Between idleness and stress

Getting the balance right in life, setting the sliders – so important. I tend to beat myself up if I catch my output flagging, if I'm not getting on with it – but then on the other hand, I hate getting myself into a state of stress. Stress happens when there's too much on my plate, when I'm failing to get done all the things that need to be done within the allocated time. And here, the Eisenhower Matrix comes into play. Sift away the task that are neither urgent nor important from those that are either urgent or important, whilst placing a top priority on those tasks that are both.

Today I start the day with jotting down my to-do list. I have to pay the annual insurance premium on my motorbikes (physically, at my local insurance office – three times cheaper than doing so online); do the weekly shop, have one online meeting with the UK, compose several emails, make a few work-related phone calls and juggle all this around a courier expected today bringing me another demijohn, stopper and bubbler airlock. Then there are my seven sets of exercises (ambition: beat last year!) and 90 minutes of brisk walking around the manor. And writing this blog.

The day starts well; the sun in shining – it's another cloudless morning – this is incredibly motivating.

One by one the tasks are accomplished. Parcel received, insurance paid, shopping done, several emails sent. The call takes half an hour longer than scheduled and requires couple of a follow-up phone calls.

All in all, this day is in hand, it's all fitted in. There has to be some action, some external factors that push me along – but not too much. 

This is called eustress, "moderate psychological stress, interpreted as being beneficial". Knowing where the boundary lies between eustress and stress (the sort that releases the hormone cortisol in harmful amounts) is crucial. Of course, this will differ from individual to individual, and with training, you can push that boundary. But most important is what drives you to put together that daily to-do list, what's on it, what's not on it, what stresses you, what you are in control of. 

And so I intend to go on working, so long as I can work at my own pace, and keep stress out of my professional life. That means knowing when to say 'no'. 

How much of the balance between avoiding all stress and being stressed out lies in the hands of fate? If you believe in the metaphysical powers of quantum will, you can somehow influence the outcome. And if you don't believe in that, well, good luck anyway.

I get it all done, and end the day listening to Martyn Jansen's most excellent soul and R&B show on West Wilts Radio. I retire in a state of gratitude.

Too much stress – bad; no stress at all – also bad.

This time eight years ago:
Ulica Karczunkowska, about to be bisected

This time nine years ago:
What I read each week.

This time ten years ago:
Defending Poland, contributing to NATO

This time 12 years ago:
Balloon over Warsaw

This time 14 years ago:
Happiness, Polish-style

This time 15 years ago:
And watch the river flow...

On human failings

Student SGH's latest blog post has prompted me to respond. And so (at last!) I'm publishing a post that I've been putting off writing for several days – a post about procrastination and attention deficit.

It occurred to me that one reason I find completing tasks difficult – particularly when I'm not facing any external deadline – is that my mind tends to wander off to something more interesting, more curious, more affecting. Then off I go, at a tangent. [Since starting to write this I've been distracted by a dozen small tasks, each getting in my way.]

It's this trait that I wanted to write about, in particular when combined with certain traits found along the autism spectrum, namely nerdish RRBI (repetitive and restricted behaviours and interests). 

As I've written before, I believe that most of us live our lives affected to a certain degree by one psychiatric spectrum or another, whether it's autism/Asperger's, ADHD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, bipolar disorder, narcissism, schizophrenia etc – in most cases well below the threshold for diagnosis. And these traits can co-exist – two or more, at low levels, low enough not to be picked up by the casual observer - or indeed, even by the subject. [This case shows how difficult it is even for healthcare specialists to spot the symptoms in themselves.] 

Looking at my life, my education, my career, my personal life, I can now look back and identify how my inability to focus has held me back from reaching my own internally-set goals and ambitions. However, having said that, to balance it out, the RRBI has been helpful in narrowing down fields of interest. 

And here I return to the great question I've often asked, regarding specialists vs. generalists, the former being more likely to be on the autism spectrum, the latter having a degree of attention deficit. My father used to tell me off as a child for trzymanie zbyt wielu srok za ogon – literally, holding too many magpies by the tail – rather than focusing on, and completing, one task.

So the two tendencies - one being the pursuit of specific and narrow areas of interest, the other being a tendency to lose focus and wander off – lead to my main characteristic – inconsistency. Straying between "That was really good!" and "That was crap." 

Because my mind does indeed wander, it takes me longer to get things done; it takes me longer to learn. I now realise, aged 66, why it's taken me so long to acquire a deep understanding of those things I deeply understand – and how to communicate my understanding of them. But then again, this returns me to my threads about longevity. A long life of life-long learning will allow you to gain deeper knowledge of individual topics (if you are a scatter-shot generalist), or broader knowledge across a wider range of topics (if you are a focused specialist).

Masking one's behavioural failings requires good self-knowledge, emotional intelligence, and the ability to read how people see you. [One set of autism-spectrum traits that I lack is the inability to empathise or socialise. So just the RRBI. And the ADHD trait that I lack is the hyperactivity. Just the attention deficit.] During my socialisation period (age 10-50), the RRBI was kept in check, so that I'd fit in. Don't talk to girls about trains. Now, I'm less bothered to mask. I am as I am.

But then there's another trait - and I'd argue a character-neutral one – that keeps (lost focus again, time to make some breakfast)... [Two conference calls and some office work later, I finally get round to finishing this post, and realise I forgot how I intended to finish this sentence.]

So – what do I consider to be the worst human trait? 

Psychopathic/sociopathic behaviour, especially when presented in conjunction with narcissism. 

Which human beings are doing most damage to humanity right now, in the past, and – unless restrained by societies – in the future? Egotistical psychopaths, megalomaniacs using murderous force to get their way. If only Putin and Xi had been hamstrung in life by chronic procrastination! [But then some other evil bastard would have got to run those two systems; I'd have to move on from psychology to political science...]

I have worked with and for psychopaths – ultra-competitive, heartless, ruthless bastards, trampling over human lives, over the people who find themselves working for them, who have to endure stress, humiliation, job loss – and all because one man (and it's nearly always a man) has personal wealth-and-power goals to meet. And most psychopaths are highly skilled at masking these traits. Fortunately, such people are far fewer in number than procrastinators. Unfortunately, the psychopaths tend to gravitate toward (or rather push themselves into) positions of power, using power to enrich themselves, and using those riches to buy more power. This is the worst human trait. Until we fully understand the ladder of authority, and turn the hierarchy that's innate in mammalian societies into networks built upon consensus, we will have to live with psychopaths ruling over us.

Procrastinators won't push the nuclear button. 

About procrastinators, I worry not.

This time last year:
Sunny Sunday meditations

This time seven years ago:
To Dawidy Bankowe, Łady, Zamienie and back

This time 12 years ago:
Town planning and the Sublime Aesthetic

This time 13 years ago:
On the long road from Zero to One

This time 14 years ago:
Łódź Rising

Focus on attention; focus on beating procrastination

If I am to list my faults as a biological human being - that shell of foam made of protein currently used to carry my consciousness - it is its inability to stay focused for any length of time.

