Life’s likes and fights

As I gallop from womb to tomb there is stuff that I like and other stuff that I fight against - and the pattern changes through time. It will be more or less the same for other people but with different  details.

This morning I happened to visit George Monbiot’s website (he has a degree in Zoology!) and I was impressed with the way he prepared his ‘About George’ page (see http://www.monbiot.com/about/). So I have adapted his technique to be better suited to my present situation. Amongst other things I do not include simple items like (a) shopping, cooking and eating and (b) managing the self catering accommodation in my spare cottage.

The following lists deal with ‘things I like doing’ and with ‘things I try to fight’. The lists were originally quite short but new ideas popped up in the attention centre while I did other things. It is still not complete but I found it to be a useful activity in terms of the ancient advice to ‘know yourself’ – at least in the way things stand at present. You might like to try making your own list.

Here are some of the things I like doing:

• being: sitting quietly doing nothing;
• mindfulness meditation; especially with the Sangha;
• living in renunciant retreat;
• being in my unkempt, walled garden;
• appreciating light, warmth, and white clouds passing through a blue sky;
• keeping up with cutting edge thinking – especially about neurology, evolutionary psychology, and linguistics;
• noting how my world view changes in light of the courtship between eastern and western modes of thinking and feeling; the psychology of perception;
• letting the unconscious churn out blog posts; the muse in flow;
• writing about the more interesting and potentially universal thoughts and feelings that pass through the mindbrain - and making them available globally through the internet;
• using plain language techniques when writing;
• interacting socially with various groups – the Northern Lights Sangha, the Keith Parkinson’s Support Group; Portsoy Past and Present Community Group;
• interacting socially with various good friends – mainly from a distance;
• taking and editing photographs;
• making music (but this is no longer so easy because of the Parkinson’s);
• using the internet in support of most of the other things;

Here are some of the things I try to fight:

• Elegant power and its inequitable, and environmentally unfriendly hegemony
• Big government and small minds
• Parochial xenophobia and unthinking consumerism
• Wasting time – being on automatic pilot
• Waves of workaholism and procrastination
• Debilitation due to Parkinson’s Disease