SatNav for the soul®

For a holiday this year we rented an eco-cottage in Somerset. It was situated in the grounds of a shared smallholding which also contained some pigs in a pen and a few chickens. Beyond these animal enclosures was a large shed cum summerhouse.

On our first evening I explored the various features of the smallholding and inspected the shed. On looking through the glass doors I could see that it was more than a place to store things – it had rudimentary plumbing and basic cooking facilities. I tried the door handle and it opened easily. I stood on the threshold and surveyed the interior. There was a camp bed with a sleeping bag on top of it. I noticed a pair of boots in a corner and a harmonica lying on a chair. Various foodstuffs and a bulky utility knife cluttered a small table. In another corner was a rucksack. Someone was clearly living in this space and here was his stuff.

At this realisation, a strange, primitive impulse accosted me. I had to respect this persons property. The fact that there was no lock on the door and was open to anyone who cared to turn the handle increased my respect. This person trusted me and so in return I repaid the trust. I hastily exited from the shed and closed the door. The trust was unbroken.

I then realised what a lock and key is. It is a division, a line between the, ‘have’s’ and the, ‘have not’, it is a broken trust. It represents everything that is unwelcome in human society.

The bible is wrong. Adam and Eve were not evicted from the garden because they tasted the fruit of knowledge. They foolishly invented a lock and key, then stupidly, locked themselves out of the garden.

Thanks to Ray Mears, I came across this example of the perversion of history.

There are a couple of large statues of Franklin, one of which is in London, which credit him with the discovery of the Northwest passage. According to Mears, he was indeed given the task of finding the passage but his expedition of two ships and scores of men was lost. Eventually an explorer named John Rae came across the missing pieces of the puzzle; he discovered the waterway which completed the Northwest passage and through Inuit reports, revealed the fate of Franklin’s expedition. Unfortunately for Rae, on his return to England, he reported that evidence was found which showed that the crew of the expedition eventually resorted to cannibalism in an attempt to survive. This idea was unacceptable to the powers of authority at the time and so they decided to alter history. Not only did they decide to alter history but they decided to confirm the lie with a couple of statues and the lie written in stone.

The statues (and the lie) are still standing today. Presumably Ray Mears only needed to do minimal research to uncover the truth (Wikipedia confirms his story). This seems like such a beautiful analogy for today’s mainstream media; the lies are set in print but any minimal research (which most people are unwilling to do) reveals the unacceptable truth.

Just imagine how big some of the lies are in history.

If you are a teenage American looking for information about a certain pop group, my apologies. I’m talking about science.

I’ve written before about the placebo effect and wondered why it hasn’t been rigorously investigated using the scientific method. Now it all becomes too clear. Here is an interesting article which explores the phenomenon in some depth. The sad truth is that the placebo effect is a huge embarrassment to Big Pharma. It is the elephant in the room. Not only is it the elephant in the room but the elephant is also snorting coke and masturbating. It destroys a lot of their credibility. No wonder they don’t want it investigated; there is absolutely no profit in a wonder drug that is a placebo.

Maybe Big Pharma should switch to pop management. At least one Placebo seems to have made a profit (oh, what the hell American teenager, here’s a video).

The train slowed to a dead stop. Through the window I could make out the leaves of trackside bushes, illuminated by the carriage lights. Hmm, I thought, not a good sign.

Sure enough, after ten minutes of waiting on a deserted stretch of track, the guard thought it fit to announce to the packed train what was happening, or rather, what wasn’t happening. We were waiting for a signal to change. Okay, I thought, nothing major there and I turned my attention to my family once more.

We were heading home on an evening train from London after a visit to the Natural History Museum. It was Sunday and the children had school the next day.

After half an hour of the train not moving the guard made another announcement that some power lines had come down across the track further up the line and that essentially there was grid lock for all the interconnecting lines. We were stuck in a queue. With that announcement, people started to get out their mobile phones and ring their loved ones to inform them that their train had been delayed. We were close enough to one man to hear him inform his wife in a matter of fact voice to add half an hour before she met him at the station.

After an hour, frustration was beginning to set in. You could see everyone recalculating their plans for what remained of the evening, us included. My wife shuffling the itinerary of food, baths and bedtimes. Tension was building in the carriage.

After two hours, denial had moved onto anger and it was apparent that everyone’s plans for the evening were ruined.

After three hours, the carefully constructed polite facade that everyone erects around themselves started to crumble and what was revealed was the essential human being inside each of us. The overall helplessness of our situation meant that we started to take control of what we could – the situation inside our carriage – and people started to talk to each other with the camaraderie of a testing shared experience. We talked to the man who’s wife was supposed to pick him up at the station. He told us good humouredly that he had abandoned that plan altogether and was now trying to organise a taxi with the help of the train guard.

After four hours, a kind of Stockholm Syndrome kicked in; everyone’s facade was down and it was understood that you could talk to anyone with an unguarded directness. The occupants of the carriage had let go of their ‘timelines’ and realised that they could only live in the ‘now’. The experience is remarkable as anyone will testify who has endured such an experience (imagine the bonds created in a life threatening situation). Towards the end of our delay it was almost fun. Why do we have to wait for a disruption of some kind before we assume responsibility for ourselves and take off our suits of pretence?

Sometimes, we don’t have to wait. At a public event I met a representative of a large organisation that is influential in the region. I suggested she might find my SatNav for the Soul® presentation useful. She gave me her card. All ’suit’ stuff. After trying to contact her, various gatekeepers passed onto me an email address of someone else in the organisation who might be able to help. More ’suit’ stuff.

I was about to type a typical ’suit’ email to this person when I thought, ‘what the hell, this presentation is far too important to be be stitched up in a suit’. I duly sent this person an email that might have been composed after a four hour wait on a train that doesn’t move. He would either get it, or he wouldn’t.

