anacoluthia

The cursor blinks at me. It’s 6:19AM. Writing time.

Immediately I remember 3 things I need to do today so I open up my email and send a reminder to work. I resist the urge to look at my Inbox.

I’ve been getting into the habit of writing in the hour before the kids wake up and have a few different writing projects.

It’s 6:20AM and I’m trying to get into flow.

“Flow” was introduced to me on a work-sponsored course by The Resilience Institute. The dude who did the most work on flow is Mihály Csíkszentmihályi – pronounced “chick-sent-me-high”. Sometimes when writing, time falls back, mental distractions disappear, and inspiration and joy comes. When playing sport or music I sometimes get a sense of being totally absorbed and somehow energized by an activity.

Some activities like commuting or ironing take energy away while others actually give you energy. If you are one of the sad people who reduce humans to carbon-based machines it doesn’t make sense. How can you expend energy on a task and gain energy overall from it? It’s like you’re a car and when you drive a particular road the petrol tank fills itself up.

The driving metaphor is wrong though. Time to jump.

Mongolia: The Orkhon River By flickr.Marcus (via Flickr)

Flow is like a river. You find a good current in the middle of a strong stream and are being carried along effortlessly. You’ve found a good moment.

But life is a long game of many moments.  Sometimes flow stops. Even worse sometimes you’re almost in flow.

You’re stuck in an eddy of muddy water. You are absorbed in a computer game, Facebook or The Biggest loser. You’ve sat down to watch TV in the evening and sort of hated every show but sat there anyway. You have many aspects of flow but no sense of control or joy; maybe a dull contentment. You’re sitting at the pokies of your mind. And at times when I’ve hated my life, or been incredibly angry, this state has been preferable.

Or alternatively you go too hard are crashing over rapids trying not to be smashed to smithereens. It’s a big night out, doing shots, drugs, grabbing at strippers, driving too quickly, picking fights, base jumping, drug taking. It’s like The Hangover. You wake up and wonder what the hell happened.

This flow stuff is tricksy.

We are charting a constantly changing river. Around each bend it could end. Trying to find the good water. Sometimes we get stuck in the worst form of ourselves. Other times we almost destroy ourselves.

In a previous season of Mad Men Peggy and Father Gill are chatting and she says “Nuclear war. We could be gone tomorrow.” His response: “Isn’t that always the case?”

We are in the river and it’s such a long way to the ocean.

I was in flow from about 6:30 to 6:50 this morning.

Japanophile v.3 (M Domondon via Flickr)

Orchestras have always put me to sleep and it’s not because they bore me.

I focus on the violins then perhaps my friend on the bassoon. Then I might sit back and try and experience the entire orchestra as a whole.

The lights are down and everyone is quiet. I switch between appreciating the individual and the whole. It gets me sleepy.

A sleep born of harmony. My skin goes tingly as I exhale all the tension out. It’s the kind of rest that begets more rest. It’s the first part of a beach holiday that makes you confusingly more tired. It’s winding down and tuning in.

My master always talks about “circle” and “dot” thinking. In my analogy the violinist or bassoonist is the dot and the orchestra is the circle.

I’m very “dot”. I do things. I pick up skills and knowledge. I mostly show up on time to work. I set a budget. I tie a shoelace. I make a decent coffee. I go to gym. I can pick the intro to Nothing Else Matters on guitar. I do many “dot things”. I spend most of my life “in the dot”.

A shipping container is one plain dot in an intricate global logistics network (the “circle”) that enables our modern life. Because of it I can drink Italian coffee, listen to music on my iPhone and turn on a fan on a hot night.

A cheap-arse Broadcom network adapter is one part of a large global Internet that enables me to see photos of my brother at a movie premiere in New York, to write this blog, and to enjoy pornography!

When “dots” are in harmony with the “circle”, amazing things happen: Pyramids. Revolutions. Civilizations. Ecosystems. Solar Systems.

Consider a big “circle”. The country. The planet. The universe perhaps. If you ignore  24-hour news hysteria and your own drunken-monkey mind you’ll notice “things” generally work out. Nature pulls towards something like harmony.

