Confessions of a confused mind
I’ve learnt the hard way that there’s nothing I like about having my most personal experiences become anecdotal. There’s absolutely no spiritual upside for me in having a lot of strangers know about my life. But, still I continue speaking about my adventures and experiences.
Have you read that Hemingway story – Soldier’s Home? It’s about a soldier back from the first world war realising that sitting in places and telling people about the experiences he’s had over there is giving him this incredibly sick feeling, because he feels he’s sold out. That has kind of been my experience every time.
In Hemingway’s story, the character, Krebs, felt compelled to exaggerate his stories because he thought it was what people wanted to hear, and this desire to satisfy, to need to be listened to, resulted in the sickening feeling.
The feeling of having sold out has less to do with personal shame than the professional consequence. Everybody goes through certain experiences and, if you’re lucky, even with the worst things, you come out of them and they induce in you an altered perspective on the relative importance of things. With tragedy comes perspective. It dials the volume down on everything that stressed you out previously.
We’re very disconnected from fundamental things. Only wealthy cultures have the luxury of worrying about face creams that prevent ageing. Beauty, fashion – they’re the indulgences of the wealthiest cultures, and I think that along with that comes a tucking under of things you don’t want to confront. The more people sell you the idea of spiritual peace through what you drive and how you look and how you live, the less connected you become.
This theme is what attracted me to Fight Club. It still makes me laugh – that part where, if the character could just get that last unit from Ikea in place, he knew that he’ll be calm. It cracks me up. Fight Club was so much about the hilarious chagrin of recognising what a slave you are to consumer advertising – there’s no way you could not relate. How a certain part of modernity has bent people and left them extremely adrift and disconnected from the adult world they’re expected to engage in. It asks you to confront your feelings about what’s transpired, and confront mixed emotions. That is life – it is in equal measure beautiful and poetic, but it’s also painful.
The perception that I am serious, sombre and intimidating is largely due to my nerdy appearance and my deep interest in politics. Sometimes, I tap so effectively into the rage that it seems impossible that I do not inhabit this quality in real life. But my placid manner is one of my most salient features. Am soft-spoken, even-tempered; you can see me working out a thought, processing it like a philosopher. Even if I am talking about something I have talked about a million times before, I am trying to find a different way to say it.
Mountains beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World, by Tracy Kidder, was one of the most significant reading experiences of his life. It had paradigm-shifting ideas about poverty and healthcare. Here was someone with no ambition for fame or money. His ambition is to fundamentally change the way people look at the most intrinsic problem – poverty and health. I came away from the book feeling it had vaulted him to the ranks of the Gandhis and Martin Luther Kings. You read that and you go, What the hell am I doing with my life?
I keep written blogs. When I reread them, sometimes I think you tell yourself you’ve learnt certain things – you know, those moments when you really see the gulf between the vision of yourself you project and the actuality. It’s pretty fascinating how much of our behaviour is based on compulsion rather than conscious choice. I think we can learn how to rewire our behaviour – just not as easily as we think. It takes twice as many passes through an experience as you think it will.
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Skill and Chance: Two Sides Of the Game of Life
A club owner in London charged with hosting poker games without a licence defended himself on the plea that poker is a game of skill, not chance. The UK's Gaming Act requires that clubs hosting games of 'chance' such as roulette get a licence to do so.
This is not required for games of 'skill' like chess. The jury was asked to deliberate and decide whether poker was a game of skill or chance, or a combination of both.
The question, of whether a game of cards is all about skill or chance has been the subject of debate for long. From a philosophical perspective, many see in it a striking parallel to the question of determinism vs free will: Are our lives governed by destiny — by the "cards" dealt to us — or is the final outcome of the game a testimony to our efforts, that is, in the manner in which we play those cards?
That brings us to the eternal question: Is life a game of chance or skill? Voltaire believed "Each player must accept the cards life deals him. But once they are in hand, he alone must decide how to play in order to win the game".
S Radhakrishnan echoed this thought while commenting on the Bhagavad Gita: "Life is like a game of bridge... We did not invent the game or design the cards. We did not frame the rules and we cannot control the dealing... to that extent, determinism rules. But we can play the game well or play it badly. A skilful player may have a poor hand and yet win the game. A bad player may have a good hand and yet make a mess of it... By exercising our choice properly, we can control steadily all the elements and perhaps eliminate altogether the determinism of nature".
The belief that we make or unmake ourselves extends from the atheist to the scholar of scriptures. We needn't worry about what's on the cards, since we can't change that. What we can do with what's on the cards is left to us, however. Which is not to ignore the factor of luck, or whatever else one might call it.
