I is for INTERVALS

 Today I'm thinking about the concept of Interval training, where you run about and keep stopping to do small amounts of strength training. It's supposed to be super good, although as I know little and care less about the fitness industry I cannot say whether this is deserved.

Be that as it may, I have found the concept of intervals utterly invaluable in tackling any large and daunting task. E.G. studying law. Decluttering a house. Writing a novel. You set a timer of some kind for a short time - perhaps half an hour, or even less, and then you go like the clappers without looking at the clock. And, more importantly, without looking out the window, or Facebook, or the weather forecast, or really anything else unless the house is on fire or a baby is screaming.

I had great success with this when I was studying Law. In fact I really don't think I would have got through without it. I was failing Criminal Law when Robert Cilley very kindly explained about using the intervals for study. I was familiar with the concept from doing the Flylady system, but somehow I'd not expanded that to include other areas of life. And from that time, my law study took off. Oh, it was still masses of hard work, there's no getting around that. It certainly was a hobby of the 'are we having fun yet?' variety. But all the fear and doubt wemt away, and once I got my study method in place, there was a 'rinse and repeat' flavour to it. This is something I've found so often in life. Once you've devised a really good system for doing something, once you've road tested your system and adjusted it and worked out any kinks, it takes away a great deal of the more daunting aspects of things. You rely on the system, and providing there's nothing wrong with the system, and you practice it honestly, it doesn't let you down. Ever. Much of my life has been lived in the shelter of this idea.

This is me being admitted as a lawyer. Living proof of the efficacy of the interval method!

So, with writing. For the last few years I've struggled with productivity. I've written in this blog about the terrible events of 2021 that led to my total cessation of work for many months, and my slow road to recovery. Now, I'm finally getting back in the groove, and although there have been a few stumbles along the way, and a lot of supervening life events requiring more and more time to be taken off, things are finally moving. 

What enables me, a basically idle and frivolous person, to achieve this, you ask. Well, it's intervals. When I see the day stretching out before me, nine to four an impossible, uncrossable waste, like the Arctic Circle or that vile shopping mall in Doncaster, my nerve fails me and I just want to go back to bed, or stare at youtube for six hours. But if I've to work for half an hour, I can do that standing on my head, as it were. So I do that, and then I do something else, either for a few minutes or an hour or whatever, and then I go back to work for another session, and I rinse and repeat and by the end of the day, sometimes I find I've achieved a decent wordcount, and also done a number of other tasks that would otherwise have gone on being endlessly procrastinated. It's like magic - work less, get more done.

So for the next little while in my blog, I'll be going back to chronicling my working days using this method. It's a good tool, this; it keeps me honest if I have to tell how I spent my day. Wish me luck!

H IS FOR HOUSE.

We have a friend moving in with us today. Our house in town is a modest dwelling in the suburbs. Technically three bedrooms, but actually only two as I have converted the biggest one to an office. It was already pretty full, with me and my husband and our two large hounds and two cats. It might be a little cramped with the addition of another adult and his five hounds. And a house, of course, is finite. It's made of bricks and mortar. Or, if you're rich and posh, vast blocks of stone chiselled out by hand many centuries ago. But whatever the material, it's a foundation and walls and a roof, and it doesn't magically expand.

H, however, also stands for home, and a home is another thing entirely. A home is not bricks and mortar and roofing. A home is made of love, and care, and patience, and the infinite small accommodations of goodwill that humans make for each other. A home is a living thing, and like most living things, it is stretchy. 

With the chaos of Moving Day, and the fitting in of everything, I've been inspired to really get into my declutter, which had rather stalled, what with injury, and eye surgery, and so on. I have always in my mind's eye the memory of my grandparents' house. They had what they needed, and nothing extra. Shopping was not a recreational exercise for my grandmother. She bought the best she could afford, took extremely good care of it, and replaced it only when it had worn out. Her whole married life, she had the same china, the same silver, the same furniture. There was none of this modern 'doing up' of rooms, either. All of the rooms in her house remained as they had been set up when she first moved in And that house was the happiest, most peaceful place in my childhood. So that's my ideal, although the category of 'things one needs' seems to be rather larger these days, with the addition of so much technology. 

So I'm really looking forward to seeing my house get properly weeded out, and embracing that more disciplined lifestyle that brings with it so much peace and comfort. But I'm also looking forward to discovering what our family will become, with the new additions. Because, above all, a home is made up of the people in it, and all the myriad connexions between them. 

We're going to be just fine.

G is for Generosity

 Generosity. We don't hear a lot about it nowadays, except when being pestered by telemarketers pimping the latest in 'charity' scams. It's one of those old-fashioned virtues, like patience and temperance and fortitude, that don't quite fit with the modern world and it's me-centric culture.

