Tag: summer

A Night Ramble

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

Well the summer is coming to an end and I fancy a little ramble in nature somewhere. I have been trying to think of something to write tonight, nothing has taken my fancy to be horrified by in the news. I was horrified by someone I know being morally outraged on his Facebook wall by someone else with an admittedly unsavoury opinion leaving his ideas in the comments section of a post. The moral irony was missed as he screen shot the comment, told everyone to share it and revealed he had already spoken to this bad mans employers. These are the moments you realise the baying mob should stop believing in their own hype. We are going to finish the pizzas at the end of this bank holiday weekend. The kids go back to school and the tourists disappear from the village. I’ll have a couple of weeks to sort some things out and rest. I’ve already booked my tickets to go to Greece in the middle of September. Don’t worry you’ll hear all about it when it’s happening.

I wonder what it’s going to be like going abroad again. I mentioned in an early post back in November or December I think about how many flights I took last year. Spain a few times, Ireland, Sweden, Greece, Sardinia – actually maybe not Greece, I can’t remember – but my carbon footprint must have been horrendous. The amount of meat I would have to stop eating just to bring balance. I’m not quite sure that’s how it works though. I’ve made up for it this year. Zero flights so far and I’ve barely left the village. Covid has been good for my carbon karma. I’ll make up for it next year don’t you worry. It is good to take a break though, change some habits. I mentioned previously how I have been looking back, not nostalgically but almost remembering and experiencing certain elements once more. It brought a contentment and allowed a certain re-evaluation of certain ideas I had. Who I am. Such a cliche. In many ways this year has not always been easy but it has been incredibly beneficial. I doubt I’m alone in thinking this and I doubt I’m alone in thinking I am a different person now to pre-lockdown me. Total cliche. The talk is of the world and society being different permanently but the idea that individual people may have taken the time to understand themselves a little more without the pressures of normality. What a wonderful experience all round. Time with the family. Time with yourself.

But now that is all in the past apparently. A friend of the unbelieving nature suggested a new Europe-wide lockdown has been planned for the 18th of September and he used a random article in a random newspaper to prove it. I suspect that date may pass without incidence. It doesn’t mean winter won’t bring a spike though but can you imagine going through all that again in a miserable British winter. Fuck that. The British people are not mentally strong enough for that. And deary me I just remembered a no-deal Brexit will be happening then too. That’s probably a good time to stop this little ramble. It’s not quite nature but it’s the best I can get this late in the day. There’s no need to even go anywhere near that little rabbit hole of a shit show. Good night.

Life’s Pot Of Gold

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

My eye hurts and I’ve felt a little sore the last two days. I think I need a holiday. Summer is drawing to a close, the numbers of visitors to this little village are ever so slightly decreasing and it feels like a period of time is drawing to a close. With Autumn comes the shedding of leaves as we move into a season of rest and recovery. The hibernation is upon us and with it like it’s time to step back out into the world. It is both daunting and exciting to make another change in life when you have been within one version of existence for so long. I was supposed to only be in this village for two months and that was last October. I won’t be giving my friends the satisfaction of having stayed for a full year but at eleven months it’s not exactly been a fly by visit. I understand more now and have gained an appreciation for a life in one place which I didn’t have before, as well as life already lived strangely enough. Despite being desperate for a holiday and being able to see something new I now know I am capable of returning to a state of existence previously beyond me. Will I miss it when I’m move one. Probably actually yes. But not this exact version.

When in a few years from now the stories of peoples time in lockdown are all out I look forward to reading about them. Of course there will be people who just drank beer, had BBQ’s and got bored but there will be as many who learnt new things and ways of being. When I speak to people here invariably they all say the same thing that they hated lockdown after a while and were just desperate to get back to work. Maybe I have been asking the wrong people but it is also one of the reason’s I know I can’t stay here. I love it very much but I need more, I need to be surrounded by people who want more. Maybe more is unfair because I’m probably just repeating previous mistakes in my understanding and valuing others, I just want different. Something else, something other than this version of existence. The constant search through the permanent existential crisis of life. But nothing is permanent, not even crisis and certainly not ones involving purpose and worth. Yet we continue struggling through them, determined to find an elusive answer we’ve promised ourselves exists. Was the pot of gold not buried below the very tree he was sitting under as he first devised how best to leave in search of prosperity. Despite everything; knowing, understanding and being still remain divided. Can they ever come together?

Yet it is more positive than it sounds. If anything has become obvious from recent events it’s that in life you just keep going. We find joy and happiness in the unexpected but we must be open to seeing and embracing these unexpected. To understand that everyone has a pot of gold out there somewhere but that they themselves already have both the map and the spade is key. First though we must stop trying to use others maps and others tools. With this all becomes exciting once more. It actually is possible. It’s always been possible. It’s just down to us to make it probable.

