Welcome to Musings - The Loom Room Blog

As you might know, I subscribe to a great magazine on philosophy for people who aren’t necessarily philosophers but who like to ponder on some of life’s more interesting questions!!  This quarter’s edition of The Philosopers’ Magazine has a number of interesting articles including one on the intelligence of dolphins and contemplating that we should perhaps consider them as ‘nonhuman persons’. 

However, that is not what I am writing about today.  The central theme of this volume is should philosophy be taught to children in primary and secondary school?  Research which has been done in the UK over the last 20 years on teaching philosophy to primary school children has found that children ‘who have been through sustained Philosophy with Children improve in almost every other academic area.  Philosophers are traditionally asked awkward questions and to come up with alternative answers, and it really breeds independent thinking.  If we want a generation of people who will begin to tackle and solve the problems we have, we need people who think for themselves and who think differently.’  So says the author, Brooke Lewis, a journalist who is now working in Cambodia. 

I’ve been concerned for several years about the dumbing down in school of original thinking by students.  Because of the constraints of the National Curriculum in the UK, many of my teaching friends find themselves handcuffed not only in the content of what they teach but even how they are to teach it.  I am, perhaps naively, encouraged by the new coalition government’s view of giving schools back to teachers and reducing the bureaucratic restrictions of the National Curriculum and maybe philosophy can help our youngsters to think for themselves once more instead of the seemingly primary goal of regurgitating set facts and figures at exam time! 

The Philosophy for Children programme sounds heavy, but it isn’t.  Imaginatively taught, children are encouraged to think about morals, ethics, choices, through the medium of books, TV, films, songs, and practical life situations.  There’s an example of this in the article - discussing clones prompted by a new movie. 

It is this kind of in-depth, curious, thinking that I find myself searching for in myself and in others.  Quite often when I go out socially, I am dismayed at the level of surface conversation - inane chatter that skims across the surface of everything.  I know I am one of those people who gets too deep too quickly, and that this is uncomfortable for many people to handle, so I more often than not keep very quiet unless I’m with people I know or people who are happy to get meaty in a discussion.  But when you do find like-minded people and a wide-ranging, give-and-take discussion involving lots of different ways of thinking and sounding each other out, the joy is just wonderful! 

I’m not a person who does confrontation, but I am a person who loves to think about other people’s opinions.  These sorts of discussions lead to more open minds and personal mental growth.  My son and I still have great discussions about all sorts of things and it’s interesting to see how differently his mind works from mine. 

There’s also a young lad of 12 who visits his granny across the road from me.  We were looking up at a passing plane and the stars and got into a discussion about space the other night at a barbecue, and he was both very knowledgeable and very curious, sucking up all the information I could drag from the depths of my mind.  We had a brilliant chat about infinity and his granny said that that’s what he would do all the time if he could, but no-one has the time to talk with him in that way.  If our children learn to access deeper levels of thinking in this way, we could find ourselves in a more considerate, thoughtful era, and I’m all for the parents and schools that will help in this task!!

I read this little gem in a blog this week.  It was a throw-away comment on a business blog, but one that struck a chord with me.  The translation all depends on whether you start the sentence with an indefinite article or a definite one.  (I’ll bet that just took you back to long English grammar lessons at school!!!) In other words, if you write “a present is a gift” then you are talking about something usually physical that someone gives you.  And yes, obviously, someone giving you something is a gift.

However, the version I have been mulling over is the other one -the present is a gift.  That’s a whole other ball o’ wax!  All we have is right now.  What we’ve done in the past makes us into what we are right now.  The future is unknown but what we do right now is what makes our future selves.  So what we have right now is priceless!  We have the chance to change our lives - to rewrite our course through life - just because we have right now - the present moment. 

This is so mind-blowing.  I’ve thought about it before, as I’m sure you have as well.  It’s one of those student navel-gazing topics on similar lines to ‘why are we here?’ and ‘what’s existence’?  I’m sure you remember those heady days when you first got to grapple with life’s big questions.  I still have those days on a regular basis - usually from spotting something wonderful in nature. 

And during tough personal times, when we spend a lot of time looking in at the minutea of our day-to-day lives, and our relationships and our purpose in life, and reflecting on what might have been and what still could be, realising that the present is our chance to do something different, to change the results we’ve been getting, to alter the path of our trajectory in life can be a tremendous gift. 

I’m not talking glibly here.  I mean this.  I’m living it right now.  And one thing I learned this morning, whilst watching a buzzard seemingly hanging immobile in the sky, is that the present is for living, for embracing, for enjoying, for understanding.  Today I have really had a sense of the present as a gift.  I hope I always have the grace to value that gift and to embrace it with gratitude, joy and passion.

I originally wrote this entry a year ago, and was thinking about this very subject this week when my son and I were having a philosophical discussion on “how do you know when you know yourself?”  In trying to put down in words what we were discussing, I got myself into knots, and deleted the whole thing, when I suddenly had the impulse to look at articles I’ve written but not yet published.  And there, right at the top, was this!  Serendipity at work!  Enjoy….

