Category: science

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…Plan to Fail

‘Fail to plan and plan to fail’ was another piece of wisdom which I acquired from my business networking days and totally failed to learn from. I reflected on this yesterday when I was digging holes for my newly bought plants and tenderly packing the soil around them. I plan to fail, not because that’s what I want to happen, but because that’s my expectation, on the basis of past experience. It wasn’t that I had no plan at all when I was walking around B&Q on Wednesday with all the other Diamond Card holders, all waving our ten-pounds-off-when-you-spend-over-thirty coupons – there were certain things I knew I wanted to buy, like compost, basket liner, and a 40 cm diameter pot, but when it came to plants, I was mainly driven by spontaneity – well, within bounds –mostly what I bought were pretty predictable: begonia, petunias, geraniums. But I still didn’t have any specific ideas about where any of them were going, and so I was making it up as I went along.

There’s a lot to be said for spontaneity, impulse, intuition – well, I would say that, given my aversion to planning. No, that’s not right, ‘aversion’ isn’t quite the right word: it’s not that I don’t want to make plans, it’s more that from experience I know the stress that planning causes, the struggle to sort it all out, to impose order and make sense, to remember the stages, to decide on the appropriate actions, to implement them without flying off in all directions, and to judge the outcomes. All those things that make perfect sense rationally, intellectually, academically and succumb to chaos when they hit the real world, that great, spinning distributor of ordure.

Having said that, it occurs to me that the major, dramatic changes in my life, the ‘leap before you look moments’, like starting a PhD, leaving a husband (both of them), travelling, moving to Prague and Southsea etc, were all preceded by years of ‘planning’, just not in the organised, logically –sequenced, rational fashion – more on the lines of: ‘…if I could, I would… if only…’ At New Year 2015, I met a lady and told her that I was hoping to move to Southsea one day, then when I announced in March that I was moving, her comment was: ‘you’re a fast worker!’, even though the idea had been in my head for three years.

There’s more I wanted to say, but as usual I started writing and then wandered off at a tangent. But I’d like to share a quote that I heard on Thought for the Day on Radio 4 earlier while I was making coffee: “You don’t think your way into a new kind of living. You live your way into a new kind of thinking.” It was attributed to Henry Nouwen, a name which means nothing to me (apparently he was a Catholic priest, but I won’t hold that against him.)

I’ve often been told I think too much… TBC

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NaPoWriMo Time Again

My heart yearns for
the Dream Place,
the Crystal Space…

Linda Rushby 5 April 2021

I was in poetic mood earlier, in my yoga/tai chi/meditation time, with one of those moments of understanding who I am, and what I should be doing, which has faded somewhat now, as they always do, before I was able to get to the computer and capture what needed to be caught, but I will try.

This is the third year I’ve attempted NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month). I started in 2018, with haikus, because that seemed like the easy way (although I know that writing a good haiku is not something to be flippant about). I was so happy with the results that I had an idea about creating a hand-made book – I’d been on a bookbinding course and bought a bookbinding kit, and was going to lino print an image for the cover – but the only image I came up with was a forlorn daffodil, and I got frustrated and disheartened and never even opened the parcel with the bookbinding kit and gave up before I got started. Maybe one day.

The next year I didn’t even attempt the poetry challenge, but then last year I did, with no plan or ideas, I managed to turn out something for every day of the month, a motley collection of uneven quality. I have always said that poems come to me or they don’t, and I can’t make them happen, but one of my favourites, ‘Beachcomber’, came out of a challenge I was set to write a poem a day for five days on Facebook in summer 2015, the first summer after I moved to Southsea.

This year I wasn’t going to bother, but on the first day I wrote a very short poem, and posted it, not here but on another blog to which I sometimes contribute. That poem, entitled ‘Web’, is about the idea of a web of connections, not the electronic ‘world wide web’ so much as an older and more general sense of interactions between events, actions and people, which relates to my interest in systems thinking, the basis of my PhD, and the idea of ‘Crystal Space’ which I have played with for some years. Writing it out gave me the idea of pulling one of the threads in a web and seeing where it led – would it just attract the attention of some monstrous spider, or might it take me somewhere interesting? So the next poem was about Ariadne’s thread, and each day since some image or reference from the day before has triggered the next poem.

So far it seems to have led me back into my lifelong interest in Greek mythology, which is of course a very fertile seam for poetry. Each day’s poem is very short, but by the second day I had the idea that they might build into something interesting. On the other hand, I might just give up one day, but how will I know unless I try?