External deadlines ("this piece is needed for 15:00 today" or "you're on TV in half an hour and expected to cover a subject you hardly know") are great for focusing the mind. If I fail to perform, I have to apologise, explain myself etc. Uncomfortable. In such cases, I carry out the task, and the fact that I get asked back repeatedly suggests that I'm not bad at it.

But when there's no external deadline - just me telling myself what I need to get done? 

Like writing this blog post. You'll see it date-stamped one minute to midnight, Wednesday 30 August - the day I originally had the intuition to write this post. I made notes, I started, but I didn't get round to finishing it. The piece was finally completed on Friday morning - because of procrastination and a mind that wanders off onto other trains of thought.

Procrastination is a feature (or rather a bug!) of our human behaviour that we're all aware of. It leads to a growing list of things to do that have been put off because they're neither Urgent nor Important within our subconscious Eisenhower Matrix. Down there in the bottom right are things like Buying the Battery for the Other Motorbike (which I'll do when I Get Round To It). Or sweeping the floor in the porch. Or getting someone to put up the big mirror. If the list of things-put-off gets too long and unmanageable, it generates unhappiness, frustration and stress, all of which contribute to ill-health.

Having reached the stage of life where I know what is indeed important, and getting older means there's less time to accomplish it, I really need focus. Spiritual focus indeed - the sort learnt by Buddhist monks in their mystical contemplations. A mind that doesn't wonder. Mine's off. I have to confess I'm thinking about breakfast right now... should I eat first, and then finish this blog post?

No - I'll keep writing. One can live for days without food. Focus on the task!

Sitting cross-legged for hours at a time in silent contemplation of the numinous, the infinite, the eternal is a valuable practice when young - when the Zen master prowls the room of seated novice monks with a stick, ready to swipe the backs of those whose minds have clearly wandered off.

As we learn more about our psychiatric behavioural disorders, we grasp the idea that there are many of them, and most of us are touched by one or more to a lesser or greater degree. I have written about autism spectrum disorder (ASD, formerly known as Asperger's Syndrome), but another that affects a significant slice of the population is ADHD - attention deficit hyperactivity disorder "characterised by excessive amounts of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity" [Wikipedia]. Again, it's a spectrum thing. Define 'excessive amounts.' Even small amounts can be pernicious. What counts as 'excessive'?

My phone vibrates. My focus is gone - I reach for the phone. Nothing urgent - the weather forecast has been updated. Sunny today, rain for the weekend. PUT IT DOWN AND FOCUS!

We are all prone to such moments of distraction. Attention is an evolutionarily important trait - I see a cat sitting motionless in a field, among the tall grass. Its attention is focused on the stirrings of a field mouse. The cat is oblivious to me approaching it from the rear... I get closer - suddenly, it becomes aware of me; it has to make a decision whether to run from the human or to stay focused on the mouse. I take a step closer - the cat bounds off. The mouse is spared by this unexpected intervention.

Attention deficit can coexist with ASD. Being 'on spectrum' usually means having those restricted, repetitive behaviours and interests (RRBI),  those intense, fixated interests in specific activities or subjects. RRBI helps with focus. I have written about how the great geniuses of science were often on the autism spectrum ('savants') - something that Stanford School of Medicine's Prof Garry Nolan attributes to differences within the putamen caudate area of the brain's basal ganglia when compared to the neurotypical.

I have written in the past about specialist and generalists - having a deep knowledge or broad knowledge. Maybe it's too simplistic, but I would associate deep knowledge within a narrow area of interest with RRBI (and ASD) and broad general knowledge with the scattiness and ADHD - losing focus on one subject area when another, more interesting one, comes along.

When I was young, I could toggle between both modes; on the one hand being engrossed for hours in deeply focused play (building cities out of Lego), or reading about aeroplanes and comparing their maximum speeds. On the other hand, I could become distracted all too easily and switch from one activity to another. My father would often tell me 'nie łap za dużo srok za ogon' - don't try to catch too many magpies by the tail. He could see that I'd have trouble staying focused on one thing, and that would be his way of telling me.

Both these traits continued into adulthood. I'd give this dichotomy a positive spin - I was good at multitasking, I'd tell myself. Now, I think that more focus is good. Focus on attention. Plan my day. Write a to-do list at the start of each day. Structure. Get more done. Beat procrastination. Life is getting shorter by the day, however old you are - there are things that need to be achieved.

Now I press the 'publish' button, I can make myself breakfast.

This time last year:
The S7 extension opens (and Jeziorki loses its semi-rural tranquility forever).

This time three years ago:
Infrastructure delays everywhere

This time four years ago:
Let's stop spitting at the other tribe

This time five years ago:
Progress on the działka

This time nine years ago:
Changes to Poland's traffic regulations

This time 12 years ago:
Teasers in the Polish-English linguistic space

This time 13 years ago:
Summer slipping away

This time 14 years ago:
To the airport by bike

This time 15 years ago:
My translation of Tuwim's Lokomotywa

Transitioning from owl to lark

I try so hard to maintain a routine. To get things done. Not to waste time; not to waste a life. Central to this is my to-do list (on paper, not digital) and my exercise-and-diet spreadsheet - for healthy spirit in healthy mind in healthy body. Just enough stress to keep me driven and motivated - not so much as to cause issues.

My biggest personal enemy is procrastination, which attacks me from the moment I wake up. There's this voice, with a sensible tone, that offers me myriad rational excuses why not to start this particular day with a set of pull-ups before entering the kitchen from the bedroom, or not doing 50 squats as the kettle boils for my coffee. 

That procrastination pushes my exercises and other duties further and further back in the day, until the moment I realise I cannot get it all done unless I stay up to midnight. And so, indeed, lights go out at 00:00. And being blessed with good sleep, I drop off immediately, waking at 8am, with a wee-break or two on the way (after which I also tend to drop off immediately). Eight hours of quality sleep.

So all good then?

Well, no - I'm wasting the dawn. We're approaching that time of year when the night shrinks down to eight hours, and the day extends to 16 hours. And I'm going to bed at midnight. That's literally the middle of the night. If sunrise is at 4am, sunset's at 8pm, the middle of the night is midnight. 

Now, if I were to go to bed at 8pm and have eight hours of sleep - I could wake at 4am. Just think - five whole hours before the office Zoom call (instead of one). And still three hours of daylight after the end of the working day.

This is the post I was meant to have written two days ago - I didn't have time. Well, actually, I did have the time, but I wasted it. Mainly on doom-scrolling Twitter. Realising this, I have determined to dial back Twitter time and force myself to go to bed earlier - first 23:30, then 23:00, then 22:30, then 22:15 (it gets harder) - while each day performing all my tasks and doing all my exercises. 