The orchestra is made up of 100 or so instruments. Imagine that one player starts playing out of tune. Would you notice the 99 other instruments playing sweet music or the one playing out of tune?

It’s easy to focus on the annoying guy at work, having to wait 20 minutes for a tram,  overwhelm at work or the struggle for money.

So many things command our attention. It’s like the world is filling up with dots. But no matter how many dots you have it never comes close to filling the circle.

And the circle is indifferent to these dissonant dots. It calls its own tune.

Two years ago.

I woke to the sound of my mobile phone vibrating by my bed. It was a little early but not too early. It was my youngest brother. It’s time, he said.

I was lethargic. Everything was in slow motion. The kids woke as usual at 7:00am and I helped get them breakfast. They were two; the same age I was when my grandpa died. They were messy eaters and it took a long time to feed them.

The four of us jumped in our car and headed off. Hoping we would be there in time, but dreading getting there.

The traffic was peak hour and progress was halting. I could feel simultaneously sweat gathering with frustration tempered by my tiredness at being woken early.

We drove past the place of our wedding with barely a glance. I’m glad he was there for that. I’m glad he outlived his mother. Thoughts raced. I wondered if my other brothers had got there yet.

The last part of the drive was quick. We got off the main roads and raced through northern suburb streets. My youngest brother was sitting on the front doorstep.

“He’s gone”, he said.

I felt like he was pranking because it sounded so melodramatic. Some finality. Some relief. Sympathy for my brother who was there to hear dad’s halting, slowing breaths.

I went to spend some time with his body and to forgive and release him as completely as I could through tears.

I remembered the good times. Walking through from the car to the ground at VFL Park, holding his hand with Rohan. Putting up the family tent every summer holiday. Him building our cubby house with Grandad. Hitting a tennis ball with him; his high backhand. His videography. His cask wine. His secret stash of muesli-flakes and scotch finger biscuits. The pained look on his face when we hurt ourselves. His bad dress sense. His complete, almost self-defeating modesty and humility. His frustration and his commitment.

I remember when him and mum were separating the first time. I was studying for year 12 and self-absorbed. He said he missed his dad. It was the only time he talked about his father to me. Typical Aussie bloke!

Well I miss you dad and I hope you are at peace.

Sometimes I wish I’d stayed in London. Occasionally I dream of the place. I dream of the narrow streets, the wet weather, the green gardens, the endless architecture and damned culture and sophistication. I even fondly remember the garbage bags, the tube and the gypsy cabs.

But I never think fondly of the London night sky. In my memory, it glows yellow. The seemingly permanent low clouds reflecting the glowing city. Claustrophobia.

London night view (kosalabandara via Flickr)

As a child, I remember the awe of seeing the unencumbered night sky for the first time. We were on holiday, out in the country, and I was old enough to be up after dark. Mum and dad were hustling my brothers and I from the Kingswood to the cabin and were flustered. They were trying to get us to bed. But I looked up and saw the naked stars for the first time. The expanse and depth. The universe. Awe.

London’s phosphorescent mist though was conjured from a medieval scene. Nature had long been diminished.

Humanity has been collapsing inevitably into cities for decades. Young families chase opportunity in the tight spaces of cities and suburbs.

Sometimes I just ache to be out of the city. To breathe.

A three day road trip to Tweed heads would seems like boredom to some, but country roads, clean air, and good company sound like heaven on earth. Camping with a mate. Swimming in the Ocean.

All of the cells in my body relax. I no longer care about my mortgage or my family.

In the ‘burbs there are parks, but the landscape is dead. Suburban parks that are under-watered, over-planned and joyless places. Nature does not belong in the suburbs; it has to lurk in the shadows and creeks. It is dominated by traffic, shopping centres, and fence-lines.

My male friends change when down the coast or hiking in the forest or walking the land. They shine.

In nature you realise how unimportant you really are, how petty most of your desires are, how pointless most of your anxieties are, and how generous the natural world is.

