Self-Awareness

Oliver Sacks on gratitude and other thoughts “My predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved. I have been given much and I have given something in return. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.” In his essays on gratitude written in the last years of this life, Oliver Sacks starts with the beautiful premise: “but I am not finished with living”. “I am glad I am not dead!” bursts out of him when the weather is perfect…what a beautiful short depiction of gratitude, for a world we’ve only been deposited into and had no role in making as perfect as it is. Sacks is a master of curiosity. That curiosity : a genuine, enthusiastic interest in all manner of observation was a fitting foundation for his career (life) in science. But what sets him apart is his humanity, how the science connects with the human. In Sabbath he alludes to the crisis of his homosexuality for his orthodox mother, frozen in fear of Leviticus. He moves on undaunted, resolving only to “hate religion’s capacity for bigotry and hatred.” I chose to find the distinction meaningful: a lesser man would have jumped to hatred of religion itself and by extension its radicalised proponents. Not Sacks. Change your mind…In a New York Times article of 2010, Are we shaped by [...]

My coach Jane has kindly introduced me to the wonderful “Cloud Appreciation Society” which puts an image and thought of the day into my inbox. “And art thou nothing? Such thou art, as when The woodman winding westward up the glen, ...Sees full before him, gliding without tread, An image with a glory round its head; The enamoured rustic worships its fair hues, Nor knows he makes the shadow he pursues!” From the poem ‘Constancy to an Ideal Object’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge I am fascinated with the little pearl of wisdom in this one: "Nor knows he makes the shadow he pursues!”. I see it as a metaphor of our frequent confusion. Are we really the victims of a hostile environment, aggressive colleagues, demanding spouses, attention seeking children and friends ? Or simply creating our own little conspiracy theory? When we seek goals of social recognition, fame and admiration, a brush with celebrity (think about the buzz some experience when bumping into Brad Pitt at Starbucks!), we are really pursuing a shadow of our own making, unsustainably fuelling our bottomless tank of external self-esteem validation. Such is the cost of social media and the pursuit of social approval. Contrast this shadowy pursuit with the adventure of letting go of all earthly connections for a while: with our heads in the clouds we choose to spend time experiencing otherness, outwards and upwards - connecting with a far away outer world, ever changing but always there [...]

“The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape. It is not destructive. It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around. A road, on the other hand, even the most primitive road, embodies a resistance against the landscape. Its reason is not simply the necessity for movement, but haste. Its wish is to avoid contact with the landscape; it seeks so far as possible to go over the country, rather than through it; its aspiration, as we see clearly in the example of our modern freeways, is to be a bridge; its tendency is to translate place into space in order to traverse it with the least effort. It is destructive, seeking to remove or destroy all obstacles in its way. The primitive road advanced by the destruction of the forest; modern roads advance by the destruction of topography. – Wendell Berry, excerpt from A Native Hill "such obstacles as it meets it goes around"... I chose the path, the humble path that gets there in the end, all the while respecting the environment, the settled communities, human and animal life alike.  In coaching, we [...]