Now, it's the exercises that are the problem. Having 'gamified' my routine with my spreadsheet and my  'beat last year' slogan, I cannot go to sleep until the exercises are all done and I'm ahead of my scores for 2022. If I didn't procrastinate and waste time, I'd get them done during the day, and not allow all seven sets to pile up until well into the evening.

So - by blasting through my exercises earlier in the day, by not letting procrastination bedevil my activity, I shall be aiming to retire earlier, keeping bedtime no later than 10pm, with a 9pm goal - and the reward will be more daylight hours to spend communing with the midsummer Sun.

Go with the flow, relax and take it easy? I try to do that too! 

Consciously striking the balance between getting on with it/getting stuff done on the one hand and taking it easy on the other is crucial to a happy life. Letting yourself go too often or pushing yourself to extremes should both be avoided. 

By nature I'm an owl with a messy desk. That's something that needs to change. It's never too late to mend.

This time last year:
Hills... I gotta have hills

This time two years ago:
Flashback to a Dream - subconsciousness and memory

This time 12 years ago:
'Old school' = pre-war

This time 13 years ago:
Britain chooses a coalition government

This time 14 years ago:
Landing over Ursynów

This time 15 years ago:
On being assertive in Poland

The right rituals

Success in life in whichever field of endeavor is determined by meeting deadlines. Not deadlines set by other people but deadlines that you set yourself. This isn't taught at school - in fact, success at school and university boils down to meeting deadlines set by others - getting coursework and homework done and preparing for exams. But once you've left full-time education, you need to be constantly setting your own goals and targets. To meet them, you you have to discipline yourself rigorously. Part of this is the habit of setting and monitoring your attainment of daily goals. It's easy to have a simple goal of getting up, going to work for 9am, doing what's expected of you, and keeping your nose clean. Other people's deadlines, other people's expectations.

But what do want from life?

Set yourself too many unrealistic goals and you will be disappointed. Stress takes over as perfectionism proves hard to attain. Set yourself too few goals and your potential as a human being will go unfulfilled.

Maybe a banal example, but for me, exercise has a crucial importance in keeping healthy into old age, I have a set of seven daily exercises which have become routine - ritual, almost. And as I tackle them throughout my day, I come up against the dangers of procrastination. It's all too easy to devise a plausible excuse and delay something that you should be doing now. There's always something more pleasant, something distracting, that gets in the way. And then the exercises bunch up at the end of the day, along with other things on the to-do list, and time runs out.

First thing in the morning after I wake up is automatically make the bed. No thought required - it's the first thing, no questions, always, every day. Then I do pull-ups (up to 20 in one go right now) then I get dressed and fill the kettle. As it's coming to the boil I do squats - at the moment about 50 in one go - and so before I've even had my coffee, I've already done two of the seven sets of exercise. 

This makes it harder to go for a day without exercise - I generally aim to do another two-three during the day and leave the rest to the evening. Determination wanes over time, so frequent new starts are important. New Year and Lent are two big ones, but even the beginning of the month is better than the end, by which time I can convince myself that four or five sets of exercises is enough.

It isn't. If I skip sit-ups for a few days, for example, I can feel the numbness returning to my big toe. If I skip weight exercises for a few days, I can feel my left shoulder stiffening. Too much beer and not enough plank - the spare tyre starts inflating. Not doing back extensions? I see my ageing father, bent almost double as he'd shuffle along.

Another important element is a to-do list for the day. To write down all the tasks that you should get done during the day, office work and otherwise. Blogging is has become an essential defining part of my life I must record what's my consciousness observes thoughts I have had which I keep in a notepad. The ability to dictate directly into the phone as I'm walking is a great innovation. 

Squeezing distractions and procrastination out of my life (especially that temptation for that short-term dopamine hit from Twitter) is an important process. The spreadsheet approach works for me as it is cast in stone; there's no point lying - writing in exercises I didn't do or paces I didn't walk. The aim, as always since 2014, is to Beat Last Year. And I'm on track to do that in every area except press-ups (unless during the autumn I manage to crank out 50 a day every day until Christmas). Creativity also; more thinking, more searching for intuitions, more writing and photography.

A walk at sunset, catching the sun disappearing from view from the embankment above the railway line between Chynów and Sułkowice. Going out last thing at night when there are no clouds to gaze up at the starry sky in amazement. Two rituals that form an important part of my działka life, adding to the spiritual richness.

Laziness needs to be defeated from within, and only you can defeat it. This is difficult to achieve if it has not been inculcated at an early age. 

This time last year:
Measuring the Immeasurable

This time three years ago:
Heading Home [my father leaves Warsaw for the last time]

This time five years ago:
From my father's historic return to Warsaw

This time six years ago:
Country life in a capital city 

This time seven years ago:
My ogród is my działka

This time eight years ago:
Over the hill at Harrow

This time nine years ago:
Behold and See - the Miracle of Lublin - Pt 1.

This time 11 years ago:
Quiet afternoon in the bazaar

This time 12 years ago:
The politics of the symbol

The Speed of Life

There aren't enough hours in the day. I tend to take things slowly; tasks get interrupted by distractions, or put off to tomorrow - and even when I am doing them, there's no rush. I don't like panics; there must be air between tasks, life is to be enjoyed not hurried, and those distractions will always pop up. 

I prefer to take things easy. At my own pace. Eating - I'm usually the last to finish eating. I enjoy the process, especially when the food is good (and as I avoid bad food, this covers most of what I eat). Walking can be significantly speeded up with the aid of Nordic walking poles, an excellent accelerator - but I also like to dawdle, take photos, enjoy the view, contemplate nature. Ever since getting the Huawei health app on my phone, I can see that my 'moderate-to-high intensity' walking decreases markedly in summer, when the living is easy. The speed of life slows down for summer. And summer in the countryside is slower than winter in the city.

Procrastination is a huge problem for mankind, especially when you have no external deadlines hanging over you. An essential lesson for life is to impose your own meaningful deadlines. And to stick to them.

Being somewhat on the Asperger's spectrum, I find spreadsheets comforting, and for me tabling my daily exercise and dietary intake is an excellent deadline-maker. This has its downside. OK - so before going to bed, I need to finish my work, write a blog piece (or at least move it forward, process some photos if not actually publish), do my exercises. With things being put off towards 'later in the day', the last two or three hours are a rush to finish what needs finishing, while fighting off distractions. But then there is the immense satisfaction of closing my laptop with the day's spreadsheet filled in correctly; 11,000 paces, 20+ press-ups, 16+ pull-ups, 40 sit-ups, two sets of back extensions, three sets of exercises with 5kg weights, six minutes of holding the plank, and 40 squats. 