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Life Systems

I haven’t returned to what I was saying about fractals the other day because every time I sat down to write I found other stuff to write about, and anyway, although it seemed very clear to me at the time when I had the initial thought, it had got hazy by the time I was at the keyboard..

I don’t think fractals was such a great metaphor for what I was trying to say anyway, because they are identical at different levels, and what I was talking about isn’t identical, just nested, like Russian dolls (which, come to think of it, are pretty identical), or ‘worlds within worlds’, the way that our conceptions of sub-atomic particles orbiting a nucleus depict them as being like planets around stars. And if that was the metaphor, what was the subject I was trying to describe? I’m even hazier about that but… my thoughts and actions, I think. Does that make any kind of sense? No, I don’t think so either, not logically, but in the analytical part of my brain, I can sort of see it.

It’s forty years now since I started studying systems thinking, in a module from the Open University, which I’d signed up to as a one-off (or so I thought at the time) – I think I was described as an ‘Associate Student’ (something like that), and I was just doing this second-level course, partly out of curiosity and partly as a precursor to doing a third-level course on ‘Systems Modelling’, which I thought would help me with a new role I’d taken on in my job – it didn’t, not directly, but it led me, after two years, to sign up for a degree with the OU which ultimately led me to a PhD and my thwarted attempts at an academic career.

Okay, so now I’m talking about my life, which doesn’t directly get me back to the whole ‘fractal thinking’ thing. Except, in a different way, maybe it does. I look back on my life, and I see it in chunks that overlap and interact with each other – the people, the places, the activities, and the different threads of cause-and-effect that run through them. In my teens and early twenties, I had no ‘plan’ for an academic career, beyond undergraduate level – and that, as I’ve mentioned before, I saw more as a way of getting away from the constrictions of my parents and my home town – and (rather ironically as it turned out) finding a husband and/or career which would set me up for an ‘adult life’ (or whatever conception of that I had at that time). Consequently, as I’ve also mentioned before, I messed up my first degree, and was lucky to get a reasonably good job (but less lucky with my choice of husband – the first one, I mean, not the second).

I still don’t think I’ve answered the question – actually, come to think of it, I’m not sure that I’ve even asked one yet. TBC

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Life-Writing, Fractals and Plasterers’ Vans

I’ve been listening to Maya Angelou’s autobiographies, which have been serialised on BBC Sounds, each volume in five fifteen minute episodes. I’ve just played the first episode of a new volume, I think it’s the fifth, and I’ve worked out she is about thirty when it starts.  

I’m not going to say any more about it, and obviously I’m not in any way comparing myself to her in terms of either writing skill or inherent interest of the story, but it did set me thinking about the issues of writing about one’s own life. This is of course because I’m psyching myself up to go back to working on The Long Way Back (when I’ve finished with my current editing job, and if I don’t get caught up in anything else). Maybe when the cafés open again, and I can take my notebook style laptop (bought in late 2019 to encourage myself to go out and do just that, hah! What great timing that was!)

The thing about writing about your own life is the clash between the time it takes to write about it and the time it takes to live it- something I remember writing about at the time when I was travelling, and berating myself for not spending enough time writing. Time has this trick of passing no matter what your intentions or what you actually do (or don’t do) with it. And how do you ever stop? How do you write some kind of conclusion? You make a decision, you find a way to tie up the loose ends which are still dangling from the narrative, but if you don’t jump on it and get it done (and I am clearly not a jump-on-it-and-get-it-done kind of person), events overtake you, and how do you account for them?

I just got distracted by a van parked across the road, with the front passenger door open and covering part of the company name, so that it looks like: ‘X&Y PUG limited’ and I’ve been waiting for someone to close the door so I can see what it really is – I keep thinking ‘Pugh’ except that I can see there’s no ‘h’ on the end and there are some letters covered up, so that makes no sense. But when the full name’s revealed, it’s ‘X&Y PLASTERING’, my eyes had just conflated the beginning of the L with the end of the N to make U. How boring.

I intended to carry on what I was writing about yesterday, and not get distracted into life-writing and plasterers’ vans. I couldn’t see the connection between the former and the ideas of granularity and fractals that were rattling around my brain, but then I realised there was a connection. Writing about your own life is like having a hypothetical map of the world on a scale of 1:1 – it covers the whole world. If the grains are fine enough, doesn’t it appear continuous? So how to structure it into a narrative? TBC…

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Pinball

My new glasses had been missing for over twenty-four hours. Five minutes before my Skype therapy session, I picked up a glasses case from the bookcase in the hall, which I knew I’d picked up in a previous search, but at that time I shook it and thought it was empty, this time I opened it and there they were.