The defendants in the poker trial made the point that if a 'game of chance' includes all games where chance and skill both have a part to play, every possible game could be des-cribed as one.
In the game of life too, the element of chance may not be in our control, but our skills are. Indeed, having to play in a situation where you have little control is hardly limited to card games.
The next time you're watching a one-day international and a batsman walks into the stadium, ponder over what choices has he been given. He did not choose whether he would bat in the first session or the second; a toss of the coin and his captain's call in response did that. He did not know when the wicket would fall that required him to walk in. No one gave him a choice of weather, pitch, or quality of bowling that he could be subject to. He has no choice over who will bat at the other end nor predict how he will respond.
Yet, from the moment he steps in, he is expected to perform. No one gives us a choice in many things when we begin our innings in life either, but how we play the game is up to us.
A club owner in London charged with hosting poker games without a licence defended himself on the plea that poker is a game of skill, not chance. The UK's Gaming Act requires that clubs hosting games of 'chance' such as roulette get a licence to do so.
This is not required for games of 'skill' like chess. The jury was asked to deliberate and decide whether poker was a game of skill or chance, or a combination of both.
The question, of whether a game of cards is all about skill or chance has been the subject of debate for long. From a philosophical perspective, many see in it a striking parallel to the question of determinism vs free will: Are our lives governed by destiny — by the "cards" dealt to us — or is the final outcome of the game a testimony to our efforts, that is, in the manner in which we play those cards?
That brings us to the eternal question: Is life a game of chance or skill? Voltaire believed "Each player must accept the cards life deals him. But once they are in hand, he alone must decide how to play in order to win the game".
S Radhakrishnan echoed this thought while commenting on the Bhagavad Gita: "Life is like a game of bridge... We did not invent the game or design the cards. We did not frame the rules and we cannot control the dealing... to that extent, determinism rules. But we can play the game well or play it badly. A skilful player may have a poor hand and yet win the game. A bad player may have a good hand and yet make a mess of it... By exercising our choice properly, we can control steadily all the elements and perhaps eliminate altogether the determinism of nature".
The belief that we make or unmake ourselves extends from the atheist to the scholar of scriptures. We needn't worry about what's on the cards, since we can't change that. What we can do with what's on the cards is left to us, however. Which is not to ignore the factor of luck, or whatever else one might call it.
The defendants in the poker trial made the point that if a 'game of chance' includes all games where chance and skill both have a part to play, every possible game could be des-cribed as one.
In the game of life too, the element of chance may not be in our control, but our skills are. Indeed, having to play in a situation where you have little control is hardly limited to card games.
The next time you're watching a one-day international and a batsman walks into the stadium, ponder over what choices has he been given. He did not choose whether he would bat in the first session or the second; a toss of the coin and his captain's call in response did that. He did not know when the wicket would fall that required him to walk in. No one gave him a choice of weather, pitch, or quality of bowling that he could be subject to. He has no choice over who will bat at the other end nor predict how he will respond.
Yet, from the moment he steps in, he is expected to perform. No one gives us a choice in many things when we begin our innings in life either, but how we play the game is up to us.
Thursday, January 25, 2007
No pain no gain (and no point)
On the surface the human being appears to be a flawed design. Obviously our brains are magnificent and our thumbs enable us to use spanners. Something an elephant, for instance, cannot do.
However, there seems to be something wrong with our stomachs. It doesn’t matter how many pints of refreshing beer we cram into them, they always want just one more roast potato. And then, instead of ejecting all the excess fat, they feed it to our hearts and veins, and we end up all dead.
Of course, we can use willpower to counter these demands, but this makes us dull and pointless. You need only look at the number of people in lonely hearts columns who neither drink nor smoke to know I’m right. If they did, they’d have a husband. It’s that simple.
What I tend to do when it comes to the business of being fit is not bother. I eat lots, and then I sit in a chair. The upside to this is that I have a happy family and many friends. The downside is that I wobble and wheeze extensively while going to the fridge for another chicken drumstick.
Unfortunately, all this has to stop because am trying to ape the white man. And that if it all goes right, I may have a healthy body.
Last week then, I went swimming in the ocean. The idea was to move my body until the shoulders were screaming so loudly that they are actually audible.
Eventually, that didn't go according to plan, I’d not made enough electricity to power Glasgow and I’d not reached my goal, so I tried to turn around. But it was no good. My magnificent brain was so stunned by what had just happened that it had lost control of my legs. I also felt dizzy and sick. Fondly, I also imagined that I had a tingling in my left arm and chest pains.