Incidentally, the squats are done usually in the morning, while the kettle boils. This is for the water to heat my coffee cup. I do this so that my espresso stays hot for longer, as I don't want to be gulping the coffee down, but enjoying it properly, not drinking it lukewarm. Logging the squats in the spreadsheet sets me up for the day; I push myself to get as many sets of exercise in before 17:00. But during the working week, often there isn't the time, so it gets bunched up into the evening.

Work has its own deadlines - you don't want to let down clients or colleagues, so things get done by when they need to get done. Over the years, I've learned to be more efficient, no longer having to spend so much time on stuff like researching background that by now I know well. Routine tasks are executed properly because of repetition.

Much as I don't like to admit this - I am a slow learner. But - having learnt a lesson, having acquired a deep insight and thorough understanding through experience, reading or from another person - I tend to learn it well. Solid foundations for future learning. But it's taking me so long! Stuff I should have known when I was in my late 20s, only falls in place now, as I'm in my mid-60s. [The internet - in particular Wikipedia - has opened doors to vast quantities of knowledge once accessible only through public libraries. A curious youngster today can tap into it at any time.]

We slow down as we age. Things take longer to do. My father, in his last years, in his mid-90s, would take an hour and half to eat his main meal of the day; he had an electric plate-warming tray on the table under his dinner plate.

I see speedy people, in a rush. They are efficient. They get things done quickly at work. Their work rate is exemplary. They can get five tasks done in the time it takes me to do two (with dawdling and distractions along the way). They deserve higher pay for that reason alone.

But at the end of the day, here's my question - if  'live fast, die young' is a motto - is the corollary true? 

This time last year:
Does it all come right in the end?

This time two years ago:

Self-discipline and creativity during the lockdown

This time three years ago:

Russia's Far East on road maps

This time four years ago:
Heavenly Jeziorki

This time eight years ago:
Why are all the shops shut today? 

This time nine years ago:
Jeziorki at its most beautiful

This time 11 years ago:
Useful and useless in my wallet

This time 12 years ago:
In search of the dream klimat - remote viewing made real

This time 13 years ago:
Zakopane to Kraków in 3hrs 45min

This time 14 years ago:
The year's most beautiful day?

Take it easy or get rigorous? Lent 2022: Day 37

Finding the balance between pushing yourself too hard and taking it too easy is extraordinarily difficult. If you believe that life is a competition, a rat-race in which to win you have to show more baubles than the next man or woman - in my books - you've lost. You are a materialist, you are człowiek który się nie zastanawia - the person who contemplates not. The mammalian ladder of authority, the innate struggle to show who's top dog, who's higher up the pecking order, is a false driver.

The spiritually important driver is the life-long quest for understanding; working out for yourself why you exist. Dial down the ego on the dimmer switch, set the slider towards consciousness.

Pushing myself on this journey means facing up to guilt when I fail to live up to my own ambitions. Yesterday, I did only four out of my seven routine sets of exercises, and walked a thousand paces less than my target - but ticked off everything on my to-do list, which was rather long. So I have an excuse. But I could have always squeezed in more, had I procrastinated less... Physical exercises are only part of equation, I do them for health and longevity. What did I learn yesterday? That's the more important question.

Writing it down I now acknowledge as being extremely important. Were I to tabulate my own religious practices into a set of Commandments or Mitzvot, this would be one of them. From the daily morning routine of creating to-do list, to recording my dreams as I wake, to jotting interesting insights as I get them in my notebook, to blogging and tweeting - if it's committed to paper or to the web, it's a step forward. An edited photo or film footage uploaded and shared is also an important digital footprint. I can return and check progress.

As I wrote last summer, and indeed in the summer of 2020, the long, hot days of June, July and August are the year's reward, the time we've been looking forward to all winter. And when summer arrives, it can be a bit of an anti-climax, especially if the weather's disappointing. Which is why perfect blue-sky days should be treated with respect - if you know one's coming, or a spell of fine weather, plan for it, do something, make the most of what you've been gifted. Don't procrastinate until half past three.

Taking it too easy during the summer months brings on those guilt pangs. I feel I must be doing, optimising my time, travelling, writing, doing something different. And as I wrote yesterday, summer is not devoid of its spiritual moments.

Finding the balance between rigor and luz (expressed more neatly in Polish!) I would set the slider much further along the scale towards rigor, with luz being in the form of rest as consciously distinct from idleness, dithering and time-wasting. Rest to get back into the swing of work during the autumn and run-up to Christmas. Then the wait for Easter - then Rebirth - and then soft summer to recharge batteries once more.

You owe it to yourself to fulfil your human purpose; you owe it to the miracle of your existence. Push yourself that bit harder, and yes, feel the guilt when you don't!

This time two years ago:
From Zero to One

This time three years ago:
Childhood memory flashback

This time six years ago:
In which I learn to speak

This time nine years ago:
Sunshine and snow, Łazienki

This time 12 years ago:
Wealth and (social) mobility

This time 13 years ago:
Six weeks into Lent

This time 14 years ago:
Foggy morn in Jeziorki

This time 15 years ago:
Sixteen poplars
[just ten left standing today]

Is the search for perfection futile? Lent 2022: Day 32

I often feel guilty - that I'm not doing enough, that I'm lazy, easily provoked, easily distracted, lacking in focus, prone to procrastination. [At least I am writing this, but I should have started two and half hours ago.] It feels like a constant struggle to keep things moving forward, not to sit back and coast. Often I catch myself thinking that I'm having a rest - I'm not - I'm idling. 

Twitter is a great distraction; at times like this I excuse myself that a) I'm catching up with the latest news from Ukraine, and b) I'm working to win over hearts and minds (and fight off Putinite trolls). But it's all too easy to get sucked into Twitter. Closed the tab for now. 

I also feel guilty for not socialising enough; for not being sufficiently charitable at this time of great need; guilty of neglecting friends and family; guilty of introversion. Life's goal is simple - fulfil your human potential. Here, I feel I'm not doing enough. I could always be doing more.

Perfection is unattainable, but improvement is attainable. Spiritual, intellectual, physical improvement. Working on yourself every day, never letting up. 'Beating last year's numbers' is easy in terms of quantitative indicators - but it is harder to assess quality. For example, is the quality of my Lenten posts this year better than last year's posts? Looking at musicians, in particular, they tend to do their greatest works in their 20s and 30s, then decline in terms of quantity and quality  of output - and they tend to die younger than the rest of us.

Certainly my spreadsheet keeps me in line - each day, for the ninth year now, I enter my exercise and diet outcomes, and a useful tool this is. Could I, as some suggest, continue to live as I do without it? The danger of slacking is too great. [I have inherited this spreadsheet habit from my father - he'd log the value of his shareholdings each day as the London Stock Exchange closed, and note down his blood pressure every day too.]