So whenever I start to yearn for those heady London days again, I remember the cloaked night sky. I remember that while I was there part of me wanted to leave so badly.

My wife did a boot camp out at Wonga Park. Boxer Sam Soliman had her jumping side-to-side over a log. He timed 3 minutes but the stopwatch didn’t even work, didn’t even have batteries.

My old personal trainer use to change the weight up when I wasn’t looking and fool me into doing personal bests. But then I started to guess when he was doing it, and I couldn’t do personal bests any more.

In some activities there is just too much damned time to think.

In a basketball game I played last century, we were down to 3 players with less than a minute to go, needing 3 points to win. The opposition covered the other two who had been shooting three-pointers all night, leaving me free. Andy and Ash couldn’t get a shot off, so they passed to me, and I turned and netted it and we won. No time to think. Ever had a time when you nailed it because you didn’t have time to think? And then when you tried to repeat it…

As Paul Kelly says in his most excellent “How To Make Gravy: A to Z, A Mongrel Memoir” when he tries to learn how to kick an Aussie football with his left foot.

The art of kicking is all about getting the drop of the ball right. My right hand does this instinctively. There’s hardly any gap between where I let go of the ball and where it hits the boot. Not so on the left. I have to think about it more, guiding the ball down. The drop always seems longer. And the longer the drop, the greater the margin for error. I’m running around an oval in Cairns trying not to think about how I release the ball from my left hand. When it goes well I’m not thinking about anything.

I love Stick Cricket. You have so little time to pick what shot to play. As soon as you start guessing what is coming next you start losing. As soon as you start thinking of anything much at all, your reactions slow down. Playing a game to get out of your mind though might not be far off crap TV and Internet porn as avoidance.

In the best Aussie novel of all time, Dirt Music by Tim Winton, Georgie consumes the Internet:

When Georgie sat down before the terminal she was gone in her seat, like a pensioner at the pokies, gone for all money. Into that welter of useless information night after night to confront people and notions she could do without. She didn’t know why she bothered except that it ate time [...] It was an infinite sequence of opening portals, or menus and corridors that let you into brief painless encounters, where what passed for life was a listless kind of browsing. World without consequence, amen. And in it she felt as light as an angel. Besides, it kept her off the sauce.

oH . . rHızoma drεam . . http://www.flickr.com/photos/jef_safi/505652237/

Getting out of your mind, or staying in it.

Examining every belief, indeed noticing beliefs at all, and deciding whether to pluck them from the fishing net of your memory to throw back into the sea.

But not trying hard. Letting go. Noticing shards and remnants of reflex and feeling: the way you behave around an old school friend; the way a pretty girl makes you blush; the way you tell yourself, like a flailing Biggest Loser contestant, “That’s good enough”.

I’m listening to A Bug Free Mind, by Andy Shaw. He starts with this suggestion: Think of a really great time in your life and nothing else for fifteen seconds. Try it.

I’m also studying a silent qigong meditation that will take 20 weeks to learn. Trying to reach what the Taoists call the Ding State. Thinking of Nothing. And Everything. Of All Things. Maybe. I’ll know it when I get there apparently.

I’m doing a lot of thinking about thinking.

Don’t think of a white elephant.

There was a time when I could hit the big reset button. The old cut-and-run. I’ve done it twice.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/vincepal/3633230337/

The first cut-and-run spilled from a brew of friend, girl, jealousy and strangely, a burning will to do the right thing, or at least not the wrong thing.

I cut the two of them out of my life. I just stopped calling. I didn’t return calls. It was like pruning a lemon tree. Faith was required; faith that something – some fruit – would grow back on the empty limbs. I didn’t burn bridges. There were no self-righteous confrontations. I just cut myself off.

I remember weeks of aching loneliness. A big part of my life had been hollowed out. I think my hair started receding. It was stressful. It felt like it took more courage than I had. Alone with my thoughts way too much, undefined in the world. Things got weird.

But into that self-created hole many good things fell. I started a band, I discovered women. I met my future wife. I went exploring. I burst through some psychic wormhole to the other side. The tree had grown back and it was recognisable as me, but it was no longer the same tree.

