Failure is rare

Failure, as applied to human effort, is rather rare in my experience. Much much more common is simple giving up. A decision taken that it is 'not worth' continuing. People persuade themselves and others to give up. Later they may call it failure, but the only failure involved was the failure to keep going. And that point, when giving up is most attractive, is almost always just before a real breakthrough, an opening that reveals a downhill ride to completion and success.

Hang out with people who forestall and minimise the attractions of giving up, who, when you leave their company, leave behind a verifiable trace of optimism, light, and interest in renewed effort.

which would you rather be?

Someone who never loses their balance; or someone who is quick at regaining their balance when they have lost it?

Much of our education and unconcious 'life training' inclines us always towards the impossible fantasy of never losing one's balance. Yet have you met anyone who has achieved this without becoming a rigid fool who controls their environment in order to avoid appearing foolish?

In order to practise regaining your balance you must also practise losing it. Not all the time, but from time to time.

games on the way

There are many games of distraction along the way...including the game of identifying the many games of distraction along the way...It is not the veil which is interesting, it is removing the veil; what's behind it takes care of itself.

Stop putting yourself out of the way of wisdom

When we put on our ‘doing good’ head we set ourselves up for a fall or at least a trip or two. The ‘doing good’ head wants to be rewarded. That’s what happens when you put a head on rather than have that transparent sense of observing the self doing stuff, being ‘aware’. You can put on a ‘busy head’ or an ‘action head’- and these tactics work- but you have to pay the piper, you have to reward the head with some kind of obvious non-subtle result. When I put on my ‘production head’ for writing I reward this head by printing out my pages and riffling through the sheets and telling the head- ‘look at that, 3000 words, well done etc etc’. Don’t be subtle with a head. It’s wasted. Subtlety only has value when applied to perceiving things with a ‘transparent head’ on. This is why lots of successful people are really unsubtle, kind of dorky in fact. They have learnt what lots of intellectuals have missed: the various ‘heads’ you wear speak a debased and simplified language of reward and punishment.

But you need to get beyond this. A friend wrote to me the other day about the pitfalls of following a path to some kind of greater understanding. A thought came to me: you have to stop putting yourself out of the way of wisdom. A lot of what we do isn’t ‘wrong’ in the ‘doing good’ sense of wrong, but it puts us out of the way of wisdom. It decreases our necessity – after all, if you live a life that doesn’t need wisdom then where’s the evolutionary pressure to develop it? Of course this doesn’t mean simply turning up the pressure and making life tough and complicated- these things can very easily put us into ‘fight or flight’ mode- pure stress. It actually means something worth contemplating for a while- look at what puts you out of the way of wisdom.

Beginner's mind for writing

Check this blog entry out: http://bridportwriting.co.uk/how-to-write-and-get-published/2015/9/8/beginners-mind-for-writers

The difference between a wise and foolish man.

A man wiser than me asked me what the difference was between a wise and foolish man. I started to expound at length on being objective and not rushing in, on integrating the personality and trusting your observing self. He agreed with all I said, but then, in the spirit of making a mere addition to my list, but providing really, a succinct alternative perspective, he held up his thumb and forefinger showing a tiny gap between them- “that’s the difference between a wise and foolish man”.

We imagine that the gap is much much wider. That it has to be filled with all kinds of learning and experience. That a ‘wise’ man or woman is cut from very different cloth from ourselves. None of that is helpful as a picture of where to go to get ‘more’ wisdom. Even that sentence is wrong headed. If you have a window you can’t see though you need to start removing things that are blocking the view. Instead we start piling more and more stuff in front of the window. Everything we do gets in the way of seeing clearly, but we need to do something- because we are human- and that is the paradox we have to solve all the time. It never goes away. You have to do the minimum without ‘doing the minimum’- you have to find an activity that keeps you from becoming lazy and heedless but doesn’t make you obsessive and anxious.

We live in an age in which there is no shortage of things to make you anxious. So avoid them. When you are less anxious you have enough ‘psychological time’ to be able to see clearly. Psychological time is that feeling of having lots of time rather than feeling rushed- it is a combination of time, energy and lack of anxiety. When you have enough psychological time you can develop a better sense of when to do something. It is often said that wisdom is right time, right place, right people- increase the rightness of places- the work you do or where you travel- and people- who you associate with- and you will increase the instances when correct timing is applicable. But in a sense it is all about timing. It is about being comfortable doing nothing without its cause being heedlessness or laziness. Instinctively knowing the right time to do a thing is rightly seen as a mark of superior knowledge. But the difference between being in rhythm and out of rhythm is like that tiny gap between thumb and forefinger- very small.

One reason why travelling is very useful is that your circumstances don’t control you. You can move whenever you want. This gives you the freedom to go or stay depending on your intuition. By trusting your intuition when you travel – in small ways at first and then in bigger ways – you develop a better sense of ‘good timing’. Why is humour so beloved of the wise? Because it encapsulates the importance of timing and the importance of incongruity. Get the timing wrong and a joke doesn’t work. Learn to spot incongruities and you will be funnier as a humourist; you will also develop clearer perceptions about the way the world works.

Can you teach yourself better timing? What do you think?

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