Spiritual and intellectual goals, however, are vague. Yes, I can see I'm getting wiser with age - but could I have done better at understanding life had I worked harder at school? Done sciences rather than arts for A-level? Or is my easily distracted mind inherently unsuited to maths and physics?

One habit I should have started much earlier is carrying a notebook and pen and capturing worthwhile thoughts as I have them. I began late in life - in May 2010, aged a grand 52 years, and still often fail to scribble down those ideas, thinking I'll be able to recall them later when sat at a keyboard - guess what - I can't. And that idea has been lost for good.

Praying - meditating - for focus? Can it help? I am convinced it can; a prayer that should be answered. Prayers for worthwhile things can be answered. I just need to Get On With It. 

This time last year:
Mindfulness vs. materialism

This time two years ago:
Further thoughts on Reincarnation?

This time three years ago:
Peace of mind stolen by Brexit

This time four years ago:
On Learning and Living

This time six years ago:
Goats and hares

This time seven years ago:
On Gratitude, and loving life

This time ten years ago:
Edinburgh views

This time 11 years ago:
Halfway through Lent

This time 13 years ago:
Swans on ul. Trombity

This time 14 years ago:
Papal anniversary, Warsaw

This time 15 years ago:
Sowing oats, Jeziorki

Writing It All Down - Lent 2022: Day 25

I often struggle to move forward. Procrastination and laziness hold me back. 'Moving forward' for me means extending the depth and breadth of my understanding of life. This is a mental process, a never-ending learning process. I am continually learning - by analysis of what I hear from others, what I read and what I experience for myself. And then I have to make sense of it all. But all the time there are distractions, and that dreaded 'can't be arsed' mindset that needs to be overcome.

So many thoughts pass through my mind - how many of them actually moving me forward? Great ideas, great insights, are rare - but do I capture them? 

Every day, as I set off for my walk, I take with me my keys, wallet, glasses, notebook... the other day, half way round my circuit I had a thought that merited instant noting down. Not just the idea, but the exact form of words in which I'm framed it. I immediately whip out my notebook from my pocket - but it turns out I've left my ballpoint pen at home. And by the time I'm back, I've forgotten that thought. Totally.

My Lenten discipline to write a blog post every day is useful to me. Year by year, I can - you can - look back over what I've written to trace the development of my thinking, since 2007. Leaving traces, on paper, online, builds up over time. This has been going well for me this year, I'm finding no shortage of themes to explore. If in doubt, I just look back over the years, pick up on an idea I've not yet covered this year, and expand upon it from the perspective of how my thinking on the subject has become clearer or more nuanced since first writing it here.

Capturing insights as they come to your mind is crucial. Brainwaves can come from deep thought, but they can also come spontaneously, which Christians tend to call the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Ideas, answers, insights, can also come as answers to prayer - a proactive form of meditation in which you are seeking divine guidance or inspiration. Right now, sitting at the keyboard, it feels easy to catch the flow, the vibe, as it passes through. But the notebook is crucial for when I'm out of home, walking or travelling.

And so it happened today, passing through Zgorzała, I saw a sticker on a car that triggered a train of thought that formed the inspiration for what I will write tomorrow. This time, I was ready for it - out came the notebook, pen and reading glasses, and with a handful of words I've captured what it is I want to set out. But that will be for tomorrow.

This time last year:
Will we ever discover what's inside an atom?

This time two years ago:
Time - religion and metaphysics

This time six years ago:
Easter Everywhere, Lent reaches an end

This time ten years ago:
Sunset shots, first bike ride to work

This time 12 years ago:
Poland's trains ran faster before the war

This time 13 years ago:
Winter in spring: surely this must be the last snow?

This time 14 years ago:
Surely THIS must be the last snow?

Focusing on the spiritual is not easy! Lent 2022: Day 16

The human mind has a tendency to stray, to wander off track, to meander. Trains of thought rumble on through your mind, often reaching seemingly random sets of points and diverting onto different lines, calling at different stations. There are trains of thought and then there is the stream of consciousness - the default when the mind is not processing thought, when the mind is freewheeling, like during the moments during which you are falling asleep - or meditating.

Meditation - indeed prayer - requires a degree of focus that is difficult to attain. Whatever you try to exclude from thought has a habit of sneaking back in. Distractions bombard you. Our online life in particular is now plagued by continual attempts to derail our train of thought - to divert onto some other website, to look at this, to buy something, to consider this idea or that.

Clearing the mind requires a great - and conscious - effort. 

During this Lent, as for the past few, I have set myself a goal of writing a new post each day. Discipline is called for! If only I could be consistently productive throughout the whole year... And focus - will I be able to get to the end of this post without leaving my laptop to do something else - make myself a tea, answer an email? 

I stumble for a minute, I'm lost for a word - my initial reaction is to stand up and go and do something else. But no - I must focus!

Just as the human battle with procrastination is constant and life-long (especially when there's no external deadline), the battle with distraction is hard to win. Your mind will give in to the temptations of instant gratification; loss of focus as another idea pops into your head [what's that plane flying over now? Might be something military, rare - switch on ADS-B Exchange] ...

Meditation requires time consciously set aside. Walking is a good time to meditate, but again there are too many distractions. From overhead planes to barking dogs, speeding cars, progress on the S7, litter - what I'd like to do to the dirty bastard who dumped an old fridge on ulica Nawłocka... emptying my mind is easier in the countryside than in Jeziorki.

At night of late my mind is distracted by the war. I find myself praying for the safety of innocent people, at risk of death, under bombardment because of one lunatic whom God seems unwilling to incapacitate. But then, where was God in Auschwitz - and off goes my mind again, wandering, rather than focusing.

I know I'm getting it right when I feel God's love within - that inner hug, and eyes welling up with tears. This requires a specific state of mind; calm, relaxed, accepting. Even at night, lying in bed, it's difficult. In normal times, I have a tendency to just drop off to sleep. Now, with the anxiety and stress, my mind is racing. I think how awful it must be sleeping in a shelter every night in Kharkiv or Mariupol, how stressful... I can't get back to sleep. So I do the breathing exercise - breathing in... count to seven heartbeats as I fill my lungs - then hold it for seven - then release slowly for seven, and - the hardest bit - keeping lungs empty for the count of seven before slowly refilling them. Repeat seven times, thinking about nothing but the breathing and the count - works every time - but not now.

Daytime meditation works best for me on the działka, in summer, when there's little or no office work; wide awake, consciously aware - but not letting any train of thought depart from the station. Now, I must admit it's not easy. It's particularly difficult at a time of anxiety. Hence the need for comfort in life, to remove sources of discomfort. Would that it were so simple in this case...