I wonder if anybody noticed or if people worried about me. I guess not everyone makes it back from dark places.

I had cut-and-run as an act of self-preservation.

I then chose to do it all again and for no exact reason.

****************

My brothers were all moving on in their lives. I was living with a mate in Northcote. I’d been doing the same jobs for a while. Somebody told me about dot-com riches that could be made in the UK. I had until I turned 28 to have my working holiday visa stamped and I didn’t want to miss out. But mostly, and for no reason I could pinpoint, everything – and everyone – seemed to be giving me the shits.

I made my travel plans in the blink of an eye even though I am crap at that sort of thing! My behaviour was so out of the ordinary. I wasn’t in control. A wild ocean was drawing me in, and I let myself be taken out on the current knowing all the loneliness and craziness it would bring. (You don’t struggle in a rip or you drown.) I woke up having night sweats in the lead up to leaving and when I said goodbye to my housemate I was trying not to cry. I then cut myself off from my world again.

I remember looking at the TV map on the 747-400 as it soared over Uzbekistan and feeling scared shitless and excited all at once. I was going somewhere where nobody knew me and I liked this very much. I was going to an apartment promised me by a guy I’d worked with once, with no job and a few thousand dollars in the bank.

I remember the day I arrived… sweaty… crossing town on the Underground with my bags… my apartment not ready… being put up by the electrician who was working on the apartment…  ripped off by a taxi driver… sleeping on a stretcher in the spare room of a family house…. living with a Danish couple, an Aussie couple and an eccentric landlord… waking up at 4:00am to a blazing summer sun… buying my first tube ticket… taking the tourist doubledecker around town… finding out that poms don’t drink black tea.

I was on my feet quickly. I landed a dot-com job within a fortnight and the Danish couple got kicked out for me. (Apparently their food stunk – pork knuckles or something).

Then, as expected, the loneliness and craziness of self-imposed isolation arrived like old friends. The craziness came as deranged and illogical thoughts. Thoughts that you are alone because you’re a loser, unlikable, that this is your life and nothing good can grow here. Thoughts that to an outsider would seem crazed.

I mean I grew a fucking goatee!

So I filled my life with walking. I walked from Crouch End to Hampstead Heath. Ali Pally. Camden. Dodgy cafes. Dodgy Pubs. Along the river. I lost about 10 kilograms and got chronic back problems but I kept walking. I crowded out my crazed thoughts with continual action.

And as with the first cut-and-run, good things eventually came. I made great friends. I had adventures I will never write down. My career flourished and my future wife joined me in the UK.

I remember seeing her smile as she came through Heathrow Terminal 4. She had a new purple streak in her hair. She was toned and tanned; at least compared to the English! I loved her so fiercely at that point I surprised myself. I couldn’t believe she had put up with all my shit and had flown over!

We ended up working and living together. We travelled to exotic corners of the planet, then finally back home where we got busy building a family.

****************

The cut-and-run. Finding yourself alone amongst strangers. Starting again. Refusing to lie down and give up. Tolerating and beating craziness. Then remarkably finding a way back home, through places never imagined.

Or as my grandma simply used to say, “Things have a way of working out”.

Every Melbourne spring there’s a run of wet weekends with the rain clearing up just in time for the workweek.

It rained all last Saturday. The rain gauge in the back yard later said 65 mm. I was bottled up inside, slumped on the leather couch, watching children’s TV, hoping at least the roof would leak so I would have something to do.

In a perverse twist I spent the day sitting down but the night standing up watching a band play.  I thought a patron was throwing beer across the band room, but it ended up being water leaking from the roof and I could do nothing about it.

*********

Sunday afternoon the sun finally came out so I went to the soccer with my brother and friends.

I was picked up in a small hatchback and, being the shortest, I sat in the back on a cheap material seat covered in dog hair.

We parked a few kilometres away from the stadium and walked. I begged to stop at a pub for a drink because we were early but I had no takers. Our seats were up the back in the shade and were made of a bendy green plastic.

