I am not a runner.

I haven’t run in ages. The more I think I ought to run the less I want to. I am getting to the point of wishing I never had run, just so I wouldn’t have to think that I need to run and that I should be running.

I am not a writer.

Not strictly true. I am a writer, I am just not a storyteller. I try, and I have tried, and it is not something that comes to me. I can write, I just can’t do anything with it. The frustration is immense. Perhaps I don’t try hard enough for long enough.

I am not a photographer.

I used to be. I used to love it. I hardly take photographs any more, and when I do I rarely do anything with them.

I am not a label.

But I am. We define ourselves through such labels, identify ourselves to fellow communities by such things. They are our markers, our flags, our code of recognition and inclusion. I wear these labels no more, because past glories do not, cannot, undo the present.

I am not me.

I don’t think I have been for a while, not the full-blown, complete me. EF jokes that I am in the midst of a mid-life crisis. Perhaps I am.

At least I think she jokes.

There are a lot of things I used to do that I don’t any longer. Things I used to love; hill-walking, climbing, cycling, camping, travel, going out and about for a bimble. I used to do them. I used to do them a lot. I don’t any longer, and I’m not sure why.

This isn’t the cause or fault of anyone but me. This is me just not being me. Not doing the things I professed to love. Not being what necessarily made me happiest.

Not doing. Not being.

This is a thing I need to work through, a thing I need to understand.

It is twenty to six in the morning and I am Bristol International Airport once again, this time for a day trip (essentially a one hour meeting but I've arranged other stuff to do as well).

I had a little reminder of the reality of inequality yesterday. I know there are people who are working much longer, harder hours than I do, for much less pay. EF helped out with her son's class excursion yesterday and was shocked by how hard a 90 minutes it was. Having done the same (with a very angry, upset, running-away-all-the-time four year old Somali boy in tow) I can attest to it. I have seen good teachers in flow and it is something to behold. Their commitment, energy (even when at the raw edges of it) and dedication to giving the best their children can receive is invaluable and more often than not underappreciated.

I also bumped into M yesterday, who was still going strong at her teaching job, working the hours despite being only a handful of months away from being a mum.

Elsewhere in the country, and the world, are countless people, working hard to ensure they do the best job they can for the money they earn. Sometimes they do it for free. It is a hard one to contemplate, that this inequality exists, that the value conferred is dependent not upon the lasting impact and criticality of these jobs and how they are performed, but on notional abstracts of value that are linked to ideologies and skewed economic and financial models.

There will always be relative value. There has to be. The question is, do our ideas of 'relative' and 'relative to' bear scrutiny? Are the values we ascribe fair and do they reflect the inherent value of a 'thing' within society? How valuable is a good teacher, who influences and inspires generations of children to be better, wiser and more inquisitive than they otherwise would be? Can we measure that and reflect that in financial terms and social standing? Can we ever reach a model of social, cultural and financial equilibrium that truly reflects the value of a thing or deed?

Perhaps not, given the way humanity works, with its less than altrustic nature. It doesn't mean we cannot work towards that, or recognise it, even in small, individual ways. For all that we are a mess, we human beings, we should always recognise that there are those who give far more than the value ascribed to them, and that they drag us upwards.

And that I should quit my moaning and remember that I could be doing more for more than I can currently do.

Posted with Blogsy

Apparently I have 25 years of working life ahead of me. I know this because I was wondering how much longer I could last doing this type of job and 25 years wasn’t the answer.

I am currently in my second ‘career’ (the first being working in and running bookshops), which, I guess, is becoming the norm for someone just entering their glorious forties. I have been doing change management for something like ten years now, four of those on this current project, and I still have masses to learn. My background is organisational and business change, although that has very much morphed into the non-configuration management type of project and engineering change over the last few years. I know ITIL, passably, and my knowledge of the art of configuration management change is somewhat lacking, although the principles are essentially the same.

What I can tell you is that it involves a hell of a lot of time spent in front of spreadsheets on computers, which isn’t exactly where I want to spend the rest of my working life. Business change is more people focussed, which is a blessing, but is also more nebulous and much harder to manage. Swings and roundabouts.

I have been thinking of a ‘career’ change (I hate the word ‘career’) for some time now. I am not dedicated enough to make a living from writing, and most decent hard-working writers I know still have the day job (although a few have taken the plunge into full-time writing). I can’t stand the stress of wedding photography, even though I am passably good at it (according to others). I don’t travel often enough to be a travel-writer/photographer and well, the list could go on. I’d love to do archaeology again, but the degree is expensive and the work sporadic and itinerant.

A long time ago, in a school far, far (not that far) away, I started to study Law as part of my ‘A’ levels but had to drop it in favour of Economics and Maths, both of which it clashed with. I have always been interested in law, in how an artificial structure supports and directs cultural and social mores, in how a structure devised for the whole intersects with the individual, in how that which is quantified by law can differ from what is intended.

Law is a demanding beast, though, with many hoops to jump through, and yet it probably suits someone who has had a bit of real-world experience, and it definitely isn’t just a young person’s thing. It would be costly (hell, yes) and time consuming (three to six years) but would allow me to change path, if I felt I still wanted to, or supplement me in what I already do (I could do commercial work etc).

It has some cons, some pros, and yet I could make a living at the end of it. It would need funding (£2500 for a full module with the OU) and would take some time. But it would be interesting and it would address a small itch that has been going on for some twenty-three years.

Posted with Blogsy

I have become a little bit addicted to the lifehacker website even though a large proportion of the topics they cover don’t necessarily apply (appeal?) to me. However this article, Look at Yourself Objectively, caught my eye, a repost of something Aaron Swartz had written as part of his Raw Nerve series. As you may know Aaron was an influential internet activist and key principal in many of the technologies that we take for granted today. Tragically he took his own life last week.