This time last year:
The ups and downs of life

This time two years ago:
Seeking a religious symbol with meaning

This time three years ago:
New views

This time four years ago:
Humanity in a Creative Universe: a summary

This time nine years ago:
Always let your conscience be your guide

This time ten years ago:
Lenten recipe with prawns 

This time 13 years ago:
Polish economy - recession thwarted

Pleasure - put it off, or have it now? Lent 2021, day 19

Lent is a time of self-denial. As with many other established religions, the notion of fasting plays an important role in Christianity. Coming at a time of year associated with neither harvests nor plenty, Lent also had a social-control function - keep gluttony in check when the granaries are running low. Our supermarkets, groaning with produce from the Southern Hemisphere in late winter, have made that history, so now the main purpose of Lent is spiritual - a chance to exercise the will not to do something.

Yet deferring gratification can make sense. If you are constantly spending money on small, unnecessary things while the big important purchases recede into the distance because you can't save for them, you have a problem. The problem is exacerbated by the materialist culture that surrounds us - 'buy now, pay later'. Do so and the debt piles up, while the consumer remains ever dissatisfied, uncomfortable.

"We want the world, and we want it NOW!" yelled Jim Morrison in When The Music's Over (1967). The boomer generation, fed on the idea of conspicuous consumption, changing cars every three or four years, keeping up with the Joneses, launched an assault on Planet Earth's resources unprecedented in human history in terms of scale and scope. The Doors song shows the dichotomy at the heart of materialist society - Morrison was concerned about its effects on the environment:

What have they done to the earth, yeah
What have they done to our fair sister?

Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her
Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn and
Tied her with fences and dragged her down

Driven by omnipresent advertising, we have been encouraged to buy, buy, buy in order to make us happier. And so a seasonal stop - a counter to the excesses leading up to Christmas - is in order.

Exercising self-denial is hugely beneficial. Begin by cutting out things that are essentially bad for you, and do so successfully for the duration of Lent, and you can cut them out of your life over time. Confectionary, cakes, biscuits, sugar, salt snacks, fizzy drinks, have all largely disappeared from my diet for good over the past 30 years. Physical exercise - once a Lent-only thing - has become a year-round habit. Similarly with buying consumer goods. Take a pause in Lent, scale back, consider - what can be repaired? What can be borrowed or hired? What can be bought secondhand? Only if it can't should we buy new. Wait until Easter, delay that gratification.

Why?

Appreciation. Heightened sense of joy at having waited. I am anticipating my first glass of cold beer - with single-malt whisky chaser- at the now-traditional time of a second past midnight on Easter Sunday. A time to savour intoxication, having 'saved up for it' for 46 days. Savour mindfully. Each sip, each swallow, the warming effect as the alcohol courses around the bloodstream. To be enjoyed responsibly. And then a good night's sleep.

Self-denial is the the mirror opposite of procrastination avoidance. "Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today"/"You'll enjoy it more after a period of abstinence".  This balance needs to be struck.

Learning to differentiate between joy and pleasure is vitally important to a happy life. Earning money by doing a stressful job then spending it unthinkingly on pleasure is not a good way of living. Better to earn less by doing something you want to do, and spend money mindfully and focus on moments of true joy - deeply spiritual moments, lost in metaphysical wonder, rather than on short-term gratification.

This time last year:
Dreams and the Afterlife

This time three years ago:
Free Will and Quantum Mechanics

This time four years ago:
Good thinking captured - the importance of jotting it down

This time five years ago:
Spirit of place and our own spirituality

This time six years ago:
Poland's road death toll falls but remains too high

This time nine years ago:
My photos turned into beautiful watercolours

This time ten years ago:
Silver birches and blue skies

This time 12 years ago:
Jeziorki's wetlands in late winter (2009)

This time 13 years ago:
Jeziorki's wetlands in late winter (2008)

On Learning and Living

I came to the conclusion that I'm a slow learner relatively late in life, but I am a persistent learner and when I do learn something - through those insight moments when the penny drops - I tend to learn it well. Lifelong learning is the vocation of a curious and observant mind, a mind that cannot rest. But the speed at which one learns is predicated by native intelligence, determination and focus.

My learning is random; it tends to be driven by coincidences and multifarious paths that converge, diverge and are generally messy. But, just as a jumble of tangled wood shavings and fibres of different lengths and at different angles when compressed and glued form structurally solid fibreboard, so  my haphazard approach to learning has consolidated over the years into something useful. But had I applied myself more to learning, many of the insights I've gained in recent years I could have picked up decades earlier.

Learning is like compound interest, you build on that which has been accumulated before.

Set yourself five tasks for the day, accomplish but three, put two off to the next day; three new ones join them, put two off to the next day and so on - at the end of the week you've done 21 things rather than 35; you've learnt from those 21 things, not from the 35, so procrastination is the reason some of us learn slower than the more focused, self-disciplined one among us.

The advantages of learning are incremental, you stand ever higher on the pile of learning you have accumulated, your horizons ever broader. Do this quickly, methodically, you see further, faster. But if, like me, you put stuff off till the next day, that accumulated learning effect still happens, but the benefits come to you when you're over 50, rather than when you're over 30 and still have time to affect major outcomes.

Breadth vs depth

Learning is like building with bricks. You can use them to build a long wall or you can use them to build a tall chimney. Consider the bricks to be 'learning moments', insights that consolidate facts that we've learnt. These insights come about from our practical experience, from learning from others' experiences, by listening, by reading. Some of us gather them faster than others. Some of us use pile insight bricks in a closed circle, piling new layers onto existing ones, the chimney stack quickly grows higher and higher. Others place the bricks randomly at first, then a line emerges, not necessarily joined up, then the beginnings of a low wall emerge, growing higher but very slowly.

How high should your wall be? Several years ago I was talking to a Polish lawyer, who said that a good lawyer, with good social skills, should be able to engage in a meaningful conversation on any subject for eight minutes. Whatever the subject - speed-skating, photosynthesis, the works of Racine, Javanese gamelan music - literally whatever - using their existing knowledge of neighbouring  subject matter, a person with good general knowledge should be able to hold their own at small talk.

I have written before about breadth vs. depth and advancing age; the generalist's wide range of interests deepen, while the specialist's narrow field of expertise broadens. Why we become generalists or specialists has, I feel, a genetic as well as environmental factors. Our attention span - to what extent is this limited by willpower (or lack thereof)? Ability to concentrate on one subject for more than 20 minutes at one time (said to be the upper limit of the average human attention span) is of great competitive advantage. Ease of understanding, quality of learning material - quality of teacher or mentor - an important factor for the self-taught... but most of all, curiosity.

Then there's RRBI - repetitive and restrictive behaviours and interests - that limit some minds, focusing them intensively and allowing for depth of knowledge in a narrow specialisation very quickly. Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Adam Smith and Isaac Newton are examples. On the other hand, there are polymaths such as Leibniz - said to have been the last human being alive about whom it was said that they know 'everything'.

