It's
like Christmas - only better. Today two very good friends of mine wrote
some great content for a couple of guest posts. As you will see tonight
their writing is great and it's a privilege to be entrusted with some
important and personal messages. I hope you enjoy reading them both as I
have. The first is by someone who even I am dwarfed by when it comes to
thinking about thinking. Enjoy.
The
notion of starting with just a title is one which has always appealed
to me. Well, I’m not sure if it’s a matter of appealing or more a matter
of the alternative being much less attractive. You could spend an
infinite amount of time planning and crafting a perfect sentence that
could sum up your life in a way which conveys whatever emotions and
experiences you’ve gained from it, but even if I managed to do just
that, I don’t think I would be satisfied.
For me it has to be about the journey.
The
process of documenting my life is one that I began the summer of 2011.
Granted, I only get the chance for reflection when my desk isn’t covered
in various papers – so not very often – but reflection still remains a
big part of my day-to-day life. How I reflect is a bigger issue. I like
to be able to discover things about myself. To sit and not know what I’m
going to think about, or write about and through this process find out
what’s important to me; to pinpoint that one thing that happened today
that made me happy.
This post is going to be a discovery for both of us.
This is getting a bit heavy already. Come, sit down by the fire, pour yourself a fruit-based drink. Let’s talk.
This is getting a bit heavy already. Come, sit down by the fire, pour yourself a fruit-based drink. Let’s talk.
Martin’s
blog (this one that you’re reading now) is his passion, and that’s
definitely not an understatement. When a person brings you in to
something that they love, I feel that what they are doing is giving you a
chance to experience what they do, feel how they feel and give you an
opportunity to understand them that bit better. I recently finished
reading a book with a similar message. To love someone is to truly
understand them, but also, the only way that real love is possible is
through true understanding. Have fun dealing with that circular logic!
Don’t worry, this isn’t what this whole post is going to be about but
it’s an interesting thought to start with. Hopefully we will both
understand something about others by the time we’re finished here
With
that in mind I’m going to attempt to handle with care something
important to my friend but that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to put
my own mark on it. Was that not obvious from all the weird stuff above?
So
I’ll start (about time!) with ‘renaissance’. I like that word a lot.
Trusty Microsoft tells me that I could say rebirth, revival, recovery,
but none of these capture my imagination like ‘renaissance’. It makes me
think of beautiful paintings that I’ve spent hours looking at in
similarly beautiful buildings; of a time when people weren’t afraid to
ask the difficult questions about life, love, science and art. It
reminds me of Ninja Turtles, which I also like. In what is hopefully the
least pretentious way possible, it also makes me think about my own
life. I’m no stranger to a renaissance.
There
have been times where I’ve had the awful realisation that I’m not
happy. It can be about anything, the places around me, the people around
me, the person who I’ve become because of all these factors and more.
What I didn’t realise until about four years ago was that this was
something which I had the power to change. Leaving school I figured out
that if I wanted to project a different image then I could. I could
change my hair, clothes and attitude so that I wasn’t the person who I
can say now was a ‘casualty of circumstance’. This has happened twice.
I’m going to tell you what I learned the second time.
Various things at the start of last year gave me the opportunity to examine where my place in the world currently was, where I would like it to be and what I could do to get these to match. As luck would have it, and although I didn’t realise it at the time, I had already begun thinking about this through reading two books that have become very important to me.
The first is a book outlining the general belief system of a branch of Buddhism, the second is a book called “ZenGuitar” by Phillip Toshio Sudo – a must for any music lover – which focused on music as a form of spiritualism, what it can make us feel and why, while at the same time improving your general musical ability using certain concepts present in some spiritualist doctrines. Sudo has incredibly interesting ideas stemming from Zen teachings and Chinese proverbs which seem to suggest the same thing, our journey never ends and to be complacent with your progress so far is to stop growing. One particular saying that stuck with me was one that Chinese philosophers suggested, “When you are ninety miles through a hundred mile march, you are only half way through”.
Now, I would class myself as a religious person. Exactly what religion I’m not too sure but I try and maintain some of the fundamental lessons that years of church as a child taught me. It wasn’t until I stopped going to church regularly when I came to university that I had to think about whether the act of going to a place an hour a week was what defined me as a religious person, even though up until that point I don’t think that my everyday actions had been motivated by what I was being told. But reading these books, about ideas that didn’t
take a physical form or were personified into a ‘good’ or
‘evil’, added an extra dimension onto my thinking.
Various things at the start of last year gave me the opportunity to examine where my place in the world currently was, where I would like it to be and what I could do to get these to match. As luck would have it, and although I didn’t realise it at the time, I had already begun thinking about this through reading two books that have become very important to me.
The first is a book outlining the general belief system of a branch of Buddhism, the second is a book called “ZenGuitar” by Phillip Toshio Sudo – a must for any music lover – which focused on music as a form of spiritualism, what it can make us feel and why, while at the same time improving your general musical ability using certain concepts present in some spiritualist doctrines. Sudo has incredibly interesting ideas stemming from Zen teachings and Chinese proverbs which seem to suggest the same thing, our journey never ends and to be complacent with your progress so far is to stop growing. One particular saying that stuck with me was one that Chinese philosophers suggested, “When you are ninety miles through a hundred mile march, you are only half way through”.
Now, I would class myself as a religious person. Exactly what religion I’m not too sure but I try and maintain some of the fundamental lessons that years of church as a child taught me. It wasn’t until I stopped going to church regularly when I came to university that I had to think about whether the act of going to a place an hour a week was what defined me as a religious person, even though up until that point I don’t think that my everyday actions had been motivated by what I was being told. But reading these books, about ideas that didn’t
take a physical form or were personified into a ‘good’ or
‘evil’, added an extra dimension onto my thinking. 2013 and I was feeling that the world was against me. There were good days, don’t get me wrong, but there seemed to come a point where I had to fight for something. To fight just because you have to is horrible. It’s a feeling that’s followed me since school: having to stand up for something that you don’t care about so that people won’t get close to the things that you do. That was something that I now realise I was wrong about. The trick wasn’t keeping people away from what I love, but making them love it too. Unfortunately I’m yet to meet anyone who shares a poly-doctrinal, spiritual approach to everyday life (although if it’s you and you’re reading this then please marry me) so people don’t really get it when I talk to them about opening up their whole life to someone to make them understand. See, understanding! It’s all connected.
What does this all mean though? I seem to have come to this sort of anti-climax but I’m afraid that I don’t yet have the answer. But maybe that’s the point? To accept an idea that connects you to everyone and everything around you appeals to me because it means that we’re never alone. It doesn’t matter if you define what connects us as a higher spiritual power or an energy or even just positivity but the fact remains that we are together. It’s a journey, much like this post has been, but once you understand that the journey is the same for everyone then you can begin to love life. Thankfully the people, places and thoughts that I’ve currently surrounded myself with make this an easy task.
Coming
to the end of my time at university though, with a large chunk of life
that I haven’t discovered yet, I’m forced to wonder whether I’m going to
have to deal with these things again. But I don’t think so. For me, the
reality that life is a marathon, not a sprint (cliché, sorry!) and that
I’m part of it is enough to comfort me in the fact that I won’t have to
change again. And, if I do, I’ll know that it’s not really a change.
If I get invited to do this again then I’ll probably just talk about something normal like music. You guys heard Marvin Gaye’s “Here, My Dear”? Amazing album.
Love,
Iain
x
If I get invited to do this again then I’ll probably just talk about something normal like music. You guys heard Marvin Gaye’s “Here, My Dear”? Amazing album.
Love,
Iain
x
