Shutdown

There is no real need for me to do any more.

The day's are busy enough, the cyclical routine of being part of ensuring everyone's where they are when they should be and has enough to eat.  And that's not easy.  "Any idiot can face a crisis; it is this day-to-day living that wears you out".  [Anton Chekhov, apparently]  And the routine was good.  No time at all then a couple of hours off once everyone was in bed and, personal emails or work emails pending, a couple of hours to disappear into some God-game on the PC.

Not easy.  But not conducive to thinking.  Exercising your own potential.  And no-one can blame you for that.

When I found myself grateful for a good winter coat while standing on the end of Ryde pier in the blistering cold darkness, watching the arrival of the passenger multi-hull ferry (which was being tossed around more that I realised they did) I kept rehearsing conversations over and over in my mind.  Only distracted by mentally separating the shore lights of Portsmouth from tiny vessels afloat, I wasn't sure how I was going to act, whether I was going to make a fool of myself.  How do you talk to someone who has traveled extensively, I mean, extensively, who seems to have led the life you wish you had got off your arse and led when you were in your late teens and early twenties.  How do you, who's occasional weeks in less visited countries on business stand-out in your life like epics, talk to someone who was in Tianaman Square with a video camera, who has been at the front line in central African trouble-spots and who has won awards for the results?  I couldn't answer the question but I did come up with an option - you don't.  You do a lot of listening.

So I was surprised by how much talking I actually did do during the weekend stay on the farm.  And I'm not filled with the blood-thinning pain of recalling drunken conversations either (I was pleased to be told after the weekend that I "held my own" which I treasure as a vote of confidence - which may not have been there before).  I may not exactly have spoken with authority, more touched on a subject and given an abstract, to listen to the precis which followed but there were areas of common interest, common agreement and I could see where the difference lay.

The fear at the end of the pier (I'm a poet and I don't know it), with hind-sight was this: it wasn't that I would make a fool of myself because I was ignorant, it was because I am not sure how to articulate what I know or what I believe.

And this is important.  Very important.  Perhaps being articulate is one of the greatest tools of evolution.  If you can make yourself understood, get your point across, demonstrate someone else's point, and so on, you connect.  With everything in your life.  Likewise, if you cannot articulate, you must surely disconnect, end up sticking your head in the sand, just getting on with day-to-day living.  What would we be without the ability to articulate?  I'm guessing more violent - and I mean as an individual - as it's bloody frustrating when someone is just not getting your point - but, as a species we'd be little more that gene carriers (see Richard Dawkins for more details).

And that I find more than a little scary.

I have children - and I, ike Louis Armstrong, want my children to understand way more than I do.  I have no doubt their opinions will be different to mine but as long as those opinions have been reached by taking what knowledge I have, adding to it and drawing the conclusions from proper premises, then I'll be happy.

So, like all of us, I have a head full of ideas and premises whizzing round my head.  Like many of us, I have no channel down which to direct and filter these premises to reach well formed conclusions.

So that's what I intend to use this page for.  My funnel.

I already feel more alive that I have done since, well, my Level One OU course back in 2004 - which was the first time (that I can recall - or where I was listening) that I was taught that properly argued conclusions come from correct use of premises.

I feel more alive.

I hope that continues.