Part of the problem is that to go on this new body drive, I must be indulging myself in such activies religiously. This means losing a stone so I have been living on a diet of soups and cereals, which simply doesn’t provide enough calories to rock back and forth in my conservatory for half a day.
Now, one of the things I should explain at this point is that I am always hugely enthusiastic about new projects, but only for a very short time. If I was to get fit and thin, it needed to be done fast, before I lost interest, so once some feeling had returned to my legs, I went for a swim again.
All this has made me dull, thick and, because there’s no beer or wine in my system at night, an even bigger insomniac. And all the while I have this sneaking suspicion that what I’m doing is biologically unhealthy.
Pain is designed to tell the body something is wrong and that you’d better do something fast to make it go away. So why would you get on a tread machine and attempt to beat what God himself has put there as a warning? That’s like refusing to slow down when an overhead gantry on the motorway says “Fog”.
Today, then, my magnificent brain is questioning the whole philosophy of a fitness regime. If God had meant us to have a six-pack, why did He give us the six-pack? In the olden days, people had to run about to catch deer so they all had boy-band torsos and good teeth.
But now, we Darwin to work in a car. Trying to look like a 12th century African is as silly as a seal trying to regrow its legs.
No really. The thing about evolution is that each step along the way has a point. Cows developed udders so they could be plugged into milking machines. And humans developed the remote control television so they could spend more time sitting down.
Fitness fanatics should take a lead from nature. Nobody looks at water and suggests it would be more healthy if it spent 20 minutes a day trying to flow uphill and nobody suggests a lion could catch more wildebeest if it spent less of its day lounging around.
Plainly, then, our stomachs are designed to demand food and feed fat to our arteries for a reason. I don’t know what the reason might be but I suspect it may have something to do with global warming. Everything else does.
On the surface the human being appears to be a flawed design. Obviously our brains are magnificent and our thumbs enable us to use spanners. Something an elephant, for instance, cannot do.
However, there seems to be something wrong with our stomachs. It doesn’t matter how many pints of refreshing beer we cram into them, they always want just one more roast potato. And then, instead of ejecting all the excess fat, they feed it to our hearts and veins, and we end up all dead.
Of course, we can use willpower to counter these demands, but this makes us dull and pointless. You need only look at the number of people in lonely hearts columns who neither drink nor smoke to know I’m right. If they did, they’d have a husband. It’s that simple.
What I tend to do when it comes to the business of being fit is not bother. I eat lots, and then I sit in a chair. The upside to this is that I have a happy family and many friends. The downside is that I wobble and wheeze extensively while going to the fridge for another chicken drumstick.
Unfortunately, all this has to stop because am trying to ape the white man. And that if it all goes right, I may have a healthy body.
Last week then, I went swimming in the ocean. The idea was to move my body until the shoulders were screaming so loudly that they are actually audible.
Eventually, that didn't go according to plan, I’d not made enough electricity to power Glasgow and I’d not reached my goal, so I tried to turn around. But it was no good. My magnificent brain was so stunned by what had just happened that it had lost control of my legs. I also felt dizzy and sick. Fondly, I also imagined that I had a tingling in my left arm and chest pains.
Part of the problem is that to go on this new body drive, I must be indulging myself in such activies religiously. This means losing a stone so I have been living on a diet of soups and cereals, which simply doesn’t provide enough calories to rock back and forth in my conservatory for half a day.
Now, one of the things I should explain at this point is that I am always hugely enthusiastic about new projects, but only for a very short time. If I was to get fit and thin, it needed to be done fast, before I lost interest, so once some feeling had returned to my legs, I went for a swim again.
All this has made me dull, thick and, because there’s no beer or wine in my system at night, an even bigger insomniac. And all the while I have this sneaking suspicion that what I’m doing is biologically unhealthy.
Pain is designed to tell the body something is wrong and that you’d better do something fast to make it go away. So why would you get on a tread machine and attempt to beat what God himself has put there as a warning? That’s like refusing to slow down when an overhead gantry on the motorway says “Fog”.
Today, then, my magnificent brain is questioning the whole philosophy of a fitness regime. If God had meant us to have a six-pack, why did He give us the six-pack? In the olden days, people had to run about to catch deer so they all had boy-band torsos and good teeth.
But now, we Darwin to work in a car. Trying to look like a 12th century African is as silly as a seal trying to regrow its legs.