Jumping about from one subject to another, unable to drill down too deeply in one go is certainly a failing of mine - or so I used to think. Then I found that returning to something that I had once looked at before, though in a superficial way, it became more accessible. Armed with insights from completely different areas of learning, I reach a new levels of cross-disciplinary understanding. It's not that deep in any absolute terms, but deeper than it was, and across a wide spectrum of subjects.

My intellectual self-confidence rises and falls like a wave. When on the high, I consider myself intellectually superior to those around me. When it falls, I realise the big gaps in my knowledge. It is in the dips of my intellectual self-confidence that my learning accelerates; new insights pile onto existing ones, I feel brighter, sharper, smarter - until once more I am confronted with people who are smarter than I. And then the competitive need to self-improve kicks in again. A non-stop cycle.

As human existence becomes exponentially more complex, considering the infinite number of permutations of our scientific, commercial and artistic endeavours, our approach to the acquisition of knowledge and insight is taking on new forms. Finishing to learn the moment one completes one's formal education is no longer an option; it leads to social and economic exclusion. One's success or failure thereafter is down to one's own attitude to learning. The complexity of society - and the complexity of the policy issues that the governments we vote for - mean we all have a huge obligation to keep up with change, and its implications.

This time two years ago:
Goats and hares

This time three years ago:
Białystok the Dull

This time ten years ago:
Crushed velvet dusk in my City of Dreams

This time eleven years ago:
My second Jeziorki blog post, also from this day

Fighting laziness should be everyone's New Year's resolution!

New Year's Eve, morning. I'm off to check the mole situation in the garden. They're back - seven molehills counted on my return from London. Time to deal with them...

I'm looking for my slip-on gardening shoes. Can't find them. I spend three minutes looking around the garage - then give up. Instead, I put on my lace-up gardening shoes.

And then it occurs to me - I wasted three minutes because I was trying to avoid thirty seconds of work lacing up this pair, that was staring me in the face at the outset.

Inside my brain, the following subconscious train of thought was occurring [sound effect of voice echoing as though a muffled loud hailer] ... "The act of lacing up these shoes will take time and effort. Crouch down - lace up one shoe, stand up, crouch down on the other leg, lace up the other shoe, stand up - it requires, as Eddie so often puts it, the 'F'-word - effort. So much easier to walk into the garage and find those old loafers than it is to do all that crouching and knot-tying..."

I go into the garage - it's a mess - the attic remont didn't get finished before Xmas and the builders' stuff is still there, the loafers must me here among all these tools and bags of rubbish and planks of wood and dismantled radiators... Looking hither and yon I get distracted. "Ah! I've been looking for this!" Or "What's this still lagging doing here - they should have dumped this on the skip before it went" and so on...

Really, what I needed was to have done that crouching, laced up those lace-up gardening shoes, and gone outside in them to face the molehills. Two and half utterly wasted minutes - and why? Because I was subconsciously trying to work around a little bit of effort.

New Year and a time to resolve to improve. It's a good time to do this, not so much cutting things out as working out new solutions to old bad habits, in particular to avoid wasting time, to maximise the effectiveness of one's actions. It's a good time to revisit four quadrants of the Eisenhower Matrix which I guess most of my readers will know, but which all too often we forget about in our day-to-day lives...

The Eisenhower Matrix
URGENT AND IMPORTANT	URGENT BUT NOT IMPORTANT
NOT URGENT, YET STILL IMPORTANT	NEITHER URGENT NOR IMPORTANT

How often do we spend our lives wasting time on things we subconsciously know to be neither urgent nor important, as we set aside things that are urgent and important... because... because...

Well, why? Fear? Fear of doing things we're not comfortable with - or outright laziness? Are the two connected? The mother and father of Procrastination? What do you think?

Something to work on this year. Something to work on every year. Life should be one long process of learning and improvement, something one should never give up on. Consciously, continuously learning, reaching conclusions, putting them into action, checking to see how you're getting on, then moving on up again.

This time last year:
A Year of Round Anniversaries

This time two years ago:
Walking on frozen water

This time three years ago:
Fireworks herald 2015 in Jeziorki

This time four years ago
Jeziorki welcomes 2014

This time five years ago:
LOT's second Dreamliner over Jeziorki

This time six years ago:
New Year's coal train 

This time nine years ago:
Welcome to 2009!

This time ten years ago:
Happy 2008!

Self-discipline, habits and growth

Lent 2017, Day 6

One can flop through life following the path of least resistance, doing only what's required. But the purpose of life is to fulfil one's potential, and that requires self-discipline. This, sadly, is not something I understood or appreciated until I was in my late 20s. And today, several months away from my 60th birthday, I realise I could have pushed myself a lot harder to make the most of the cards that I was dealt by nature and nurture.

But life is not about striving for perfection. One will never attain perfection by anyone's measure; aiming for it only brings about disappointment after disappointment. Rather, life is about continuous improvement, incremental change that can, over time, lead to significant improvements in outcomes. Across any field of human endeavour, and starting at any age. It's Never Too Late To Mend!

Introducing good habits and weeding out bad ones, incrementally. And not giving up.

Biggest bad habit: Procrastination. Putting things off - the things you have to do.

[There. At this stage, I know I've been putting off my morning exercise, so I just took a break and did 31 push-ups. A record for this year. I re-started on 1 January with just ten; twenty push-ups is what the US Army expected of its soldiers in WW2 whilst airborne units expected 30 of their paratroopers. Just cracked it!]

Procrastination gets us all, we give into it, some of us are better than others, but for nearly all human beings, the struggle against procrastination is a lifelong battle.*

Obsessive behaviour can be turned into a tool for implementing good habits. It's been three years, two months and five days since I started logging my fitness and diet every day in a spreadsheet. Friends and family say that this is nerdish, but like my father, I like filling in spreadsheets and looking at the data making a good trend. More walking, more exercises, less alcohol, more fresh fruit and veg. Some self-disciplined people can achieve much without having to use this prop - but for me, it helps.

If there's one arch procrastination thing out there for me, it's Twitter. Times are so infuriatingly interesting! I wake up in the morning and reach for Twitter just to see what that Trump person has done overnight, the Russian war effort in Ukraine, or any Brexit latest. I need to be up-to-date with news, analysis and opinion and Twitter is good for this - but it's a real devourer of time. It's difficult to discipline oneself on Twitter, because you feel that the next significant Tweet will either appear at the bottom or at the top of your Twitter feed. Bad habit.

Good habits need working on, and IT helps. Since the New Year, I've been using Todoist to keep track of all the things I need to do in the working day. Very useful. And from America, home of self-improvement, I'm getting on Medium.com every few days or so some useful articles about Human Growth and Good Habits, some of which are practical and worthy of consideration.

Observing Lent, at first as nothing more than a 46-day period of self-denial, but building up year by year as a time of self-reflection about body, mind and spirit. Making each Lent more significant as a learning and growth time than the year before. Self-denial is but the first stage. The Will Not To Do Something is easier to exercise than the Will To Do Something Hard. I could not have done 31 push-ups just now had I not done 29 push-ups yesterday. And 10 push-ups on 1 January.

