Tag: success

Procrastinating, Corruption, Meritocracy and Showering In The Rain

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

Yesterday I had a little ramble about nothing at all and tonight may just evolve into similar. There are times when I can’t think of anything and they turn into some of my favourite pieces and other times when well, they don’t. I contemplated procrastinating a little more but it’s already after nine o’clock at night and this thing can’t be allowed to drag itself out too late. That and I had a quick moment of trying to be present and realising life is about one task at a time. I think I had been watching something random or a few random things which involved beautiful people or successful people and realised they probably don’t procrastinate. Or maybe they do they’re just really good at what they do in between. One day at a time though and one step at a time. We won’t achieve these anxiety inducing dreams any other way.

Politics is always an easy one to bring up, which I’ve said already I imagine. It appears a few MPs and The Good Law Project have decided to take legal action on the Government over their awarding of contracts during the Covid-19 crisis. Anyone who simply watches the mainstream media news cycle will be completely unaware of this but it turns out they’ve been spaffing a lot of tax payers money up against the wall awarding contracts to their mates, or companies with links to their mates. Quite often these companies have little expertise in the area they get the contract and in most cases they’ve completely messed up whatever it was they were supposed to be doing. For an obvious example think of the test and trace app which in itself would result in people going to jail if we didn’t live in such a corrupt society.

Talking of meritocracy I was listen to a podcast tonight called The Partially Examined Life which I’ve only recently discovered and haven’t listened to enough to give too much of an opinion. It was their discussion on The Graduate which led me to watch it the other day. I never got through the whole podcast tonight as I finished cooking my dinner and preferred to watch an episode of something crap instead but they were discussing and interviewing the author of On The Tyranny Of Merit: What’s Become Of The Common Good – Micheal Sandel. It was reasonably interesting but I had heard some of the ideas before; namely that it can result in those at the top lacking empathy as they believe they have achieved what they achieve purely through their own ability which is rarely ever the case and that it can lead to a disconnection between them and those deemed unsuccessful. It is idealistic in that it is not cohesive with modern society. He discussed about in relation to our polarised politics, or more precisely America’s but it relates to the Brits too. Basically as the title suggests he’s totally against it. I missed bits as I was distracted by cooking and also didn’t listen to it all but as I said it’s not the first time I’ve heard this and it’s an idea I have sympathy for.

Where I am in Greece is currently enduring what is apparently day one of five days worth of storms. I just had a rain shower which is always a pleasure and not one I get to experience enough. I remember dancing around in monsoon rains in India, the locals thought I was completely mad. I’m right in front of the yard security cameras with the boat so decided against taking my undies off although I doubt anyone would ever be watching. I was a little concerned about the lightning tonight as it only seems to be a couple of miles away but I’m banking on all the boat masts getting it before me. Just in case I’m unlucky though it’s also a good reason to keep the undies on, it seems to be a slightly more dignified way to go out for some reason. Isn’t human conditioning an interesting barrels of intricacies.

The AWOL Mind

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

If we were using weather to describe mood, this last week would have just about summed it up perfectly. As the storms arrived I went down a rabbit hole. I’m not one for describing how I feel online. Generally exposing myself like that is not always something that comes easily to me and in truth there are times I pour scorn on people who share their mood in social media posts. I should probably stop being so unfair on people crying out for help in such moments of desperation, it likely does nothing more than expose my own ignorance of mental health issues.

This has been an intense year. That is probably an understatement. In a way I am happy about how it has turned out, I took advantage of the new version of existence that came along. There are some things I would have liked to have done more of such as learning how to code but with all the work and the need to rest and procrastinate, I just ran out of time. Maybe less procrastination, or more efficiency with it. Can you efficiently procrastinate?

I always knew I would move on from here and I am fine with that because I have moved on from many places, I never saw this stop as a final one and it has already been about six months longer than had been planned. With lockdown any need to achieve or succeed, or create something or make money or do something or whatever self-induced pressures I put on myself evaporated. I had no choice but to stay in one spot and work with what I had. with options come pressures. I loved it and in a way I carried this on. However as it came time to wrap up this chapter I realised I had to step back out into this world and all the old fears and irrationalities, and ultimately all the stupid bullshit returned. For nearly two months now I have been working everyday on the pizzas and delivering bread three sometimes four mornings a week. You don’t sleep much in these circumstances and this simply exacerbates things. Throw in the fact me and my friend have a rather tempestuous relationship, it all seemed to come to a head this week.

If I were to say I lost my mind I would not be exagerating. I started to believe everyone was working against me, that they were trying to sabotage me. At one point one of the guys came down from the bakery to pick up some oven gloves from the cafe as they had run out up there. I wasn’t about and he took the best two pairs. In my mind he did this because it was all part of pushing me out. Looking back now it is almost comical but in that moment it was entirely serious. My body was tensing up, my neck still hurts and I was getting headaches. I have worked many seasonal jobs in the past which have been everyday for extended periods but they’ve rarely involved the mental stress of running things or maintaining personal relationships within the whole daily operation. It’s safe to say I now know my limits.

