Butterfly monkey

It is more a butterfly mind than a monkey one. The ICT has been having glitches and they have been jumping lightly from one focus of attention to another. I am working with two laptops in two rooms. I often arrive in room B and realise that I have forgotten why I left room A.

There is a list of lightly thought through things to do: some are grand others are trivial. I sometimes aim for the big stuff first and leave the trivial stuff to fill time when I need a break. When relaxed and at ease the situation can be like that. I can be comfy in my skin. But for about a week I have drifted to and fro in a haze of micro busy-ness.

I notice feelings of guilt for listening to the radio before17:00. I am aware of the difference between journalists and academics – the former cover many topics in a shallow way while the latter deal with grand topics in greater depth. Youtube has lots of lectures and debates lasting more than an hour while TED talks are less than 20 minutes. So there is the academic with his prize lecture being delivered many times; the journalist with a different story delivered to a deadline once a week and; the school teacher with her five lessons each day.

I am easily distracted when dealing with websites. This is mainly because I relied so heavily on MS FrontPage in my early web work where I developed a few oases of mastery in a vast desert of ignorance. FP was a user friendly means to an end. I stood in awe before the anonymous programmers for making it so incredibly easy for me to build websites.

But that was yesterday. If my old websites are to become archives they will have to be tweaked now and then to clean out the malware. I am ignorant about the nature of malware and of how to know it is there and how to get rid of it. The service providers (eg bizland) have such systems but they are expensive.

Aha – there are several stories coming to mind and they are not all about websites. Periodic back pain. Cabbage and chickpea soup. Slowness of typing. Some food in the cavity where my filling fell out. Made an appointment with the optician – will have to make one with the dentist. The old laptop is noisy.

This article demonstrates the need to edit the contents of the butterfly and monkey minds if there are to be meaningful and interesting utterances. But it is perhaps worthwhile to pay attention to the churn now and then because it is where ‘reality’ comes from. It is ‘good’ to be familiar with the workings of the mind given that all thoughts, feelings and moods are mind made and totally influenced by nature, nurture and serendipity – especially during your first 22 years on the planet.

Amen.