From 2020 to 2021

The first of January 2021 dawns bright. A strip of pink and blue appears between the horizon and a receding layer of grey cloud. The snow and ice of the last few days has for the moment withdrawn to edges and shadows. Bright green blades of grass cluster around muddy puddles and stand tall amid seeping brown piles of rotting leaves. The air is alive with tiny stinging insects. There is no wind but the bright sky soon gives way to a creeping, gloomy grey cover. This is 2021 – uncertain, tentative, breath-holdingly calm.

Often at the turn of the year I write a few words from my personal reflections on what has past. This time, too much has already been said by many; examined, pondered over, speculated, blamed. The year has been exceptional and exceptionally bleak. Instead I am going to project some hopes for the years to come.

The world will be a kinder place.

We will come to know moments of contact as moments to treasure.

Fleeting nods and smiles will be remembered and replayed in our memories for their warmth and the something special that was shared.

We will value the kindnesses of strangers as kindred acts, and affirmation that we are human.

We will have time for our loved ones.

We might come to welcome shorter working hours and the promise of digital work may see dispersed families and fractured communities moving closer together.

We might see local communities rebuilding around nature for which we will make space, and plan more space for other species. City gardens and allotments will abound.

We will learn to treasure other creatures as sentient beings. We will eat less meat. We may come to eat no meat.

Work will involve fewer hours, so more can work and earn a living. Caring, nurturing, educating and nourishing will become key words in our mission statements. Our goal – to develop the spirit of humanity.

We will come to realise that if our roles are custodians of this planet, they are to preserve and support its wonderful diversity for the benefit of all of its creatures.

Contribution will replace competition as the dominant logic, and giving and sharing replace winning, having, owning in our vocabularies.

In this kinder world league tables will not exist but striving for excellence prevail. Excellence as a habit will be understood and respected as a nurturing process to allow all to reach their potential for the benefit of all.

Above all, I hope there will be time to learn, and time to learn why we learn and time to be as well as time to do.

Daydreaming my way, part two

The funny thing about daydreaming is that when you have time to do it, to really let go and lose yourself in some magical forest of discovery, somehow the paths into the forest lead to dead-ends. It is when daydreaming diverts from something that really must be done that the paths open to a mystical tour and you never know where you will end up. Those commas in the text you are trying so hard to edit become tadpoles swimming in the bucket that you once put them in after fishing them from a canal. The canal becomes a lake, there are boats on it. There are boats too off the Maltese islands where the sun is shining and you are lying on a deck, glass of champagne in your hand. Bubbles rise in the glass and you remember the Bermuda triangle where ships sink because of bubbles rising in the water and lots of tiny bubbles decrease buoyancy. But that doesn’t explain planes falling out of the sky or does it? So you just have to look up wiki and on the way you find an article on the universe and download some pictures from the Hubble because they are so beautiful and relaxing, and evocative of something but what? Hey this one reminds you of jellyfish, stained glass colours in indigo oceans and what was that tune about indigo skies, and suddenly it is lunchtime and where has the morning gone?

Daydreaming is about your inner stream of consciousness where your mind of its own accord wanders from thought to thought, memory to memory making connections and associations that allow us to see things in novel ways. Daydreaming underpins creativity but is not in itself productive. Creative people are those who are able to harness their daydreaming, and steer it towards a tangible outcome, or snatch ideas in passing like forest fruits from the meandering pathways of fertile imagination. Creative people follow roaming thoughts to see where they lead but creativity comes not so much by accident as by design. Invention results from creative and experimental thinking. If rising bubbles sink ships, what happens in the air that sinks planes? If I change the character in my story from a girl to a boy would he think differently? Will my house be warmer if I grow a garden on my roof? How will smoked fish taste if I eat it with my fruit salad (the canteen had run out of plates, and yes it was delicious). Was salty caramel a lucky accident, and did that blogger who enjoyed cheese sauce on his apple pie discover it by design or error?

The difference between daydreaming your way passively through life and being productively creative is knowing when to let your thoughts wander, and when to switch off the dreaming channel and focus on the task at hand. Creative people are dreamers, true, but creative people are also task oriented, motivated to get things done and see the results of their creativity. Creative people are able to balance their dreaming with focused activity, harness ideas from their dreams and make something of them. I wonder why these lessons are so hard to learn. There I go again, off at another tangent.

This month has not been very dreamy for me as you can probably see from the lack of new posts. This has been a month of focused, task oriented activity. Reporting, marking, processing, form-filling, and solving everyone else’s problems. Daydreaming does not pay the mortgage. Not Yet.