“Know Yourself”

This is a local secondary school’s motto near where I live, and it always gets me shaking my head.

I can’t say too much about this other than to say that the children really don’t get time to know themselves!  But what I wanted to think about today is how this short phrase applies to each of us individually.  Do we really know ourselves?

There are certain things I know about myself because of how I feel in certain situations.  For instance, I have an intense dislike of confrontation and will sometimes not stand up for myself or seek to turn a conversation to avoid confrontation although these days I would not go so far as to compromise myself or my principles.  But the flip side to this is that I have a very active (or overactive) sense of fair play.  If someone else is suffering an injustice, I leap in to defend them even at the risk of personal injury!  Now how does that equate??  In Homer SImpson’s immortal words – Doh!!

Why do I do that?  Is it a sensible thing to do?  No – usually not!  But somehow I can’t seem to help myself!  Choices.  No-one can say whether any choice is right or wrong.  We have laws and social codes but they are only guides, and they can change over a period of time as society itself changes.  We each live by our own personal codes, so we can only judge each other seen from our own standpoint.  Also our own perspective changes as we mature (age!) and we can choose (if we wish) how to react to any situation. When we are born we seem to be hard-wired with one disposition or another but as we get older we can sometimes develop into the opposite of that. 

So I’m back to where I started.  And how do we get to know ourselves? 

For me, it’s spending time on my own.  Lots of time.  Thinking.  Reading.  Weaving.  Thinking some more. 

Also it’s spending time with other people.  Lots of different people in different situations.  Watching. Listening.  Talking.  Listening some more. 

I’m not a social animal by nature.  However, give me a group of people with the same interests – weaving, philosophy, travel, readers, writers, music, theatre – and I’m as gregarious as anyone else.  It’s like heads and tails, chalk and cheese.  And I don’t think I’m alone in this.  I cultivate what I’d like to become – so I don’t watch violent movies.  I read to expand my mind and my soul.  I travel to learn more and experience more about the world.  I walk with my dog and examine closely the nature I see around me.  I weave because I love art, and weaving and experimenting fulfils my soul. 

I don’t know if what I do really helps me to know myself.  All I do know is that I like doing these things and I feel that I’m getting to know myself.  And perhaps that’s all any of us can aspire to. 

The words and music from The King & I, “Getting to Know You”, are running through my head now.  Perhaps it is more about getting to know others and finding through that that we get to know ourselves.  Hmmm.  I’d be interested in your thoughts…… 

In this quarter’s Philosophy Magazine, there is an article asking Where Are All the Women?  Whilst there are roughly even numbers of men and women studying philosophy at undergraduate level, that number begins to have a male bias at MA level, and more so at PhD level, leading to only 18% of women to men ratio on academic staff, including full and part-time lecturing.   The article posits a few theories of why this might be, and in the process of discussion the point was raised that philosophy at a more advanced level is much more aggressive, with the audience actively prepared to shred a lecturer’s hypotheses and disprove the argument. 

This combative approach suddenly brought to mind a hen weekend I went on about 8 years ago.  A group of about 16 women, ranging in age from late teens to me, the eldest at 39, turned up at a historic house and stayed in several of their beautiful cottages for the weekend.  One of our various activities was Paintball.  I know more about paintball now because my son, now 20, is an avid paintballer, playing in several leagues at quite an advanced level, and it’s really a strategy game as well as physical and ‘hard’. 

When we turned up at the paintball site, we were met by two strapping lads in their early twenties who confessed to us that they’d never had an all-female paintball party before.  They’d dealt with mixed groups of school children, executives on team-building exercises, and lots of all-male groups, but never all women.  What transpired was really interesting from a philosophical and psychological viewpoint. 

We were split up into our teams and told the objective.  We had our little team talks and worked out our tactics, then went out to begin the game.  I already knew that when paintballs hit you they hurt, so I was prepared to be bruised, and the lads told us that they would sting and you’d know you’d been hit.  The first game commenced. 

I’m not an aggressive or confrontational person and attack is not something that comes naturally to me, so I elected to guard our flag and defend it against all comers, and I was quite good at that, staying in hiding, and positioning myself to get a great overall view so that I could fire at anyone coming close to our flag.  Another woman, whose day-job was a city trader, was the natural leader – she was assertive, quick to assess situations and deploy her troops, but the rest of the foot-soldiers – the cannon fodder, if you like – were not so keen to put themselves in the line of fire.  The game must have been going for all of five minutes, and you could see most people trying to keep out of firing range and working their way round to behind enemy lines on both sides.  Then one of the women decided this was pussy-footing around and she charged.  I can’t remember now which side she was on, and it really didn’t matter, because she got well and truly hammered, fired upon by several people, and she yelped and fell over.  That’s when the difference between the sexes was most apparent. 

She was obviously hurt, and lay clutching her leg and her arm.  There was a few seconds total silence, then everyone came out of hiding, rushing up to her and asking if she was alright, where had she been hit, did she need help, etc…  Looking back, it was amazing.  Regardless of competition, the overriding reaction was one of empathy, of wanting to help, of wanting to co-operate to solve a situation. 