I went into the front room to set up my laptop for the Skype session, for which I wore my reading glasses, but I knew I needed the varifocals for the session proper. When Skype was open, I took off my readers to put the other ones on. They weren’t on the sofa next to me, they weren’t on the bookcase. I went back into the hall, just to make sure I had actually picked them up and brought them into the front room. I had walked maybe four metres up the hall and into the front room with them. I went back into the front room and checked the sofa again. Sitting on the sofa, I glanced round and saw a black glasses case on the rosewood table, just in my eyeline. Was that it? I walked over and picked it up and opened it – yes, there they were. I must have put them down on the table (amongst all the other junk, including another glasses case) as I walked past it en route to the sofa and the laptop. From start to finish, this took less than five minutes, but I had no recollection of where I’d put it down because things like that don’t register in my head.

Now, you’re probably thinking: ‘Oh, that happens to me all the time!’ or ‘We all have days like that!’ but that is not the point. My entire life revolves around things like this happening, so frequently that I couldn’t possibly count how many times a day (and I’d forget to anyway). Why am I focussing on it this morning? Because it’s symbolic.

I am thinking about fractals and granularity. Incidents like this happen at a microscopic level, but if I zoom in or out on my life, I can see them happening in different ways, at different granularities, over different time periods. They bounce around my head and it’s impossible to impose any structure over them, or to focus on more than one at a time, or to string them together into any kind of rational order. I have been card-making all week and that is all about tiny things and tiny actions, but what order do I need to do them in, and where are the things I need, and now I’ve found this, where did I put that which I had in my hand only minutes ago?

My therapist says: ‘that’s because you’re multi-tasking’ but with dyspraxia ‘multi-tasking’ is impossible, because you can only focus on one thing at a time and you lose track of everything else, and so you constantly bounce around like a pinball.

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Murmuration

This morning in bed I listened to a radio play, ‘Murmuration’, which I’d downloaded without reading the description, so I didn’t know what to expect. It was about a man who lived alone in a flat and heard voices in his head – various characters with different personalities – aggressive, childlike, and one a bombastic circus ringmaster – who told him who he was and what he should do. At one point he is taken to hospital and given drugs which silence the voices but also make him feel numb all the time, taking away the pain, sadness and anger but also positive emotions like joy, enthusiasm and hope, which reminded me of my experience with Amitryptyline.

This is not quite what I mean when I say I hear words in my head, or have arguments with myself. Despite all the stuff about Belinda, Melinda, Cassandra and Cat-By-Herself, or about gremlins, I know all that is metaphorical, and at all times I am just me, myself. Admittedly, at different times my thoughts – and the words in my head – manifest in different kinds of behaviour, and I don’t have any control over that, I can’t choose who I am going to be at any particular time. I wish I could. I think about the times when I thought I could ‘reinvent’ myself, focus on one of those aspects (usually Melinda) and let her have her head – when I was doing my PhD, or after I left my husband, or went travelling, or moved here – my ‘running away’ times, in other words. In many ways they were when I was at my ‘happiest’, because even though I still had bad patches within that, I had hope that somehow I was moving towards a sunlit plateau where the world was full of joy and light.

Yeah, I know, embarrassingly unrealistic.

The play was described as ‘darkly comic and heart-warming’ (I read the description afterwards) and had a sweet, hopeful ending, as the man makes friends with a neighbour who draws him out of himself and out of his flat into the world outside.

The writer had worked with MIND and with people who hear voices in this way while developing the play, and also played the pivotal role of the neighbour. The description says:

‘A diagnosis of voice hearing has long been stigmatised in western culture, but in recent years there’s been a new approach that helps hearers to understand who their voices are and where they come from.’

It made me think about how strange the workings of the human mind are, how little we really know about what goes on in others’ minds, or our own, come to that. How much of what we experience is down to underlying conditions like dyspraxia and autism, how much is triggered by early childhood experiences and trauma, how do these interact and continue to interact and develop through our experiences of relating to other people as we pass through life? Who among us is ‘normal’, after all?

