Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow

I hear a lot about mindfulness these days. It seems to be the buzz-word of choice, especially around minimalism and Zen forums, but it’s still just a repackaging of ‘living in the moment’ or ‘being present,’  both of which hark back to ancient Eastern philosophies. The idea is that by focussing on our immediate environment and situation, we can slow down from the frantic rush of our lives and appreciate what we have. It’s all very well and idealistic, but the fact remains that we are creatures of time, and we have to plan for the future, as much as we try to learn from rehashing the past. It enriches our experience to have the contrast of memories, hopes, dreams and reality.

If I was truly ‘mindful’ I wouldn’t dream about the future, wouldn’t make grand plans and schemes to achieve. If we didn’t look at the past, how would we ever learn who we are, or how to deal with situations that are new to us, but not to our parents, our ancestors. In the cup of the hand, there may only be the present, which is trite enough without remembering that hands don’t make very good cups: they tend to leak, and as the water spills, we’re not holding it anymore, only its memory.

So I’ll continue, regardless of the zeitgeist pop-philosophers, to live my life in all three tenses, and live it all the more fully for that. 

Tangled Red Tape

Why do we make our lives soo much more complicated than they need to be? I’ve been trying to plan a road trip for next summer. Should be easy, right? In principle, anyway: a bike, some money, spare clothes, full tank, maybe even a phrase book and off I go… Or not.

Because EU passport or not, I’ve still got to think about routes, mileage, daily coverage, ferry schedules, ferry bookings, EU regulations, and the list never gets any shorter. We, as a society, have now made even the simplest trip incredibly complicated. This is, granted, compounded by living on an island. First thing to do is to get off the island and that automatically means a wrestle with means of transport, schedules, prices and arcane bookings interfaces.

I’m looking at 4000 miles of beautiful roads, and all I can do is get bogged down in the details of how far, how long, how much, how many.

My head is swimming with lists of things to organise, things to do, to book, to pay for. I’m starting to look forward to this trip because once it starts the logistical nightmare of organising it all will be over. And I can, to an extent, relax.

You’d never think, given the chaos in my brain over all of this, that logistics is a large part of what I do for a living. It’s mildly laughable how much more organised I am for work than in my own life, but that could well be because I spend most of my day organising work, and don’t really have much time left to organise my own life.

It's a small world after all

The Euro’s in crisis, most of the developed world is in hock up to its eyebrows and the super-rich are still super-rich. Bankers still, even when working for government-owned (i.e. bailed out) banks, get big bonuses and politicians are struggling to come up with any solutions because they’re in bed with big business as well as the electorate. And neither businesses nor politicians are particularly good at long-term planning. They think in terms of financial quarters and electoral terms. This is not sounding like a pleasant scenario for the world economy. Especially when you consider that the developing economies are heavily reliant on trade with the developed world for their own stability. We have outsourced our call centres, customer service centres, IT support to India and our electronics manufacture to the Far East. If we can’t afford to buy the products that use the services, then countries like Japan, China and India will see a slow-down, if not a full-blown obsession.

Our world has become so interconnected and so small that we can no longer insulate ourselves from geographically distant events: the UK is blind if it thinks the Euro zone crisis doesn’t affect it – at least 50% of UK trade is with the EU. I work in television, and as arty as that sounds, we’ve been hit by the shortages created by the tsunami (and subsequent nuclear meltdown) in Japan, which has wiped out suppliers of key technical components.

It would be nice to think that this interconnection of all our economies would promote at least a tolerance between our cultures and religions, but that’s wishful thinking. Because it requires an awareness of the wider world, and also the act of thinking. Which apparently isn’t as simple as it sounds. 

Pure and Simple Every time

Simplifying my life has had an unexpected side-effect. I should have thought it through; logically, I could have predicted this. When you simplify, you focus more on what remains. This is the attraction of minimalism – there are so few objects in the room that each one stands out all the more. The effect of simplifying is to intensify, to concentrate, what remains. To make what remains stand out, shorn of extraneous embellishments and complications – purified.

And maybe that’s why minimalist philosophies go on about “living in the moment” – because when you take away the past and the future, and all the added complications that go with memory and anticipation – what’s left is enhanced, focussed, concentrated and somehow pure. And however unfamiliar it may feel, I find I like the intensity of that. 

Flow

There is a principle, in various Eastern philosophies as well as martial arts, often credited (by the West) to Bruce Lee: Be Like Water. It’s not about hard or soft, but about adaptability, and the acceptance of change. Water takes the shape of its container, it runs down the path of least resistance – water adapts. The natural state of life is change, and as much as it scares most people, we need to learn to live with it. To deal with it, to at least attempt to embrace it. The problem is, we’re so busy filling our hours with appointments and to-do lists and strictly defined goals and deadlines, the idea of any unexpected developments is terrifying. It’ll throw our whole day off plan. If my boiler breaks down and floods my house and all my things are ruined? How much insurance and work and time will it take to repair and replace everythign as it was? The Eastern philosophies that expoudn the Be Like Water principle tend to promote minimalism as an ideal lifestyle – the promote having enough, and no more or no less. The idea behind it is the chill-out principle. On holiday, on weekends, we can breathe, and do nothing or whatever takes our fancy. We can chill. We can experience what the Scandinavians call hygge (which doesn’t really translate, but expresses a kind of combination of chilling + cosiness + camaraderie better lived than explained). If we live simply enough, not bogged down with extraneous possessions and commitments, the idea is that we will be more relaxed and more able to adapt, and just go with the flow.

Not Worth The Jail Time

I lack patience. The older I get, the less patience I possess and the shorter my attention span seems to get. Traffic lights, pedestrians, the car in front of me, indecisive shoppers, disorientated tourists – I am not good at waiting. I never really have been. But it’s not worth the trouble it would cause to lose my cool every time I have to delay gratification. It’s not socially acceptable to scream and swear at every red light, every pedestrian, tourist, shopper, every small delay or obstacle. So all that’s left is to take a deep breath, count to ten, consider the repercussions of possibly taking a little longer to do something than I’d ideally like to take. Those consequences are seldom serious, seldom life- or even job-threatening, seldom significant enough to register on the grander scale of things that will still make my blood boil tomorrow, that really: losing my temper and murdering the cause of my frustration? Not worth the jail time. (Assume meditative pose and repeat until smiling).

The second best time

“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” ~Chinese Proverb

We live so fast in these modern cities. Technological progress no longer marches, it sprints. Any new computer development has a half-life of six months before it’s obsolete. And all of it is geared toward giving us instant gratification: fast food, broadband, microwaves, smart phones, IM. Reality television, talent shows like X Factor. Andy Warhol may have talked about 15 minutes of fame, but we seem to have taken that as the length of time required to achieve fame and fortune. Meanwhile we know that anything we do achieve so instantly, doesn’t last.

What matters is track record, is the ability to achieve results over and over again. Instant gratification culture has left us with an overdose of one-hit-wonders and flashes in the pan. Is it any wonder we’re starting to set more store by track record again? It’s a slow, subtle, almost undetectable shift, but it’s there: in the growing Slow Food movement, in the downsizing trend, even in the Green movement. Some people are starting to realise that we can’t always greenhouse everything, and nor should we.

Crops take time to grow, even with fertilisers, irrigation, pesticides and GM seeds. Quality takes time to create – we all know we make more mistakes, do a shoddier job when we rush things. So why do we, perpetually, feel the need to rush? If enough of us opt out of this incomprehensible “need for speed” the dominant paradigm will shift, change down a couple of gears and we can enjoy the scenery again, knowing that we will still reach the destination, just with richer memories of the ride.