Never look back - something....

Weblog 10/02/07

Last year I wrote about resolving to resolve when it came to making changes to one's life as part of the New Year renewal thing that it has become fashionable now to avoid. I did none of that now. In fact I completely avoided January and have even managed to avoid nearly half of February.




I just took a five-to ten-week break from the world of careful caring about the day to dayness of living. Just went out and about around the city eating here, there and in many other places- hardly turned the computer on, never mind actually sat down and wrote something.

And I lounged around for days at a time and read books. Not many, a dozen overall and four of them in great detail. Enough to shift focus and discover new ideas; and confirm existing suspicions and also give shape, to ideas I have been formulating for awhile-It was a great break. I did get bad sunburn sitting in my Jacuzzi one morning reading Steven Levitt's Freakonomics; so bad that I gave myself a basal carcinoma on the chest, which has had to be painfully treated with blade and fire. Ag sis.

One of the more bureaucratic things that I did was to get into my office which has been gradually overwhelming me, revise that, it had overwhelmed me; and I carried out a ruthless 'fat paper' explosion, mainly relating to the notes I use for my day job; and threw almost everything away- There was catharsis: both a cleansing and a renewal.

Somewhere in the mass of stuff I gathered up from the copious drawers of past experience was a faded sheet of A4 paper on which I had once scrawled out a collection of 'rules for right living' handed down by one Satchel Paige.

The once lined now faded sheet of otherwise yellowed paper is pocked with pinholes from all the times it has been pinned up somewhere and then taken down again. On the other hand maybe they are holes caused by some paper-eating insect that may have lived behind the place where the page was pinned? -. Naaa: pin holes.

I had no idea who Satchel Paige was when I collected his dictums and it seems to have predated the internet when one is daily bombarded with cute axioms and pithy saying of all kinds of people daily by one's associates with nothing else to do except play on the Internet daily and farm for such trivia. So I presume I saw it somewhere and liked it and wrote it down and have been broadly following them ever since - amongst following a few hundred other dictums as well.

Later I discovered that he was a famous American baseball player noted for breaking the existing mould of his times and coming out triumphant over terrible odds. What I read about him made me happy that I had chosen his words as my resolve for that particular year whenever it was back when.

I also cant remember why I decided to note down these dictums or what I expected to have happen as a result of reading them and acting upon them- save that it has always proved useful advice. I do remember that my life seemed like a head on collision with reality most of the time. What was going on and how the fujck did one cope with a world of continuous and coruscating changes in the stream of hassling insanity that buzzed through each day's uncertainties.

Maybe it was a bizarre form of mentorship.

Satchel Paige's Rules for right living:

'¢ Avoid fried foods which angry up the blood.
'¢ If your stomach disputes you lie down and pacify it with cooling thoughts.
'¢ Keep the juice flowing by jangling around gently while you move
'¢ Go lightly on the vices such as 'carrying on in society' The social ramble ain't restful.
'¢ Avoid running at all times.
'¢ Don't look back something may be gaining on you.


The next piece is also written on the same piece of paper, but after a separating zig- zag scrawl and was not, i believe, one of Paige's dictum's it may have been one of mine, or maybe it came from somewhere else, who knows. It may have been a response to the seemingly constant battering from the universe in the form of adverse daily life that one experiences sometimes. And you have to slow it down somehow and take hold of it.


'¢ Do not become attached. Do not identify with what you do turn down the noise in your mind.

This is going to be a different year to what we expect [should we be expecting something, rather than complacently taking what comes on the chin] So I'll repeat what I said about coping with the blast that is to come.

'¢ Practice cheerfulness daily in 2007


Then there are three vexatious little affirmations that I embarked on in 1998 derived from a book dropped into my letterbox by a human who was stalking me for about a year once, during an insane period of attrition. No. Don't ask why: I don't know. It just happened and it was weird. I also don't remember which book it was of the thousands in my library other than that it had something to do with Joy. It was a difficult year.

'¢ Avoid judgements.
'¢ Avoid comparisons
'¢ And most vexatiously- Delete the need to understand..


Keep on blogging
Cheers.


NiK














Resolving to resolve

Over the next week or so the mass media will be full of the now fashionable annual theme of the failed 'News Year's' resolution idea. A decade or so ago this was never considered to be so unfashionable an idea but gradually as the idea of acceptable failure has entered mainstream thinking it has become almost de rigueur to agonise over this now quaint idea that on the first of January one attempts vainly to transform one's usual pathetic life and emerge chrysalis like into a new sunlight as an freshly achieving person.

Equally there are people who actually believe that the world becomes a different place on the 1st of January and of course there is the horror opf knowing that by January the 31st it has all been and gone and it's head down and go for home Jerome.

Thus we now have the resolution not to give up the smoking thing for instance, or, of not to stop hitting on one's fellows for nutritional sexual gratification, or not to remain in the same boring dead end job, because our experience has demonstrated that once we resume our usual routines in the freshly paced frenzy of day to day living that we shall forget our resolve, so why bother.