Here is his reply;

Thanks for your e-mail. I’ve had a look at your website …and I’m sufficiently intrigued to invite you to come in for a coffee and chat.As a bit of background my role is that of Organisational Development Manager – impressive hey? Actually, that means I can shove my nose into anything I want to in the organisation. My boss encourages me to be creative – but as a 60-year old, wasp – no actually the p should be a c or rc which makes wasc or wasrc which doesn’t quite work?

Anyway, sorry to bumble on – your website has put me in that frame of mind – not the bumbling but the getting outside of the usual niceties and formalities and onto what’s really relevant. I continue to ramble…

So –send us two or three dates and times convenient to you and we’ll agree when to meet. Probably best if that coincides with some other business you have in the area so I don’t feel too guilty about the costs you’ll incur in getting here and giving up your time. I used to be a ‘consultant’ in personal productivity – time management and the like – so I know time is money – or wasted opportunity! I’ve never sent an e-mail like this before – I think your website has liberated my mind already!

As T indicates we have no money – so no promises. But happy to consider providing a platform for someone who might just get some in the organisation to think a little differently?

Most people find ‘exercise’ too much like hard work and boring, so well meaning fitness regimes quickly pall into an intolerable chore and that freshly bought gym pass soon languishes on the hall table.

Exercise is hard work because the goal is too vague; to enjoy a better quality of life for longer. What the hell does that mean? As an incentive it is too diluted and arbitrary. As hunter gatherers, we exercised as a result of an immediate goal – to catch prey or to to dig for roots. Exercise was a by product of doing something important – feeding yourself.

Today, there is no imperative to catch anything except a train or a bus. Food is immediately available, no need to dig. But our bodies are designed to move. Use it or lose it, as they say. Exercise is imperative for good health. To make exercise bearable and sustainable therefore we need to make the goal more specific and immediate. One way is to make it fun.

When I used to play squash (had to give it up – too hard on the knees), the goal was to outwit your opponent and win the immediate point. On occasions, after a long rally, both me and my opponent, would be exhausted to the point of fainting. The brilliant exercise we were willingly experiencing was a by product of having fun.

In business, lots of people have goals but often they are as vague as ‘getting fit’ (for what?). In their case it is often, getting rich. Not, what is the best widget we can possibly make? or how can we make our customers ecstatic with the service we provide? Is it any wonder then that a lot of the ’service’ we do receive is insolently offered by someone who would rather be somewhere else doing something that they find less boring and wearisome?

So let’s look at religions that promise an afterlife. This promise suffers from the disadvantage that no-one has actually died, visited any sort of afterlife and returned in some form or other to report back that either a) it exists or b) what level of (in)hospitality it offers. Incredibly though, despite this lack of evidence, a lot of people choose to believe in an afterlife.

Similarly, most people who want to be rich have never been rich (rich being a purely relative term of course) so they choose to believe the myth that being rich is some kind of paradise in the duringlife.

Where the two concepts differ however, is that some people have returned from being rich and reported back about its (in)hospitality. Some don’t manage to report back at all, of course, because they have already died through debauchery and substance abuse. Those that do report back invariably say that having huge amounts of money is a problem – how to keep it, what to do with it etc. Some even admit that their problems started when they became rich.

Interestingly, most people (some of whom would find a belief in the afterlife ridiculous) choose to ignore any negative reports like this and cling to the belief that huge amounts of money will somehow make their life better.

This is similar to the vague idea that exercise will somehow make life better, and in some respects it would be true; being rich would allow you to enjoy better health care, for example, but you are still stuck with the question, for what? And if anyone thinks ‘to enjoy yourself‘, they haven’t been listening to a word I’ve written in this blog!

On long car journeys our two young children would sit in the back and either play with some toys or stare quietly out of the window. They never said, “I’m bored” or “are we there yet?”

But we saw other cars with dvd screens on the back of the front headrests and thought it might be nice for them to have dvd’s to watch on the journey for a change. So we bought a portable dvd player and that was when all the problems started.

There was only one dvd player and they had different tastes in the type of content they wanted to watch so arguments started about who was going to watch what and in what order. If one of the children lost an argument and had to wait for their content to be viewed they would complain about having to listen to the sound coming from the dvd. This meant sourcing some headphones so that the other child was not disturbed but then complaints started about uncomfortable headphones.

On arrival at our destination the children didn’t want to leave the car as they were in the middle of a dvd and they had to find out what happened next. Once inside the holiday venue they just wanted to continue watching the dvd’s they had brought for the journey.

This is how consumerism works and in this instance, I realised I was the unwitting perpetrator of the evil.

Previously, the children were great travellers and found enough interest in the world outside their window or in their imaginations to occupy them on the journey. We saw other travellers with ‘gadgets’ and we, the parents, invented a need from our curiosity. We bought the product and discovered it generated more consumerism while at the same time diminished our quality of life by promoting envy, division and isolation. We would be far better off without the player except that now, the children are used to the player and getting them to go back and make do without it will be a major undertaking. Rationally explaining to them that their quality of life would be improved by this subtraction will not work. The dvd is too seductive. Even if we ‘lost’ it, the children would insist that we simply buy another.

Isn’t this the story of consumerism? And yet, if, by some catastrophe, we were to lose our power and petrol, I’ll bet it wouldn’t take us long to rediscover the forgotten pleasures of improvisation, collaboration, participation.

I’d come across this group only through the mainstream media (is mainstream media a pejorative term now?) and their representation was criminal and comic in that order. They were thieves and they were being prosecuted for it.

Well, here is an interesting article which demonstrates either their cleverness and guile or their intellectual understanding of history. You decide.