builds trust, reassures people and creates an environment of peace. That means being able to communicate effectively not only with the locals of these places, but also with the invading forces, particularly Americans. And if their learning style as it were is one of action and enthusiasm, then logically what the British contingent would need to do is present their ideas in that style in order to gain the support and cooperation of the Americans in more peaceable and thoughtful tactics.

Fun guy identification

Ok, here are my guesses for what fungi are pictured in the preceding post. If you know any of the unidentified ones please comment!

1. I'm not sure about this one yet. Any ideas? It had a yellow spore print.

2. These also. What are they? Who knows.

3. Fly Agaric (Amanita muscaria) - Poisonous. My book says: Rarely fatal. Hallucinogenic properties. Rarely fatal is fatal enough for me! Do not eat these.

4. Amethyst Deceiver (Laccaria amethystea) - Edible. Apparently it retains it's colour when cooked but lacks flavour. The problem is even if it tasted nice you couldn't get anyone to eat that because it looks dodgy.

5. Another unidentified.

6. Bolete of some kind. My guess is that this was a Bitter Bolete (Tylopilus Felleus), which is, as the name suggests, bitter. It could also have been a Brown Birch Bolete which my book says is soggy and not worth eating except for young ones. Less likely is that it was a Bay Bolete which is meant to be very tasty. But it doesn't look much like that from the picture in my book. My bet is that it was a Bitter.

7. Glistening Ink Cap (Coprinus Micaceus) - Edible but not worthwhile.

8. Sulphur Tuft (Hypholoma Fasiculare) - Apparently has a horrible bitter taste. Shame as these were growing rampantly in the back garden.

9. Polypore of some kind I think, but I don't know what kind. Pretty sure it's not edible though.

10. I feel pretty certain this one was of the Tricholoma family, but it didn't smell soapy so I'm not sure it's the Soap-scented tricholoma, probably a different kind. Don't think it's edible.

11. Smooth Earthball (Scleroderma Verrucosum) - This is my guess but I think it's a fairly good one. Not edible as it causes diarrhoea.

12. Don't know what this is. I didn't take a spore print OR a picture of the gills, so I don't think I'll be able to identify it with any certainty.

13. Hedgehog Fungus (Hydnum Repandum) - Perhaps surprisingly, this one is meant to make good eating. I haven't tried it yet.

14. Slimy Milk Cap (Lactarius blennius) - First mushroom we found after getting the book. It was slimy, and white milk leaked from the cap. Nice easy identification that. Not good eating due to slimy cap and acrid taste.

Who says I ain't a fun guy?

Apologies for the lameness of the title of this post. I can't help myself sometimes. So, I've had this blog kind of sitting here for a while, not doing much. I couldn't decide whether to start blogging again. But it's national blogging month, or NaBloPoMo and a couple of friends are doing it and I thought it might be therapeutic. Also, lately we've been really into mushroom identification and so I have all these photos of fungi and nowhere to put them really, so I figured why not make a post about them? We picked up a mushroom identification guide at the end of September, while in North Wales and started identifying straight away. Here are some of our finds. For added fun, see if you can guess which ones are edible! My answers tomorrow.

1a1b.
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Like sand through the hourglass

I couldn't sleep last night, thoughts swirling about in my head. That feeling, when you're tired and you have planned a day of work for the next day and you keep looking at the clock. I tried breathing deeply and massaging lavender into my temples. Then later some warm milk. I tried writing in my journal, but it was a new notebook and it had it's own demons that I was too tired to battle with. My mind refused to turn off and I didn't really sleep until about an hour before my alarm went off. Needless to say, today I was a zombie.

Sometimes I enjoy a bit of sleep deprivation. It sends me into a state of almost hallucination, things seeming sort of surreal, colors a bit strange, sounds even. It can put a new spin on things, liberate the mind a bit from the mundane. A little distortion of perspective can be just what's needed to bring focus and clarity (I hope these will soon follow as my mind currently feels like a room in which a hundred people have been given musical instruments of different sorts and each is playing their own tune as though they couldn't hear the others!)

I walked around in my zombie state for most of the day, wishing there was a way to snap out of it and function normally, new perspective or not. In the afternoon the sky, broody all day, broke into a thunderstorm. We went for a walk on the beach. I like how the sandpipers all cluster together, run towards the waves, then away from them, or all take flight together in formation. The tide was in so far we had to walk back over the rocks. It felt a longer way going back, it always does. I am tired now and will sleep and dream of all the sandcastles I want to build.

That sense of wonder

Yesterday evening as we were playing tennis I looked up to see the arc of a beautiful rainbow in the sky. I can't look at rainbows anymore without thinking of a video I recently saw on Youtube of a man viewing a double rainbow near his home on the edge of Yosemite National Park. The video has gone viral on the internet because of the man's extreme ecstasy at viewing this phenomenon. It is funny and also heart-warming to see someone, particularly an adult, with so much wonderment and joy in the world. The man in question uses the name Mountainbear on Youtube, and he looks a bit like a bear too. Just like my bear does. It makes me think of animals and how we have such an affinity with them sometimes, or see in ourselves characteristics that we see in them. Empathy with other creatures. Which reminds me too of another video I watched on Youtube, produced by the Royal Society of the Arts, which was about empathy and how if only we could develop our sense of empathy with all things the world would be a much better place.