Daydreaming part one

I have always been a dreamer. Mind like a butterfly my mother used to say. Flitting from one thing to another. Asking seemingly random questions – in the midst of arithmetic – why do tadpoles become frogs? Why did I ask at that precise point? Perhaps because the commas between the integers looked like tadpoles, and the next lesson, my favourite, would be about nature.

And so I have spent my life thinking about the next thing, or the last thing, or things that connect with other things but not about this thing that I should be concentrating on at this moment in time. My teacher was not happy with the daydreaming. She is depressed, she wrote on my report one year. So everyone tried to make me focus, keep my mind on the task, keep eating until my dinner was finished, keep on with the homework. Eventually and thankfully they gave up. Daydreaming makes life so much more colourful, but I have always tried to switch it off when I find myself squandering away my time, or forget what it is I am supposed to be doing, or what our conversation is about.

It was during a guilty moment, when I was not doing what I was supposed to be doing, that Scott Barry Kaufman’s (2011) article snared me and pulled me back into focus. His research found that daydreamers are more creative, and able to keep nightdreaming running while at the same time concentrating [of a fashion] on various tasks. People with this ability are less able to resist distraction, but are able to keep their internal stream of consciousness (dreaming state) running whilst doing relatively complex things. This enables them to make connections between objects, processes, thoughts and tasks that would not be possible if the dreaming state was completely switched off. Creativity therefore seems to rely on the brain’s internal dialogue making connections between normally unrelated things in novel and interesting ways. So the next time you catch me daydreaming, please don’t distract me, I am mentally composing my next masterpiece. If only it could find its way onto a page.

2014 Personal Reflections

To be absolutely frank, 2014 is a year that I will be glad to put behind me. It was not without its good points, some of which were wonderful. There were two weddings in the family, and it was truly lovely to be able to share the beautiful and happy photographs of those family events as they unfolded over the days before and after the ceremonies, for that, social media plays an enormous role in bringing family together when miles or circumstances otherwise keep us apart. My cousins, the brides, were radiant, their grooms handsome and the photographs so lovely that it almost felt as though we were there together. The joy of those occasions though was sadly overshadowed by the unexpected death of my dear auntie (grannie, mum, great-auntie, wife, sister and friend) to all of us who crowded into the flower-filled crematorium early in the summer. We promised to her that our goodbyes would be a celebration of her life and celebrate we did, for she lived life to the full and enjoyed every minute. It brought us all together but reminded us too of how fragile life is, and how unexpectedly it can come to an end. We will miss her. This year for other reasons was one in which I decided to step off the treadmill or at least slow it down a bit. Apart from a lovely family holiday in beautiful Kefalonia in May, a quick business trip to Bratislava in June, and a visit to our daughter in London, I travelled only between home and work and stopped trying to deal with the 20-30 e-mails that arrive in my inbox every hour. When I can find a way to throw out the feeling of guilt with the junk mail, things will really be on the up. A highlight of the year was a school reunion. After 40 years one of our group of friends arranged for us to get together and surprisingly we did recognise each other after the first smiles broke through the wrinkles and the years fell away. Why did we not do it sooner? The work year was busy of course in an uninspiring, repetitive, mindless kind of way but lightened by a liberal sprinkling of social occasions, food, drink, music and excellent craic with family, friends and colleagues. My daughter’s thoughtful Christmas present of last year triggered an attempted self-reconstruction as a new kind of writer. Tired of hearing me say that I had always wanted to write fiction, she bought me a write-your-first-novel template from Nanowrimo. Inspired, I created several characters between Christmas and the start of 2014 , wrote a number of short scenes but realised that writing a novel in my “spare” time would need more than cutting down on my foreign travel. So I signed up for a creative writing class focussing on the short story instead, deleted the half dozen cringingly bad posts I’d put on this blog since 2011 and started again with some fiction. To all of my friends and family out there who have had my creative writing efforts pushed in-your-face over the last 3 months, I apologise. I hope you may have enjoyed some of it and I promise I will be more subtle in future. I may also experiment with material that is less safe, less pc, and more ballsy, gritty or dark. Raunchy might come later. The writing class is great fun, I’ve met lots of super-creative and talented people and am looking forward to next term. My husband has also been following a course of self-reconstruction, took his motor-bike test and arrived home with a brand-new, clean and shiny set of wheels. Mid-life crisis? No, he is trying to avoid parking charges by losing two wheels, or that’s his creative story! Well 2015 has arrived, let it bring what it will. Happy New Year everyone, let’s hope that the world will become a more peaceful and happier place.