The game was a good one and the home side kicked the winner at the 80-minute mark. The forward angled away from goal, dribbled towards the corner, spun around and chipped a gentle cross to his teammate who headed the ball home. I leaped from my seat shaking my fists and screaming, feeling something other than latent frustration for the first time in days.

We were all talk as we wandered back to the car. I thought about suggesting we go for dinner. As if reading my mind someone jokes, “If we weren’t all tied down, we’d go for dinner or a drink now.”

I sit on dog hair again.

*********

Tonight I put the kids to bed. It was quite warm in the house so I turned on the fan for our ducted cooling system.

My wife was out at boxing training. I thought it’d be nice to cook her dinner, and a veggie tofu stir-fry seemed doable, so I raided the fridge.

It occurred to me that my climbing beans would need picking and that there may be a zucchini or two also, so I wandered out back in the evening sun to gather.

And I heard a gentle click as the cooling system blew the back door shut.

Locked out. I ran to the front door. Locked out.

I’d had exchanged manly nods with the guy from across the street the morning before so I knocked on his door. He answered, I explained my predicament and he let me use their phone.

With help a few minutes away I stood on our front verandah feeling impotent, listening to one of my boys crying inside.

When I got back in all was quiet. The boys were asleep and I wondered if I had imagined the crying.

*********

It’s meant to fucking rain again on Saturday, and it’s not even spring any more.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/makelessnoise

My brain is exhausted and aching. I’ve been sold to for two days straight. I’m at the 21st Century Financial Education Summit in Melbourne. I’m here because my brother and I have plans to start a business and because I want to hear Tim Ferriss and Richard Branson speak.

Just a kilometre away our diminutive Lord Mayor Robert Doyle is setting the police on non-violent protesters. Once upon a time I would have been there protesting. Somehow I’ve missed the whole “Occupy” thing. Whilst lefties are videoed allegedly being punched by police, I’m at a finance summit. How is this so?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rakka/2996186507/

Back at the summit, when a presenter yells out an obvious question such as: “Do you want to make money while you holiday?”, I snidely refuse to join the chorus of “Yes!”. When they tell me a product usually goes for <ridiculous number> but today it goes for <ridiculous number divided by two> I smirk. When they tell us to stand out from the herd but give out free Herald Sun newspapers I enjoy the irony.

But I admire their sales craft. And I admire the people attending, from all walks of life, who have a desire to start a new life, a new story line. I love the hacking of systems and strategies, and I recognise that today the means of production, of marketing, the means of hell everything are open to… well anyone…

As the joke goes, “I’m unique… just like everyone else”. I was researching cold reading recently and realised that apart from being used by palm readers and the like it is also a sales tool. Cold reading is based on the fact that we like to hear good things about ourselves and discount bad things, that we fall into only a few personality types, and that our lives follow predictable trajectories. If you’re in your late teens, you are trying to find a role, in you twenties you can get caught up in what you should be doing, and in you 30s you question earlier choices, and in your late 30s (where I am) you…

“No matter what a man has achieved in life, at (almost) 40, he is likely to feel worn-out, on edge, weighed down and unappreciated. Men deal with these feelings in different ways. Some become self-destructive, while others channel this energetic tension toward a more positive outcome, such as developing their gentler and more principled side.”

Wow. Sounds like me! But probably also sounds like most men approaching 40. So where am I? Am I on the clichéd arc from teenage idealist to hard-nosed pragmatist? Am I on the verge of middle age re-invention or decay?

Are these story lines natural like gravity and the tides, El Nino and La Nina, erosion and eruptions?

People sometimes feel they are stuck in the middle of a story that never changes but this of course, like all things in nature, isn’t true. Other people are addicted to beginnings. A bartender told me last night about her one-way ticket to Kathmandu! Geez it sounded like a good beginning!

Where are you on your storyline?  Can you accept it and use it to your advantage, or will it be used against you? Are you ready to buy a one-way ticket?