On my other blog I've been working on a piece about knowledge vs belief. And the rationalistic attitude that pervades modern life. Modernity. The idea that some things are known and others are merely believed. This distinction is at once liberating and enslaving. We are liberated by the ability to perform experiments and to devise ever more detailed and careful methodologies to examine phenomenon and to try to understand them and their causes, and this allows us to use all kinds of things in new and creative ways to accomplish things we'd like to accomplish. And yet we are enslaved by this too, enslaved by having to communicate in the language of knowledge, a language that draws lines between knowledge, belief and imagination. And yet of course all knowledge is based on belief, but that belief has been informed by observations and interpretations of them. So, if you drop something and it falls, and it always seems to fall, we believe that there is such a thing as gravity, which draws things toward the earth. Our observations as well as the explanations we have been given for them seem to fit with our reason.

What I'm trying to get at here is that the way in which knowledge is created in our modernist system, leaves no room for say, spiritual beliefs. Spirit and imagination and fantasy are seen as having no space in the world of science and rationality. And that is where I think the world of knowledge is missing a trick. Maybe missing the trick.

Knowledge tells us that animal spirits and that strong affinity that a person can feel with an animal or animal spirit is the product of imagination and therefore unreal. And yet, such affinities are so important. If we feel close to our fellow creatures we will treat them differently, with deference and understanding. Without a feeling that we are separate from them. Instead with a feeling that we are just one species among many and rather than being the center of everything we are simply a part of it. It would give us a different sense of valuing things, an enhanced sense of empathy for our fellow creatures and for our surrounding. If we could acknowledge the spirit in things, in all things, we would find ourselves appreciating more our position in relation to them, within the complex, interwoven fabric of life.

Along that line, this morning I went for a walk down to the seafront and sat on a bench for a while watching waves break. A longboarder came along to ride them. And at the same time I saw a dolphin (or perhaps two or three) playing not far away, surfacing in graceful arcs then disappearing. I watched them for maybe half an hour like that, their glistening gray bodies breaking the surface of the waves while not far away a person surfed the same waves. I left with such peace and joy in my heart. Sometimes I feel like Mountainbear seemed to feel on seeing the double rainbow, just full of wonder at things, and full of love.

A weekend walk

It's Monday but I'm dreaming instead of working. On the weekends we often go out for a hike or walk somewhere in the hills. This Saturday we did an 8-mile walk that went past a slate quarry, leaving from Abergolwen, a nearby village. I have some vague memory of my father (now passed away) taking me there as a child. A geologist, he was always taking us to mines, quarries, cliffs with interesting rock formations showing... that kind of thing. I certainly remember trying to walk up a pile of slate. It's not easy as the smooth slabs of rock just slide over each other, nothing firm beneath the foot.

It was drizzling as we set off, but relatively warm. Bear had his GPS as well as a printed map. In my bag I have a little kit containing a compass, matches, a whistle, fishing line, etc. Stuff in case you end up lost in the hills basically. Not that I don't trust the GPS, map and bear put together, I do, but you never know what might happen. We had sandwiches made with bread that I baked in the morning, and also bread that bear had baked a couple of days before. Good Welsh cheddar cheese, grated, and fresh tomatoes.

Walking is quite meditative for me, one foot placed in front of the other, and thoughts turning in my head like cogs. I think about the speed at which we move through the landscape, and how our speed freezes it for a moment, even though we are moving quite slowly. When we pause for a moment the place slowly takes on movement of its own, beetles trundle past, birds appear out of their undergrowth nests, a big brown hare lops into the path and then disappears again upon seeing us.

The path leads us upwards and through a forest. The drizzle has turned into a damp fog and everything is wet, especially the ground now, soaked with rain and overflowing streams and turned into thick mud. At one point we almost lose our shoes in it! I have to get Bear to help pull me out and my foot, ankle deep in the squelchy mud makes a great SLLLUUUURP! sound as it is extracted. We follow the path upwards through the trees, a fine grey mist making the furthest trees disappear, and altering the sound of our voices. We emerge from the forest onto a moor, the mist blowing over it. The moor is covered in bilberry bushes and delighted we pick many of the delicious blueberry-like fruits and snack on them. We've diverged from the path a little now but the forest was hard work to get through because of the thick mud, so we struggle over the moor instead, eating berries as we go, until we join the path again.

The path begins to climb slightly again as we follow a ridge. We pause for a moment and look down. There is nothing to see but white - a blank page. We are standing atop a grassy ridge and below us, there is nothing, a great white void. Strangely, the white clouds that are obscuring the wide open view give even more of a sense of openness. There is nothing for the eye to rest on, just the edge of the white where wisps of cloud roll up onto the ridge. There could be anything beyond, or nothing. Whatever you want there to be. It's peaceful.