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Awake, Alone, Aware

I wake alone, aware…

Sounds quite poetic, doesn’t it? Because of the similarities of the words? It would be even better if that was ‘awake’ – how would I work that into it?

‘I lie awake, alone and aware…’ yes, that works, – or, if it’s a poem, even just : ‘Awake, alone, aware…’

What was I aware of? How did that thought continue? Aware that… this is how it is. This is life – my life. And it’s another morning.

Still in bed, I read, via a friend’s Facebook post, an article in the Guardian about women who choose to be single, to live alone and forego marriage and children, defying the outdated concept of spinsterdom. But of course, the lives of today’s single women, even those who’ve never had a live-in relationship or children, are expected to be very different from those of the stereotypical ‘spinster’ – changes in social conditions and mores have utterly transformed that. A spinster in the Victorian (and also most of the twentieth century) mode could be presumed to remain eternally virgin, whereas modern single women are assumed to have (or have had) active sex lives just as single men are.

The article was focussing on women for whom the single, childless life has been a deliberate choice – something else that has massively changed over the last fifty to sixty years, as women’s opportunities for employment and self-determination have improved out of all recognition. But I’d guess that the majority of women living alone are like me – divorced, with marriage or cohabitation in the past, and maybe grown-up children who don’t live with them anymore.

Did I choose the life I’m living now? I don’t want to revisit the territory I explored last Sunday, but – no, not really – or only in part. Fifteen ten, maybe even as recently as five years ago, this was not the kind of life I was hoping for in my sixties, but it is what it is. The longer I am alone, the more I appreciate the advantages, and given my experiences of living in relationships, I think on balance this suits me better than that did. As the song goes: ‘you can’t always get what you want/But if you try sometimes/you just might find you get what you need’.

So, what is it about waking up alone? What was/am I aware of?

That sometimes we choose our lives, and sometimes they choose us, I suppose. That life is far more complex than we like to think; the future is far more unpredictable than we like to acknowledge, and that our choices are both more circumscribed and yet at the same time more potentially disruptive than we can ever understand. The forces which constrain our choices are not just the physical laws of the universe and chance (which can’t be circumvented) or the man-made laws of behaviour (which can be, but not without consequences) and of interaction with other self-determining beings.

I’ll stop there because I’ve confused myself.

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Stream of Consciousness

I got a bit distracted yesterday – or maybe I didn’t. Maybe you were enthralled by my ramblings about: what was that actor’s name, and should I try knitting jumpers based on William Morris designs, or would they look like shit, and would that matter anyway, as long as I had fun doing it? (I missed out the bit about looking up stroke symptoms on Google).

I can’t really work out whether the fact that my mind works like that is unusual or not, given that I can’t get inside anyone else’s head to find out how they think. Up until a few years ago, I assumed that’s the way everyone thinks, that constantly rolling narrative, the barrage of words running through the head, and when I discovered that some people actually think in pictures  (allegedly most people, though I find that hard to believe) it – well – blew my mind. I mean, maybe partially – I can ‘visualise’ some things, but I have to make a conscious effort to do – but as a main way of thinking? How do you visualise abstract concepts? I had this conversation with a friend a while back, and he said that he sees the words as he thinks them. To me that sounds bizarre.

But I started this train of thought by thinking about whether I can control my thoughts. The theme of those pep talks I used to listen to over a full English was that it is possible to control your thinking and by doing so change your life, but my mind seems to have a mind of its own. The actors’ names and knitting designs kind of thoughts don’t bother me at all – except when they interfere with my ability to do more important stuff (which is quite often). I don’t even particularly mind the might I have a stroke and will the cancer come back thoughts too much – they’re awful at the time, of course, but tend not to come very often or last very long.

The ones that really get to me are the regular, unavoidable ones that come in the early hours, or occasionally in the day time, the: I hate myself and wish I was dead, why has everything I’ve ever tried to do with my life come to nothing, why do I always give up on everything, why can’t I write anything apart from this drivel? Those are the ones I’d really like to be able to control. Daylight and doing things can sometimes blow them away – knitting, crochet, reading etc are usually pretty reliable; walking by the sea can be too, but it requires effort to get myself out of the house (not always easy, even when there isn’t a lockdown). Being with other people can be, but it’s risky, it can also have the opposite effect, so in general being by myself is safer.

Writing these daily essays – I think that helps too. I usually feel better afterwards, anyway, even if I don’t have anything to say.

