Taking experience seriously

"One of the great lessons of taking experience seriously is that change must be sought on the basis of the actual conditions of the world. These are the only conditions that people find meaningful, and any changes that cannot be understood from an everyday perspective are unlikely to succeed. ... In the realm of experience there is no high tech and there are no quick fixes; there is only slow, steady, sometimes joyful, sometimes painful growth of understanding."

Edward S. Reed, The Necessity of Experience (1996), 135-136.

To really help people ...

"To really help people, you first need to understand them - but you can't understand someone else until you understand yourself. Know yourself; prepare yourself; develop the clarity, the courage, and the sensitivity to exert the right leverage, in the right place, at the right time. Then act."

'Socrates', in Sacred Journey of the Peaceful Warrior, Dan Millman, 1991.

Talk in Estonia

I finally got around to uploading the audio file of a talk I gave at a folklore conference at the University of Tartu last month. It was on the theme of 'crafting gentleness' and it was given in the context of discussions about the practices of collecting, preservation, archives, oral histories and so on among folklorists.

If you have Real Player you can listen to the talk here. (It takes a while to download.)

Recent lessons (some relearned)

It's important to consider a room of people carefully before giving a talk. Relevancy is good, clarity is good. Not everyone wants to get up close and personal. A bit of everything is probably better.

Talking to a group while I am still recovering from an emotionally challenging event needs to be handled even more carefully than usual.

The most pertinent feedback sometimes takes a while.

There are people out there looking after me. I am grateful, and humbled.

I can't count. I could once.

Apparently, signs don't necessarily indicate direction to follow. Sometimes they seem to, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they just tease. Seems to be poetics (correlation, association, presence) rather than logic (causality, linearity, sequence).

If I honour the process it seems I can trust the process (as Master Yoda would say, 'trust the process can you').

Some people will dislike me no matter what I do. Better to play it quietly in their company.

Wonderful people happen.

I think loyalty and trust are among my most cherished values in friendship, and my most cherished friendships are where neither is even an issue.

Life can change considerably, and very quickly too (duh).

Training a dog requires more discipline from the parent-guardian than from the dog (6.45am is not a good daily rising time for me!).

I am excited by what's in store for me, and I am excited that I get to work it out as I go along.

Drinking alcohol to any degree leads me to feel icky the next day.

Charity fundraising is often difficult to reconcile with gentleness.

I am not comfortable letting a desire to make money (for whatever reasons) become more important than carefulness about what attitudes are brought into play in how that money is being made.

Raising difficult questions tends to be important to me.

Responding to difficult questions tends to be more important to me than attempting to answer them.

A professor of mine once said, 'Anthony, lack of ambition is the height of ambition'. (He later denied that this meant anything, and attributed it to a moment of drunkenness).

I have no idea who Andrew is (this is as enigmatic as it sounds).

I feel like a surfer who has spotted a great wave way over there on the horizon. There's something coming.

The gravity of comfortable laziness sits deep within me.

I love doing what I love doing. (duh)

"Eve the Patient: I'm gonna base this moment on who I am stuck in a room with! It's what life is, it's a series of rooms, and who we get stuck in those rooms with, adds up to what our lives are." House (TV series), 'One Day, One Room', Episode 3.12.

And that has made all the difference

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

(robert frost)



But what if the same path keeps emerging....

Soooz