‘Twas The Month Before Xmas…

Looking at my calendar, I am struck by the fact there are 4 weeks until Christmas. You’d think I’d’ve noticed before, what with the advertising and the ‘special offers’ and tawdry tinsel everywhere. But for once, I have managed to stay pretty much Holidays-free so far. This is very good news for my patience. If I could make one global rule it would be to ban all xmas advertising, decorations and music until December 1^st. Because it’s all so overblown these days. I’m not religious, I’m not arguing for the Christian message to be the focus of the season, and yes, it is a nice – if somewhat misplaced – idea to have a time of year when we’re reminded to be grateful for what we have and pleasant to our fellow humans, but I don’t see why a celebration of returning hope in the depths of winter has become a consumerist orgy starting in August and running through until (with all the post-xmas sales) about March.

I’m not proposing the radical No Buying approach of Leo Babauta, just that we don’t go overbarod, into debt and generally insane about it.

I’ve been invited to join 7 Secret Santa schemes so far. I don’t see what purpose could possibly be served by me spending money on something generic for someone I don’t even know – because I know from receiving such gifts that it’ll probably just gather dust in a cupboard or be instantly re-gifted. So far, I’ve declined all invitations, and if that makes me a Scrooge, so be it. I’d rather keep a sense of perspective as to what the holiday season should really be about – gratitude, tolerance, peace and goodwill – than try to score social points by conspicuous splurging.

Energy Levels

The Law of the Conservation of Energy, as stated in the 1800s, tells us that total amount of energy in an isolated system remains constant over time. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only be transformed and transferred. These are the scientific facts, in our universe. Which is interestingly similar to the position of Oriental philosophy, with the concept of Chi and how it flows. According to physics, everything is made of atoms, and atoms themselves are made of charge and empty space. Charge is energy – so everything is made of energy (generally chemical potential energy, if I recall my high school science correctly). If I accept this scientific information, then it’s not really such a stretch to get to the idea of energy flowing, as in Eastern practices from martial arts to Feng Shui. The law of the Conservation of Energy lends itself to a person being able to borrow energy from her opponent to then use against them (a central principle of yin or internal martial arts such as tai chi, wing chun and chi kung).

This idea is  should enable us to manipulate the flow of energy to avoid feeling drained – if everything is energy, and the total amount of energy remains constant, and energy flows, then all we need to do is find a way to put ourselves in the way of that flow and absorb as much energy as we need to emit: as movement, as heat, as whatever form is required.

We live on borrowed energy then – all of us, all the time. 

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.