For those of you who have read my mainly earlier stuff, you will be aware that one of the key themes I have danced with over the years is that of identity and what it means. I have used metaphors, memories, stories and poems to try and define the ongoing, evolving relationship I have with the concept of self-identity, and what it means to be a better me.

Aaron quite superbly defines the problems with understanding one’s self; reducing the issue to (loosely) these key themes – discomfort with the truth, the inability to accept responsibility for one’s faults/actions, the ease with which we perpetuate, evolve and act upon our illusions, the inability or unwillingness to measure ourselves as we measure others.

His solutions suggest other complimentary themes that can be difficult to contemplate. Look up, Not Down suggests, quite rightly, that we often look down on others worse than us as a measuring stick, rather than being aspirational and looking to those better than us. In many ways he talks about the less wholesome aspects of human nature, which are easily extrapolated into the worst and vilest behaviours we are apt to display (a topic for another day).

So, in recognising that I am, generally, a better person than I was several years ago (at least, I hope so), I arrive at a place where I wonder at the basis on which I make that judgement. I have ever been careful to make sure that the measure for myself is myself. But how much of that is amplified? How much of what I dislike about myself is bound in emotion and distance? Have I been honest enough with myself? God knows I have tried, and it has often been a painful process. But I am still blind to myself, and occasionally things or people happen that highlights this.

To quote and borrow from George Carlin’s famous phrase:

Don’t just teach your children to read…
Teach them to question what they read.
Teach them to question everything.

This is the crux of it. As a species, culturally, socially and individually, we are ill-equipped to understand this, and the processes by which we continue to define ourselves. We are discouraged, and discourage ourselves, from questioning and testing the truths upon which we stand, and the mechanisms by which we came to them.

In the effort to be a better me, I cannot just rely on the differences between me then and me now, but on understanding how I came to judge and value those two individuals in such different ways. I have to understand that the values and systems of the context within which I find myself (society, social groups, etc) are not necessarily representative of mine, no matter how much they may define the aspects of self, with all its attendant behaviours, perfections and flaws, that are displayed to it. And that I am not alone in that.

To be objective about myself, I need to be objective about everything. To be objective is to be uncompromising, to myself and to all those around me. As much as I may embrace that, would anyone else?

2012 was not quite the year I imagined it to be.

I didn’t get away. I hardly ran at all. My writing went through a roller-coaster of productivity. My photography found a new lease of life in instagram. I climbed a bit. I walked a bit. I read a lot. I sat by the beach and watched the sunset. I spent a lovely week in Scotland with EF. I ended up working for six months in Edinburgh. I got promoted. I made new friends and kept old ones. I put Christmas decorations up. I changed some things. I became closer to my brother, sister-in-law, nephews and niece. I lost my mum.

In many ways it was a year like any other. Ups. Downs. Things happened. Things didn’t. I lost family. People close to me lost family, lost loved ones. The world turned, and we turned with it.

I don’t know what to make of it. Out of the bad came some good. Out of the grief came love, awareness, understanding, strength. Out of the loss came family and friends, each of whom proved themselves truer to me than I ever could be to them.

2012 was just another year, whatever its price and prizes.

I wonder what 2013 will bring. I wonder what I will do. I wonder about the books I will read, the friendships I will make and sustain, the places I will go.

I wonder.

One of my favourite people in the world blogged yesterday. She hasn’t blogged in a long very time, and in the back of mind, though I have never met her, and only conversed a couple of times… I wondered, and hoped, that she was okay, that she was happy.

And it would seem she is.

Life is about connectivity, about relationships formed through mediums diverse and widespread.

I know more people now than I have ever done, and yet, strangely, I see far fewer. Saturdays used to be breakfast days, out and about. Sundays were ‘Roastie’ days – hours tinkering in the kitchen, friends descending, food wolfed, bodies sprawled throughout the house in contentment, chatting, full, watching tv, reading the papers. Weekends were for walking, for ambling about and mooching, head cocked at the strangeness of the world, bantering and debating, simply being in each other’s company. Weekday evenings were kung fu and football and climbing, the latter punctuated by pickled eggs in packets of crisps in the pub. Long weekends in the mountains, days in the hills, tents by the beach.

Things happen. Life and people and friends move on. Connectivity stretches, reduced to the simplicity of the keyboard and screen and snapshots in words and pictures. Friendships form the same way, sometimes intruding into the physical, sometimes never more than words on screen. Friends come and go. Life comes and go.

Things change.

I’ve changed. For the better I suppose. I am no longer the angry, thundercloud wearing young man I once was. I am calmer, quieter, more considered, harder. I do my best, not always successfully. I try, I fail, sometimes I succeed.

And things have changed around me. Life has evolved in ways I thought it wouldn’t, life has morphed and mutated and yet the mismatch remains the same. My bridges are fewer, the gaps wider and more numerous. Those bridges are precious, the connections precious. The people I know and love… precious.

Even those long gone.

I have written a lot my blog posts past the midnight hour. There is something about this time of night, when the majority have gone to bed, the streets silent and the air dark with their boisterous absence.

I like it, and yet I spend far too little time here, at this hour. The world beyond these midnight hours is a harsh one, demanding, brutal. All-night sojourns down lanes of whimsy are punished arbitrarily, without recognition of the fruit they might bear.

Such is life.

I think… that I allow myself to be more thoughtful, possibly more truthful at this time of night.  There is a comfort in silence and solitude, in the singular nature of your own company. Nothing else intrudes, and the mind, and fingers, flow. Words are written, thoughts expounded, dreams spun, intent distilled.

This is the joy of 2am; just me, and the me reflected back at me from my screen, in wayward word and pretty picture.

2am.