There's far more to generosity, though, than giving out money to panhandlers, or buying lavish presents for one's friends. The other part of this underappreciated virtue, perhaps the greater part, is at once easier and more difficult, but far, far more subtle. It usually doesn't cost much in concrete terms, but can come at a great price in the intangible. I'm talking about generosity of spirit. For example: the ten minutes you take to think yourself into the other person's viewpoint in an argument. That's cheap in one sense - it costs no money at all. But in another way, it can be, as the poet put it, 'hard and bitter agony'. For to achieve this, we must let go of our conviction that we hold the only correct view. We must admit that the other person's view may also be completely valid. As valid as our own, and perhaps more so. The other person may be right. We may be wrong, or both of us may be right; one of the hardest preconceptions to give up is that belief that every question can have only one answer. A really good example of this is the dialogue between adherents of different religions. 

There's another kind of generosity, too, that's largely uncelebrated nowadays, when everyone is about showing off their fabulous lives on social media. It is the small, humble acts of service that go largely unnoticed and often unseen. And these can be the hardest ones of all. I am constantly challenged in this area, myself. It's one thing to open your home to a friend who's temporarily homeless, or to rescue stray animals. It's quite another thing to respond with the same gentle patience the sixth time your old, incontinent cat wets his bed as you did the first time that day. To just shut up when your husband did the laundry incorrectly. To listen to someone's story that she's told you a hundrred times, and pretend you haven't heard it before. These things, so small, seem to take an herculean effort.

This is where, I think, the power of habit can really work for us. Once aquired, habits of kindness and patience are a practically endless source of strength. They help us to rise above the baseness of nature, to become better versions of ourselves. This is the real purpose behind religious events such as Lent, and Rmaadan. They are training exercises, boot camps where kindness, self-control, and so on get muscled up. I've no data to support my theory, but I'd be willing to bet that the people who really put in a sincere effort for Lent are probably better people all the time than they would otherwise have been. Ramadan, too - it isn't just about fasting, but about everything. 

End of life care, for any species, challenges us to be our best selves.

F is for Festive

Now that it's all over, the presents unwrapped, the feasts eaten, and in some houses the Christmas tree already stripped, it seems appropriate to look back on the season we've just weathered, some joyfully and some not so much.

What is the nature of this festival we celebrate each year? Despite how secular our society has become, it is still a major driving force in the economy, with people, especially the poor, rushing like lemmings each year to immolate themselves on cliffs of debt. Of course it's the poor; we are the ones who exist in this society to be milked, like cows.

So, the nature of Christmas. To a few die-hard Christians, Christmas is our second greatest feast, the celebration and reliving of Christ's miraculous birth, the beginning of the long, beautiful path of our salvation. To many people now, however, it seems to be the occasion for celebration of all that is worst in us: our greed, our gluttony and pure selfishness. I'd like to think that this is a catharsis, leaving us cleansed and improved for the new year, but sadly, this kind of thing doesn't work - like orgies of gluttony or drinking before embarking on a strict diet or regime of sobriety, what it really does is undermine our moral fibre and render it impossible, in the short term, to rise above the mire.

Of course, there is a great deal of lip service paid. 'Joy, peace and love', proclaim the banners, as beneath them hordes of shoppers elbow each other out of the way. People who couldn't be bothered giving one the time of day for 50 weeks of the year suddenly realise their entire life will be ruined if they don't get to have lunch with us in that particular week. In workplaces, there's a lot of hugging and kissing; people who spent their year stabbing you in the back and sometimes even sabotaging your work slobber all over you as if you were their long-lost mama come back from the wars. It's all about as real as tinsel, and as useful, although perhaps not quite so pretty.

This whole shitshow is exemplified, like most productions, by its leading characters. Just as Dr Zhivago was the poster boy for the film of that name, as Bruce Willis represents the Die Hard films, we see at the head of things the leading man of the day. Once, long ago, this role was filled by Our Lady, by the Holy Family as they trudged their way to Bethlehem, by the Baby Jesus. Now, however, they have been relegated to the status of extras, and the leading role is filled by Santa Claus.

Let's look at Santa Claus for a moment. Fat, jolly, and giving out stuff to children. He gets shoved down our throats with every bite of media, with every look around a shopping centre. He's even on the stamps this year. He's supposed to be harmless, and good, and fuzzy. Yet, what is Santa, really? Functionally, he leads us away from the actual meaning of Christmas, inviting us to focus on the gratification of all our basest desires: gluttony, greed, self-indulgence taken to ridiculous extremes. Wallow in the things of the world, he tells us. Ho, ho, ho! Who else can you think of that tempts us away from the right life to wallow in the cheap satisfactions of the body? I'll give you a clue - its name can be arrived at by a simple rearrangement of the letters of 'Santa'.

One of the Native American peoples, I am told, has a legend that inside each person are two wolves, one good and one evil. They battle each other for dominion of your soul. Which one will win, asks the querant. The one that is stronger, goes the answer. The one you feed.

Whom will you follow, next Christmas season? The one who leads us to kindness, to charity, to mastery of the self? Or the devil?