Bear's hair and the fuzz on his face is dusted with tiny drops of dew. His sun-browned skin looks fresh and the colours of his clothes are the only vivid thing in my field of view, everything else disappears into muted tones around us. I guess sometimes you just have to slow down, pause, remove all the noise and flashiness, to see what's really important.

Bird by Bird

From October 2008 to September 2009, all I did was read. I mean, I took breaks in between for food, sleeping, holidays and an ample amount of procrastination, but mostly what I did was read. Oh and worry. I was worried because I was meant to be doing a PhD, and surely this meant doing more than reading, surely this mean processing what I had read into some kind of form? In retrospect I think that is exactly what was missing, the writing bit. I took a year out of the PhD to go and have a think about this, and whether I wanted to continue with the PhD or go become a town planner. Now, on the verge of completing my MSc in Planning, with only the small matter of the dissertation left to go, I find myself returning to my PhD office, and to the old patterns that were so unproductive. I spent the morning yesterday, guess what? Reading. Yes. Then in the afternoon after some procrastinating and feeling down, I talked to my boyfriend and he said, did you write? And I said no, I was tired, I didn't feel like it. Oh dear. Then he said, ok, just write a couple of hundred words about what you read today. Now, over the years, I have written thousands of words, words flow from me like water, I can't stop, now that I've started up this blog again and if you've come across it, you will soon discover this fact. But when my boyfriend said 'write a couple of hundred words' I thought, 'I don't have that much to say about this! I can't possibly write that. I don't want to...' and endless other excuses.

Why is it so hard to start writing? As a child I used to stay up late at night writing stories. I had notebooks filled with them. I loved it and I did it for fun. Now, nearing thirty, and my dreams of becoming a writer continuously on hold because I feel the need to have a 'real' career that will guarantee an income, and I struggle to write a few words unless I absolutely have to. Strange indeed. Granted, the material is quite different. Whereas writing stories involves wandering off into the beautiful world of imagination where the mind can roam free, academic work involves focusing hard on someone's argument and carefully analyzing and dissecting it and making a good critique of it. It's hard work. Just thinking about it now is making my head hurt. But I'm on the verge of returning to my PhD, which means I'm about to sign up for at least two more years of this misery and I have to find a way to get myself through it... hence the blog. I need to have an outlet where the things that prevent me from approaching my academic writing don't apply, so that I can write freely and work out for myself the problems I'm having so that I can get on with the task at hand without getting caught up in a kind of paralysis.

The thing is this... the task seems mammoth. And as soon as it does, the easiest and most appealing thing to do is to lie down and well, go to sleep to shut it out. So I slept a lot during that first year of the PhD. There are other avoidance tactics as well, but it's rare to escape the feeling of guilt unless you are doing one of two things: sleeping, or doing the work. The best part is when you are actually doing the work. It's rewarding, it's interesting. Sometimes it's disappointing (like when you find someone else's work that covers what you're covering but seemingly much better!), but overall there is a sense that you're doing what you're meant to be doing. And that's good. So, why is it that I try to avoid it so much? The endless hours spent watching youtube videos, on facebook, anywhere else (probably this blog in the future but at least this is helpful)....

I figure there are a number of reasons for why I procrastinate. And so I've made myself a little guide to refer to for whenever I start roaming youtube and looking at videos of talking cats. Here goes:

Question: Why do I procrastinate?

Answer 1) Because I'm afraid that if I do work on something it won't be good

** Think about this: If I don't work on it at all it's bound to be worse!

Answer 2) Because I am under the impression that the work I need to do will be less enjoyable than what I'm doing

** Think about this: I enjoy thinking and playing with ideas. I enjoy writing. Most of all, I enjoy the feeling of having accomplished something!

Answer 3) Not doing it is easier

** Yes, but there is also no satisfaction in it, and I feel bad after wasting time. I feel ashamed of my procrastination and guilty for not having done my work. Also, it makes my work harder and stress level higher in the long run.

A4) The thought of the work in its entirety fills me with fear and dread - if I occupy my mind with other things I don't have to think about it and thus don't experience the fear and dread.

** Try not to think about the entirety. Instead, think in terms of paragraphs, or ten minute chunks. e.g., I'm just going to write 2 paragraphs on x and/or edit 2 paragraphs. Baby steps!


This last point is where the title of this post comes from. I have a book called 'Bird by Bird' which is about writing. And the story goes that someone's son had to write this paper on all the birds of a certain area. It was the end of the term and the boy hadn't done any of the work and now the task was mega. Feeling daunted he just didn't know where to start, until his father advised him to just take it 'bird by bird'. Just write one thing at a time and in the end it will add up.

I'm all too easily distracted but hopefully I will refer back to this when my mind is wandering for the umpteenth time each day, and I'll find the will to carry on and get something written!