Let's all agree that we'll never reach perfection. But we can make today better than yesterday - but that improvement should be remembered and celebrated, even if it's only numbers on a spreadsheet.

*Read this piece about procrastination - it's long, but one of the best, and most humanly written articles about our shared human weakness I've ever read.

This time three years ago:
Putin - tactical genius, strategic failure
[I had - the West had - evidently underestimated the man.]

This time four years ago:
Socialist Realist architecture in late winter sun

This time six years ago:
The Cripple and the Storyteller - part II

This time seven years ago:
The station with no name
[update: W-wa Dawidy station got its sign last autumn]

This time eight years ago:
Lenten thoughts on motoring

This time nine years ago:
Flowers, spring - already

Procrastination: a euphemism for laziness?

Two articles have recently appeared in the English-language online media on the subject of procrastination. The one in the Economist's Schumpeter column is telling the world of business to slow down, take it easy; not to rush into ill-judged decisions. "Become obsessed with deadlines, and you're left with the intellectual equivalent of fast food". I wrote about this a few weeks ago. A riposte has appeared in the BBC's online News Magazine, which slams procrastination as a curse. "Chronic procrastinators, complicate their lives, and probably shorten them, with their incessant delaying and task avoidance... [They] are less wealthy, less healthy and less happy than those who don't delay."

So who's right? Of course, both extremes (unthinkingly rushing into things or delaying they indefinitely) are recipes for disaster. Finding the happy medium between the two requires getting the balance right, using a blend of thought and instinct. As the Economist article says, there are things that cannot be put off at all, such as paying credit card bills.

The BBC's article was followed up by a huge treasure-trove of personal anecdotes relating to extreme procrastination. Things put off for decades (my favourite was about the pregnant woman who asked her husband to put up some shelves. The shelves were eventually put up - by the couple's 16 year-old son).

Learning that Procrastinators-Anonymous.org has been set up has forced me to dig deeper into the nature of task-avoidance. Could a lazy person could have done something like this? Resolving to do something, but doing it much later than initially planned, is less bad than not resolving to do something in the first place. "Less... bad"? Yes, indeed. I'm placing a moral dimension on this. As well as putting off starting something, people often have problems with finishing something they've started. (I must say this is more of a problem for me than procrastination in its basic form.) So - is procrastination synonymous with laziness, or just one aspect of it?

Key to the question is the issue of human will. We learn from Prof. Joseph Ferrari of DePaul University Chicago, author of Still Procrastinating? The No Regrets Guide to Getting It Done, that 20% of the population of the world are chronic procrastinators. Whether it's 15% or 25% is not the issue, nor how you define 'chronic'. The point is that many people have a problem in this department. And yes, it holds them back in life, it generates self-loathing or else resentment and envy towards those better motivated and better organised than them.

After Poland's economic and social transformation, some people threw themselves with a frenzy into the market place, set up small businesses, worked all the hours of the day - and slowly, systematically, found they could afford a better, more comfortable life than their less motivated and less hard-working neighbours. Who soon came to resent their new-found wealth.

I still return to my old question - is human will and motivation something we are born with, or taught? If the will is strong enough, it can overcome obstacles - poor social skills, low levels of assertiveness or even intelligence. Strong will, self-discipline, good organisation - nature or nurture?

This time three years ago:
Remembering the outbreak of WWII

The balance between action and procrastination

This week's Economist carries a most significant article - about finding the balance between a) rushing and b) taking it easy. The article comes to the (unsurprising) conclusion that neither extreme is good. Unsurprising?

Maybe not to the testosterone-charged get-it-done-quickly merchants that are responsible for leading the world into economic crisis ("we want higher turnover, higher profits and we want them now"). These alpha males (and males they usually are) are driving their teams ever onwards and upwards - often without thinking where to.

And maybe not to life's whingers, who think that the world is unjust, because their slothful existence has failed to provide them with all the baubles that advertising has led them to believe they are entitled to.

In my blog posts, I've been regularly castigating Poland's public sector for sloth, indecisiveness and lack of motivation - indeed, this is one end of the spectrum that must receive regular castigation. The other end, those bankers and managers, taking risks with (other people's) money also needs to be kept in check.

Finding the optimal way forward is always about balance. Not too quick, not too slow. Not too high, not too low. My mother was fond of telling my brother and me the story of Icarus and Daedalus - "Daedalus interea, Creten longumque perosus..." she would recite, the story of how Daedalus instructed his son to fly away from their Cretan prison with wings he'd fashioned from wax and birds' feathers... "I warn you, Icarus, to fly in a middle course, lest, if you go too low, the water may weight your wings; if you go too high, the fire may burn them. Fly between the two."

Finding the optimal course between two extremes is the key to a successful life. Greed and sloth are two poles towards which modern man has skewed too close in recent years. Greedy men have exploited the lazy - this is mere biology. As sentient human beings, we can determine our course, we must work together towards mutual progress.

This time last year:
The verb 'to fuss' in Polish?

This time four years ago:
Plans for Mysiadło and Nowa Iwiczna

Setting the sliders VII: Patience and impatience

"Patience is a virtue, patience is a grace..." the old saying went. Impatience - I see it every day. The impatience of the Alpha males that drive our economies, impatient for short-term profits, willing to take risks, to shatter other people's lives, because they want to hit those goals in this quarter rather than next year. Greed and impatience go hand in glove. The impatience of drivers similarly taking risks with their own lives and those of others because they're in a hurry to get to their destination.

The impatience of the young is balance by the patience that comes with maturity, ironic that; one has more time when one has less time left. Older people can more accurately attribute the correct time horizons to things that need to be done. Younger people have a biological inability to think long-term. "We want the world and we want it... NOW!" bellowed Jim Morrison in The Doors' When The Music's Over. How right that sentiment felt when I first heard those words many decades ago. How foolish they sound now.

Yet patience can often be a mask for inaction. Procrastination. Putting off until tomorrow what you can do today. Is patience a euphemism for fatalism? "Mañana, mañana" never gets you anywhere. But is there something to be said for letting nature take its own course?

Patience - waiting for something rather than striving for immediate gratification - has its rewards when its considered; when awareness is applied to a situation, when options are thought through. Simply waiting in inactivity is not enough.

So where to put that slider - well, I for one would put it just slightly more towards 'patience' than 'impatience'; I wonder whether this is one that would be slid progressively towards the left as one gets older?

"We have all the time in the world," sang Louis Armstrong; two years later he was dead. Yet Hal David's lyrics, John Barry's music would not have sounded convincing sung by a younger vocalist.

This time last year:
Commuters' staging post

This time three years ago:
Return of the migrating geese