No really. The thing about evolution is that each step along the way has a point. Cows developed udders so they could be plugged into milking machines. And humans developed the remote control television so they could spend more time sitting down.
Fitness fanatics should take a lead from nature. Nobody looks at water and suggests it would be more healthy if it spent 20 minutes a day trying to flow uphill and nobody suggests a lion could catch more wildebeest if it spent less of its day lounging around.
Plainly, then, our stomachs are designed to demand food and feed fat to our arteries for a reason. I don’t know what the reason might be but I suspect it may have something to do with global warming. Everything else does.
Sunday, January 21, 2007
Sydney Summer '07
Summer is acting like a seductress - the great undresser of people of all shapes and sizes. As summer settles across the land, a certain wistfulness invades the mind. A longing for other times, a sweet nostalgia both melancholy and pleasurable, like the takes of a biscuit recalled across the decades: a remembrance of things past.
Well, am in a confessional mood. Women have nice friends. They listen to each other. They empathize and weep for each other’s woes. They talk honestly about sex. They do not, for example, lie to each other about how big their clitorises are or pretend to have lost their virginity to the au pair when they were 12 or so as to make their friends feel small and miserable and childlike. Men’s mates, on the other hand, just talk. They don’t listen. They wait for you to finish talking so they can say something better. This is because men are boring. Men talk about football and beer. They are interested only in cars and tits and…no, just cars and tits.
Men compete. Men tell jokes to make themselves feel good, not to make you laugh. With mates you spar and occasionally giggle at shallow things. You argue about ideology and international politics if you are educated, and about 4-4-2 (football) if you’re not. But the level of human interaction is the same. Women I have met three times know me better than men I’ve known since I was ten. When things go wrong in your life you go out with your mates and you get wasted. You get wankered, fucked up, mullered, caned, schindlered, shindered and shitfaced and then you have another drink and you think of more words for the only thing you ever do together. But you don’t share feelings. And they don’t give a toss, really. Hence, cherish the mates you have and try to grasp the joys of life with both hands.
‘The horse of time is galloping fast: let us see where he halts.
Neither is the hand on the reins nor the foot in the stirrup.’
PS. Am part on a infamous statistic which one would have loved to avoid. Despite the 'Beach Closed' signs at the Tamarama Beach, yours truly dived in and headed straight into the rip. To put it straight the Surf live savers' were to the rescue. Am embarrassed as hell to confess. That moment stuck in the rip, was life supposed to flash in front of my eyes - because the salt water made visibility quiet difficult. Aah well, yet another tale to an eventful summer.
Summer is acting like a seductress - the great undresser of people of all shapes and sizes. As summer settles across the land, a certain wistfulness invades the mind. A longing for other times, a sweet nostalgia both melancholy and pleasurable, like the takes of a biscuit recalled across the decades: a remembrance of things past.
Well, am in a confessional mood. Women have nice friends. They listen to each other. They empathize and weep for each other’s woes. They talk honestly about sex. They do not, for example, lie to each other about how big their clitorises are or pretend to have lost their virginity to the au pair when they were 12 or so as to make their friends feel small and miserable and childlike. Men’s mates, on the other hand, just talk. They don’t listen. They wait for you to finish talking so they can say something better. This is because men are boring. Men talk about football and beer. They are interested only in cars and tits and…no, just cars and tits.
Men compete. Men tell jokes to make themselves feel good, not to make you laugh. With mates you spar and occasionally giggle at shallow things. You argue about ideology and international politics if you are educated, and about 4-4-2 (football) if you’re not. But the level of human interaction is the same. Women I have met three times know me better than men I’ve known since I was ten. When things go wrong in your life you go out with your mates and you get wasted. You get wankered, fucked up, mullered, caned, schindlered, shindered and shitfaced and then you have another drink and you think of more words for the only thing you ever do together. But you don’t share feelings. And they don’t give a toss, really. Hence, cherish the mates you have and try to grasp the joys of life with both hands.
‘The horse of time is galloping fast: let us see where he halts.
Neither is the hand on the reins nor the foot in the stirrup.’
PS. Am part on a infamous statistic which one would have loved to avoid. Despite the 'Beach Closed' signs at the Tamarama Beach, yours truly dived in and headed straight into the rip. To put it straight the Surf live savers' were to the rescue. Am embarrassed as hell to confess. That moment stuck in the rip, was life supposed to flash in front of my eyes - because the salt water made visibility quiet difficult. Aah well, yet another tale to an eventful summer.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)