It’s also safe to say now the winds only signify change and the movement into something new. My friend suggested we stop the pizzas on Monday instead of continuing for two more weeks as originally planned. At first I took it in the same stride of paranoid lunacy I had previously been experiencing and planned on having it out with him when I next saw him. In the end with that being about two days later it was just a chat between two people who had been mates since they were eight years old. In that time I had already started to calm down but he had seen how much I needed a rest and he was right to suggest we stop. I’m grateful for him pulling me out of the rabbit hole because I doubt I would have been able to do it on my own without doing something overly dramatic and ridiculous.

Life is full of pressures. Some pushed upon us but many entirely of our own making. When we look in from the outside we can rationally understand were things need to change. If it is ourselves though, when it’s our own minds which seem to have gone AWOL being able to make sense of things can almost be an impossible act. It is time mentally for some recuperation. With the awakening of my senses this is already underway. The pressures are off and I can breath again. We rest, we recover, we take a step followed by another and we get on with it. We get on with what comes next. Something always comes next, how you experience it is up to you.

Don’t Taste The Wasp Twice

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

We as a species have an inbuilt response to new things, we fear them. There is a practical reason for that and it is rational; new is unknown and unknown could mean danger. As a species we have managed to survive, adapt and evolve to the point we’re at in our evolutionary cycle. I don’t doubt one reason for our success so far has been down to instinctively following that practical approach mentioned above. Is it instinctive though? When we are young children we try to touch or eat anything new, it appears we sense next to no danger in anything, yet as adults we have become cautious if not neurotically fearful. That would suggest we are taught to fear new and unknown things but then puppies and adult dogs mirror human growth fear patterns too. Perhaps puppies learn new can mean danger because sometimes they experience the pain of discovering new things, like the taste of a wasp, or a dogs parenting is just not something obvious to my untrained eyes. Can we then take that further and use it to explain why we are so weary of new sources of information, or even new information that may contradict our previously held beliefs.

I suppose it is probably quite a straightforward idea, we distrust new sources because they are unknown and we haven’t built up a relationship of trust with them. We reject new information because our current beliefs are known to us and with them we have so far survived to this point in life. With them we have safety and life, potentially this unknown new information may lead to danger and the taking away of either our safety or in the extreme our life. There is also the issue of narrative to take into consideration, what doesn’t fit our narrative we are likely to dismiss but I’ll not go down that avenue this time.

I was sent a link to a video on YouTube by a friend who has a differing set of ideals and beliefs about how best we should approach the world than I do. I rarely bother engaging him in discussion anymore because neither of us come close to seeing the others perspective and I always end it feeling exhausted and frustrated that I’ve wasted an evening arguing with a brick wall. When I received this video I assumed immediately it would relate to one of his points previously made, which it did, and in my mind I had already rejected it before even contemplating watching it. My initial response was to see it was a YouTube video and dismiss it as worthless. There are many useful videos on YouTube and I have taught myself how to do all sorts of things through them, but videos of a political or social nature are quite often just a pile of tosh. I had already rejected the point because of the source platform. I decided to watch it a little, not the full one hour because I have better things to do, and did some research on the speaker and his organisation. Seemingly they are of a different persuasion to me but I still watched and tried to listen to the message. After ten disagreeable minutes I gave up because I found him frustrating, it appears you can’t argue with a pre-recorded person. I do understand why angry people comment now but I still refuse to get involved in that game. Ultimately my point is that I like to think I gave the speaker the opportunity and I listened with a clear mind but it’s not easy when you already think the platform the information is on and the source of the information are unreliable and bullshit.

Absorbing new information is clearly an incredibly challenging task. We struggle to absorb anything that is new because it is unknown and potentially dangerous, and we struggle to accept anything contradictory to our present set of beliefs as it challenges what has so far kept us safe. The YouTube example above is an easy one to dismiss because the contents and the platform are like the Daily Star of video journalism but sometimes we get contradictory information from credible sources and this can be hard to accept and equally dismiss.

The more I delve into these things the more I’m starting to realise just how hard, if not impossible, it is being some kind of discerning, moral and decent person. Here I am, just like yesterday back to the fallible human. Is failure what makes us human, or perhaps the ability to recognise and improve on our past failures. It is okay to be fallible. It is unavoidable clearly, but is it only acceptable if and when we try and avoid repeat failure. Being conscious of our previous failures, accepting that they are inevitable and pushing on in the search of perfection, or at the very least an acceptable success. Don’t try and taste the wasp twice, it’s all so simple now, if only I had realised that earlier.