Inspired by Venkatesh Rao

“Whatever goes wrong goes wrong any how”

- Neil Murray, Lights of Hay

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jbparrott/4556667870/

I was handed an old cardboard box after his funeral. It was full of Super-8 and Standard-8 film canisters.

The wax cardboard had started to go soft and there was grit and dust settled throughout.

Some of the small reels were in orange Kodak envelopes. Others were loose. Some were unravelling. The handwriting so recognizable and messy. A numbering scheme, but no key to decipher the numbers.

Super-8 is film. You can hold it up to the light and see the frames. It does not diminish like later day magnetic-based Video formats.

With trepidation I asked the family for contributions to the cost of converting the collection. Trepidation that asking family members for money is fraught, but also trepidation for what I might find on the tapes.

I’m assured when I pick up the DVD conversions that there is 4.5 hours of “excellent” footage. The cardboard box is gone though. Apparently it was full of little bugs and had been banished.

Dad’s camera did not record audio. Sitting in silence, I felt like some time traveling voyeur. The constantly changing focus and quality of the images made my eyes work hard.

All the gardens look so neat. Dead relatives appear restored to youth, smiling and limber. Wedding dresses. Flared pants. Vinyl. Children everywhere. Happy young faces.

And it’s seeing the guy who was not in frame but who did the filming.

You see the reactions of the people who are looking at him. You see that that your parents’ relationship wasn’t always beaten down by life and unrealised expectations. You see his attention to strange details, like two dogs fighting on a hotel balcony. You understand when the camera lingers slightly as a pretty, young woman enters frame. You see his commitment to recording birthdays, weddings and births.

You see a collection that runs some 15-20 years and you take it in in a few hours.

You see that he was fastidious and constant with his camera work, disciplined and learned. Something you’ve never seen before.

You wonder why some things only get revealed after death.

And you feel shame for how you let your own adolescent aloofness and your parent’s failed marriage diminish your father like a cheap VHS cassette.

But you also take pride in seeing that he was like you, he endured, left a legacy, and that he was great behind a camera but for too short a time.

Things have tendencies.

I can grab some crystal ware, and if I manage to sing at the right pitch, it will harmonise with me. If I sing loud enough it will shatter into pieces. Or I could pour myself a glass of wine…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/richardsharp/29575191/

Remember the story of the scorpion and the frog? The frog and the scorpion are standing at the bank of a flooded river. The scorpion asks the frog for a dink across the river. Surely not says the frog, you’ll sting me. Why would I do that the scorpion retorts, then we’d both die? Good point says froggy, jump on and let’s swim. Out they head into the torrent, when froggy feels the sting of the scorpion’s tail in his back. Hey! Dickhead! Why did you do that? Because it’s my nature, claims the scorpion.

Everything has dangerous tendencies. A passion fruit vine grows exponentially and destroys the fence that supports it. One person’s loving self-sacrifice ends up with them being taken for granted and sacrificed. Another person’s anxiety protects them from all danger but destroys their happiness and their life. Another person’s laid back attitude begets disengagement and atrophy.

Even relationships have their own nature. I read this EM Forster twitter this morning: “No human relationship is constant. If it is constant it is no longer a human relationship but a social habit.”

But we think in constants and interpolations and act with habits. We don’t think in rhythms and cycles. It’s like me standing up from this table on Grant St in Port Douglas and heading north to Main St, and drawing the conclusion that I’m destined for New Guinea. Our way of thinking is bunk.

The way we are, our nature, our souls, our DNA, holds the key to our potential (go grab a self help book to read more) but it also holds keys to our self destruction.

Our habits, tendencies and nature, if left unchecked can become vicious storms where we are the oblivious eye.

My Qigong master tells me that you have to break up your energy and let it rebuild in a better form, a natural form. Sometimes you have to prune the tree, you have to cut off a bad friend, you have to end a bad relationship, or maybe just quit a job or take a holiday. You have to exit the storm and you have to do it with no real planned outcome.

Then you wait. Do you have faith that your true nature will eventually reveal itself and it will be good, at least for a while, before renewal is again required?