Ten Day Challenge

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

My last Ten Day Challenge involved no news at all for, well, ten days. I’ve decided to do another one. If truth could be told I put the name of this in italics with capitals because I imagine it must be a thing and if I searched online I would find all kind of Ten Day Challenges. I won’t look though because if I do and I find loads of people do these kind of things then instinctively I won’t want to do any ever again. I may even wish I hadn’t confessed to the world, or at least the three people who read this, that I partake in such things. I remember months ago at the beginning of lockdown I wrote a piece on running the 5K Challenge. I can’t say for sure I hadn’t heard about it beforehand and allowed it to slip from my conscious mind, but a week after writing about my ordeals running five kilometres, and after giving it the name 5K Challenge, everyone started talking about their times in the 5K Challenge. Either I’m a trend setter and an influencer, or most likely I’ve picked up the name from somewhere and not realised it. Either way when I discovered it was a thing I wished I hadn’t been so uncool, written about it and publicly acknowledged my participation in something. Next I’ll be pouring ice buckets over my head. So either I ignore the possibility that the world is already familiar with a multitude of Ten Day Challenges, that Instagram probably already did it to death years ago, that I’m actually far less cool than I want to be or I just remain in a ignorant bubble.

All that and I haven’t even told you what I’m doing. The longest and least interesting waffle of a build-up in history. Drum roll please…in an entirely original and never done before way, let’s forget Dry January or Sober October, I’m going to give up alcohol for the next ten days. It’s not as if I’ve become an alcoholic but at the beginning of lockdown I saw so many people embracing the beautiful weather and buying a lot of alcohol. I felt that even though I was working still I shouldn’t miss out on the pleasure of drinking at home. As if I too was on holiday, I joined the fun. Warm weather makes me want to drink, when I’m abroad I drink more during the day and over these last few months the weather in this usually cold and miserable country has inspired an increase in my alcohol consumption. It’s been a while, let’s be honest probably long before lockdown, that I went ten days without a drink but I’m about to finish day two of ten. Today was such a lovely warm and sunny day, it would have been perfect to quench my thirst with a nice cold beer but I stood firm, allowing only pure unrefined water to touch my lips. What a hero yet again. I’m glad I’m the only one ever to have managed such an achievement.

Do We Plan Positively?

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

There is something incredibly satisfying about making plans. I have never fully worked it out but I suspect like I mentioned a couple of days ago it is all about taking ourselves out of the present and into some dream fantasy land. Perhaps this could be a slight continuation of the other piece although I’m lazy to reread it to check, but I’m sure it mentioned not being in the present and I remember something about happiness just being around the corner. In a way this then is exactly a continuation piece because plans are nothing more than imagining a future event we would like to happen which surely, unless there is a specific reason, is going to be the best possible version that could happen. When we plan do we imagine ourselves happy, I would have always thought everyone does but then I know from conversations or more precisely; slightly argumentative debates, that I misunderstand depression for example. When people suffer from depression, or specific types of depression, do they imagine a future event happening with either a negative outcome or them being unhappy in that future moment. If so there must be no escape.

For me I have always imagined myself positively, or at least I assume I have. Do I imagine I’m imagining myself positively but relatively I’m actually imagining neutrally. Relative to what though. What if I am just imagining myself neutrally and that is what I base every present moment against, does that make my life nothing more than neutral. What is the base level, the fantasy or the present reality as our skewered eyes view it. There are no answers for that right now but I am planning on observing my own thoughts and how I place them on a scale of success. What is the outcome of that, am I imagining myself succeeding in these observations or am I left confused and clueless at the end. If I’m honest I imagine myself somewhere around seventy percent successful, which is a little miserable considering it’s my own fantasy, although probably realistic. The pragmatism of old age.

Is that better though. To have a plan for some future event which you are in your mind being realistic about. Perhaps this is just something we work out through experience but then that also means I only aim for seventy percent success. Should I aim for one hundred percent and potentially be disappointed, or will that higher aim actually result in me getting eighty or even ninety percent success, not what I aimed for but higher than my so called ‘realistic’ but which is now looking like a defeatist target. And if the depressed person expects to fail but has a little success higher than they expected does that bring them positivity or do they just view that through the prism of depression. Does that prism create a failure in observations. In truth I do not know. And also in truth it appears I am going off tangent from my follow up about being present and making plans to loads of nonsense questions and getting confused about depression.

I was going to tell you all about my lovely plans for the summer and how they’re probably going to change because everyone is going to be in quarantine soon and all flights will be grounded. It was going to be on the futility of planning and it ends up being nothing more than escapism from the present but all I can do is leave you with what this was going to be and try and digest some of those confusing questions I asked myself. I can’t even remember what I was supposed to be observing now. Something about success rate and being realistic I think, well there’s no harm in dreaming.