Usually, in my view, the writers of 'failure' determined articles have failed to live up to his or her own resolve often enough in the past to relish the idea of popularising failure and the writer's editor is happy to accommodate 'resolve failure'; because without such failure the magazine/ newspaper/ radio programme et al would lose its appeal. After all the whole idea of being part of the mass is to remain predictable and therefore part of the market; and the idea of 'market failure' is currently a fashionable one. One could say therefore that the sub-texts are suspect.

However the cool thing about the Bloggist's world is that this idea of Failure resolve is irrelevant. By the nature of things our Blog world is one of individual commitment, performance and achievement in this, the great citizen's fight back against editorial gatekeeper controlled voicelessness. This applies irrespective of what it is we are all writing about.

For this particular Bloggist the week between Christmas and New Year is a time of renewal, for assessing the impact of goals set for the preceding year and renewing the commitment to building oneself into a more effective human. Of course it's also a time for boozing and gorging gluttonously, gourmandishly on heaps of lubricious foods and hanging out in the Jacuzzi.

The upside of aging is that I have also come to accept that you win some and you lose some; and that achieving transformation in one's own life is a continuous process that begins with birth and ends with death. New Years day is for me a moment for re-affirming my own sense of purpose, without which, in my view, life is inherently pointless: irrespective of all the marketing hype to the contrary..

So for this bloggist a big part of achieving one's goals in the New Year is summed up in the phrase 'Resolving to resolve'. Perhaps the best way to think of this is like the piece of string you may tie about your finger to remember that you have to remember something. Of course, remembering what it is we have to remember is critical to 'resolution' success. In the other words the only way to live a purpose driven life is to keep track of and remember the purpose through all the digressions and relapses and general ups and downs of everyday life, because as the late John Lennon famously observed life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.


That is the real difficulty, I've found, when we reach January 31st. Then is when the reality of the goal we set in the heady holiday mod of Jan 1 has degenerated glutinously into a treacle tar of anxiety. BY March 312 it is history and we're the rats in the pack.


Then in addition to remembering to remember, there is a truth, in my view, that there are resolutions that work and there are those that don't; and the difference between the two seems always dependent on the words we used to describe what we were going to do as our purpose.

They [our resolves] are also subject to the rule of 'moreless' so our goal should be 'lessmore'.

Fourthly humans are 'hard wired' against negativity. Negativity is not the same as as creative appraisal to which it is related but which nonetheless is not the goal.

The resolution that I eventually came to grips with and effectively implemented after decades of rationalised procrastination on the 11th of September 1995 at O7.30 hours, was simply: Write 100 words every day.

I regularly said that I would stop smoking and failed as regularly not realising that I had framed my actions as a negative action linked to a future intention. The future is an illusion and so was my resolve.

I stopped smoking by accident when the opportunity inadvertently arose as a side effect of taking a nine millimetre bullet through the liver one particularly bad day here in Jozi. The slug hit me from behind and as it exited via my liver red the shock wave blew out the lower lobe on the right lung. During weeks in intensive care sucking oxygen through a mask I implemented a decades old and regularly failed anti-smoking resolution by deciding: to smoke zero cigarettes daily for life.

In two thousand-the Millennium Gap year when we didn't know if we were in one century or the next I made a resolution: to write a poem every day. I never imposed any judgements on my daily poems and the only rule I made was that were I to write more than one in any day that did not absolve me from writing one the next day.

It took about six weeks to write anything for which I have any regard, in retrospect, and I ended the year with 826 poems [most of which were incoherent garbage]. It wasn't part of my goal to judge what I wrote; that can always come later like last year when an opportunity arose to compile an anthology now published on my personal website.

So I discovered and affirmed that small, easily manageable targets practiced daily build up over inevitable time to considerable output.

Over the Christmas Period my aging mother chanced upon a printed copy of the collection [called Rehearsing Nietzsche] and randomly opened it with Murphy like accuracy to the one poem in the collection with which she could identify [since it was a conversation with her that had prompted the poem] At first she was enchanted and then later with the rage of age and militant motherhood she became angry and domineering and wanted words changed which I naturally declined to do. To paraphrase some prison graffiti: if you are doing this to please your mother you are fucked.

One of last year's favourite moments was finding an old book in a storeroom in which I had written my 'Ten Resolves and purposes for 1982' and although there is no indication that I had ever seen the book again since the day I wrote the stuff down I realised with joy that I had achieved nine of them. That indicated that once a goal is written down it becomes more powerful.

As to this year? I shall continue with the resolves from last year with some additions. Each of ten resolves will be defined positively in terms of a small daily contribution to the end of the year account each resolve involving no more than 7 words, preferably fewer, and based on present time.

So my approach now will be to write the ten short seven word max sentences that will help me to become a more effective person over the next twelve months and to remember to remember, I shall sprinkle them randomly through my diary. Should I be ahead on points when I encounter them through the course of 2006 then I shall have something to be cheerful about, and should I be behind then I shall be cheered at the thought that I would now have an opportunity to move ahead and retake control of my life.

Practise cheerfulness daily in 2006
Keep on Blogging
Love you all
NiK