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Mind Full of…

The question I posed was: ‘Do I control my thoughts or do my thoughts control me?’ and the answer is fairly obvious – my thoughts define me, determine my experiences and control my life: I am my own story. How could it be otherwise? I think, therefore I am – how could I know I was alive if I didn’t think it? Although, of course, I only think that was the question – I may have misremembered it. I could go back and check, but I’m choosing to trust my memory on this occasion.

The ‘I’ who is typing this and the ‘me’ I’m describing are the same person, that goes without saying, indicated by use of the first person singular pronouns. Why did I say that? I have no idea. My thoughts are the outcome of genetic predispositions, my life experiences and external conditions, and they feed back on themselves and go round and round and make me who I am.

But can I control them? To some extent, I suppose I do – I can decide to concentrate on one particular subject or activity – like cooking a meal, for example, which involves performing a set of tasks. But even as I’m performing them, my thoughts don’t necessarily stay in one place –while I’m chopping an onion or stirring a pan, my thoughts can be anywhere – possibly planning the next task, but in my case, more likely thinking of something completely different.

Consider what my thoughts have been doing since I started writing this – reading the titles of a pile of DVDs which I found in the study yesterday and put on my desk; considering watching Gosford Park because I haven’t seen it in years and can’t remember anything about it except that I enjoyed it and it has an exceptional cast; trying to remember the surname of the actor named Tim who was in The Shawshank Redemption, knowing it’s not Burton (he’s a director) although I always get confused between them, wondering whether they’ve ever worked together, reading on the back of the box that it’s Tim Robbins and thinking ‘oh yes, of course!’, noticing how young he looks in the picture, and also how young Morgan Freeman looks, and wondering what Tim Robbins has done since. Then picking up a book of Victorian needlepoint patterns based on William Morris designs, and thinking how lovely they are, wondering if I could somehow incorporate them into my knitting, or if I should take up needlepoint again, and whether I should try to visit William Morris’s house at Kelmscott when things open up again, because I’ve never been there…

A gull flies right to left across a grey patch of cloud outside my window and catches my eye, leading it towards a plane crossing the other way, much higher, across the distant blue.

There’s a much misused and misunderstood concept called ‘mindfulness’, which derives from Zen Buddhism, and means focussing completely in the present moment. I’ve been trying to learn it for sixteen years.

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Worlds Within Worlds

Just been for my first trip to the shops this year. The last time was New Year’s Eve, when I arrived outside Sainsbury’s at ten past eight to find that they weren’t opening till nine, so I went to the Co-op instead. Not sure why they had different opening hours for New Year’s Eve – New Year’s Day is a holiday, but not the day before. Anyway, the Co-op was open as normal.

And today, I went to Sainsbury’s. Ten days – no, eleven – I must have stocked up really well – not just on Christmas stuff, but milk too, because that, as usual, was the indicator that sent me out this morning.

We all live in our own worlds, that’s what I was thinking earlier, before I went to Sainsbury’s. ‘We have just one world/But we live in different ones’, to quote Mark Knopfler (Brothers in Arms). Each of us has our own personal world inside our head, which evolves over time, partly from genetics, partly from the environment we live in, partly from our experiences of interaction with all the other worlds surrounding us, the physical, social, economic and cultural worlds (all of which can be considered as constituting the ‘environment’ to our personal world). Each of us has a world of incredible complexity inside our heads, whether we consciously realise it or not, even before we factor in the ways in which our internal world interacts with all those other internal worlds of all those other beings with whom we interact.

I was going to say ‘people’, but I said ‘beings’ because – well, even my little cat has her own world in her head, which leads her to predictable actions but is largely impenetrable to me – such as the way she was in the living room when I got home from the shop, but while I unpacked the shopping and made coffee, she came upstairs and was sitting on the landing outside the study door, waiting for me to come up and switch on the computer. She can predict my behaviour almost better than I can predict hers – sometimes we surprise each other, but given that our relationship is based on observation rather than verbal communication, it’s surprisingly mutual and very close – even more so since last year and my periods of lock-down.

I don’t know why I’m writing about this this morning (although in a way it is the basis of my PhD thesis). How do we understand all those other worlds that we crash into and bounce away from like billiard balls? The default position, I would suggest, is that we start from an assumption that our own world is ‘true’, and that other people’s experiences of and relationships with the world are broadly similar to ours – at least those with whom we are in close contact. In fact, we have to start from that assumption, that our own perceptions are based in some kind of shared reality, otherwise how can any kind of communication be possible?