Month: November 2014

Categories
Philosophy

Learning To Use Intimidation

A truck approached.

It slowed down rapidly, as though it was a last minute decision from the pedal-heavy driver.

I was riding on the hard shoulder, without music because I’d overplayed most songs recently and was bored of Every. Single. Album. For a while, silence, creaky gears and bird noises had most definitely replaced Mos Def.

A few feet away, the passenger window on the smokey and rickety truck began to open. It was probably someone wanting to chat or just shout “where you headed?” That happened sometimes.

An apple whizzed past my head at full pelt. I heard the rush of air whistle past and rattle my ear drum. 

“Haha, you fucker! Get a car, asshole!” a voice shouted from inside the truck, half a second before speeding off.

It’s quite a vivid memory.

The wild intimidation of landing in the snow on Day 1 is another vivid memory. 

On the airy approach, occasionally the clouds would part and I’d see huge amounts of nothingness over North East Canada. Just empty, baron land. That caused doubt, which for a short moment seemed quite crippling. My mind was in overdrive with whirling thoughts. A stirring pot full of equal parts excitement, fear, and apprehension. And when we got close to landing, I saw the deep white powder for the first time. It was a moment of realisation that I was completely underprepared and didn’t have a clue what I was doing.

But then a couple of days were ticked off, and nothing went too badly wrong. And then a week, and a month. And eventually, what to do and how to handle things became clear, and all those worries that had been so strong faded into irrelevance.

Immersion teaches us what we need to know. In this case it was things like where to sleep, how to manage everything, how to avoid apple throwers, how to swear at apple throwers effectively, how to visualize apple throwers getting hit with a dripping wet fish etc. 

To become competent all it takes is diving right in and grasping on to a little bit of confidence, even if there’s not much of it rattling around inside our intimidated minds.

Becoming a brain scientist, riding a bicycle a long way, learning poker or Krav Maga, it’s all the same. When we’re truly immersed, then given time, everything that we need to know becomes intuitive. That is the coolest part about the learning curve.

With most things that seem wildly daunting at first, surface fear is likely all it is.

It’s worth thinking about the things we’re putting off, and asking ourselves the hard question. Why?

If we’re holding ourselves back because of intimidation, then that might be a sign that something’s worth doing.

What seems like fear now probably won’t last long.

Dive in.

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Categories
Philosophy

If You’re Having A Bad Day

There’s a very valid time for quitting and walking away, and there’s a very valid time for sticking to your guns and ploughing on. I think more often than not, ploughing on is probably the best approach.

The right or wrong decision is something that is obvious when you look back and connect the dots, but it never seems as clear as that at the time. So when things go wrong, when mistakes are made, when everything falls through, when you don’t get as far as you wanted to get within the time you set – all this freakin’ messy collateral of mindache can be frustrating and upsetting and annoying, and it’s easy to fall into a trap of discouragement or wallowing or defeatism.

So if or when that happens, and if you’re having a bad day, read this:

“The slaves received the whip with more certainty and regularity than they received their food. It was the incentive to work and the guardian of discipline. But there was no ingenuity that fear or a depraved imagination could devise which was not employed to break their spirit and satisfy the lusts and resentment of their owners and guardians – irons on the hands and feet, blocks of wood that the slaves had to drag behind them wherever they went, the tin-plate mask designed to prevent the slaves eating the sugar-cane, the iron collar.

Whipping was interrupted in order to pass a piece of hot wood on the buttocks of the victim; salt, pepper, citron, cinders, aloes, and hot ashes were poured on the bleeding wounds. Mutilations were common, limbs, ears and sometimes the private parts, to deprive them of the pleasures which they could indulge in without expense. Their masters poured burning wax on their arms and hands and shoulders, emptied the boiling cane sugar over their heads, burned them alive, roasted them on slow fires, filled them with gunpowder and blew them up with a match; buried them up to the neck and smeared their heads with sugar that the flies might devour them; fastened them near to nests of ants or wasps; made them eat their excrement, drink their urine, and lick the saliva of other slaves. One colonist was known in moments of anger to throw himself on his slaves and stick his teeth into their flesh.”

[An extract from The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution by C.L.R. James]

Suddenly the little things don’t seem that important, and it’s certainly not worth allowing them to pull us down too far for too long. The chances are slim that someone’s gonna pour burning wax on our arms, or fill us with gunpowder and blow us up with a match. It’s all a game of perspective. Everything is a game of perspective.

Things could be worse. Tomorrow is a new day. We are lucky.

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Categories
Vague Direction Book

A Letter To A Thick Chunk Of Paper

Dear Book,

Sorry for telling you to leave and never come back. But sometimes… well, sometimes I hate you.

You don’t even realise you’re doing it, but you make everything so difficult. Whenever we’re in the same room, I hollowly stare at you – for hours or days – like a boneheaded idiot gazing at your pages with nothing to say. You’re overwhelming and knowing where to start can seem impossible. So I often don’t start at all. I just ignore you and hope that you’ll be gone when I get back. 

The other day the guy behind Game Of Thrones said he likes having written but doesn’t like writing. That struck a chord and I’m pretty sure you know why. You do know why, don’t you?

It’s been a while now. We’d met briefly before but it was fleeting. How it eventually became a commitment like it is now I’ll never know. And it pains me to say it, but there’s frequently times when I wish we’d never met, because it just doesn’t come naturally to me. I often look at real writers from a distance and think you should just go and hang with them instead. They have skill and know what they’re doing. You’d be in better company with them. 

You know I said I hated you? Well that’s sometimes true, but at least the hatred goes both ways. At least we have that in common. 

You hate when I think we can’t compete and should go our separate ways.
You hate that sometimes I swear. Shit.
You hate that you frequently have to come at the end of the to-do list.
You hate when we went away and fell out and I spent time with her instead of you.
You hate that our process is so condition-dependent and full of false excuses.
Not unless I’ve had caffeine or a sandwich or am feeling “inspired”.

We’ve probably grown recently but haven’t realised it yet. It was our biggest rejection. We tried to keep it under the radar and act like we didn’t care but we did. We really did. I thought we’d cracked it. It looked so promising until, out of the blue, the publisher said sorry-but-no. I’m pretty sure that’s what getting stabbed in the eyeball with a dirty Swiss Army knife feels like. Let’s not do that again. Let’s do it on our own instead.

There’s still work to do. A few months’ worth. Neither of us realised we were signing up for something that would take this long, but unfortunately you’re still well rough around the edges and need polishing. But holy toast-crumbs, we’ve come a long way.

Sorry, I take it back. I don’t hate you at all. You’re alright when you’re not being difficult.

Yeah. You’re alright.

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