The paintball guys were incredulous, and somewhat dismayed, I think.  They had to rethink their whole strategy of how to set the games because the underlying primal competition element and ‘do or die’ mindset that features in the male and mixed games was totally inappropriate for our all-female group.  Obviously, if we had been trained as a team, with a specific objective and strong enough incentive, this wouldn’t have happened, but I was proud to be part of a bunch of women whose first thoughts were to help each other, regardless of which side anyone was on. 

So, in reading about the aggressive approach of some branches of philosophy that seems to put many women off progressing further, I am not surprised.  If the profession of philosophy adopts co-operation strategies rather than combative strategies, then they might see a different result, and be the richer (philosophically speaking) for it. 

I’ve recently been posting about listening to what’s going on in nature around me when I’m walking, and I was really pleased to see a whole section in the 2nd edition of 2009 of TPM - The Philosophers’ Magazine - about coming to our senses - appreciating and using all our senses, starting with touch. 

As weavers, touch is really important to us.  It’s even more important to me in what I am studying - texture.  The author of the article on touch, Mark Paterson, wrote in a way that brings to attention our constant world of touch, of which we are mostly unaware.  It’s not so much being unaware, but being unconscious to what our tactile interface - our skin - is telling us.  In Mark’s words,

“Touch is a sense of communication.  It is receptive, expressive, can communicate empathy.  It can bring distant objects and people into proximity. ”  His article deals with how touch is perceived philosophically in a visually dominated world which I found very interesting and also with plenty of reference to historical texts so that I can go and read up for myself about it.  More to the point, for me at least, is the sense of consciousness about touch that I was left with. 

Other articles in the series are about smell as portrayed, or not, in film as compared to literature; about sound, which as a musician I found really interesting; taste and its disputed position as the least of the senses, and then 8 different short articles about seeing.

Going back to the auditory article, as a musician I had always associated music performance as a moment in time, never to be repeated (other than through a recording of one particular performance), and also taken for granted that I could hear the complete range of instruments and sounds during a performance, or different varieties of birdsong as well as that jet passing overhead and at the same time able to hear the hiss of the electricity in the high-voltage wires.  But having it pointed out to me made me realise that this is discrimination of sounds at a high level of complexity!  All sound happens over a shorter or longer period of time.  I really hadn’t made that connection before.  Our brains are making sense of all the complex sounds that reach it at the same time and not only are compiling each sound with its relevant nuances but is also notifying our consciousness exactly what we are hearing.    We are all aware of the amazing work that the brain does in de-coding and re-creating what we see, but I know I have never really stopped to think about the brainwork going in to what I am constantly hearing.   

Having read the series of articles (not counting one on subliminal processing and the last one on whether we have 5 or more senses), I started hearing things I hadn’t heard before, and being much more aware of how I interact with things through touch.  My senses all seemed heightened.  Even when I sat down to a cup of tea and a few chocolates (!!), I was much more alert to the flavours of the drink and the chocolates, the heat of the tea, the aroma of the tea, the chocolates and the flowers in the room, the lingering smell of smoke as my son walked through the room after having just lit the wood fire, and the sound of the wind outside, the noises of the house, the crackle of the fire in the next room. 

Appreciation of the small things in life start with observation.  Thanks to this series of articles, and my own musings recently, I’m focussing on the small things with great enjoyment!  There may be a recession outside, but I can relish the immediate things of life with more attention to the information my senses are giving me.  Learning to appreciate the best things in life is definitely a positive way to counter the gloom of our ecomonic reality and it’s free!

You know how suddenly everything grows and puts on its coat of green?  Well this week in my corner of the world, spring has suddenly sprung.  Leaves are popping up all over the place, and suddenly the world looks less bare and forlorn.  It’s amazing how it happens almost overnight. 

Today on my walk, I decided to practise half an hour of mindfulness.  Boy, was that hard!  I decided to focus on listening to the sounds of nature and man around me as I walked because I thought that listening would focus my attention more powerfully than looking.  I was right about that, but had to keep metaphorically shaking myself to rein my thoughts back and just listen.  In a way, it was harder to do that than it was to spend time practising my oboe back in the day…. Practising the oboe required me to think in a disciplined way.  Listening to nature required me not to think - just to listen and appreciate the sounds I was hearing.  Not to think about them but just to note them.  It wasn’t an easy thing to do, but the experience made me determined that each day I must dedicate some time just to listening to sounds. 

We all listen to our minds constantly, and if you’ve the kind of job, or mind, that likes to analyse or imagine, then the time that we spend in our minds is massive.  I would say that the time I spend in my head is over 90% of the total time that I am conscious!  Yikes!  No wonder trying just to suspend thinking was hard!  It’s like being a tea-addict - it requires conscious thought not to go and put the kettle on for another cuppa.  But I would never have realised that it would require conscious thought not to think!! Hopefully practice will make it easier to do. 

On a slightly different vein, I bought my Dad a book for his birthday.  It’s called The Book of Idle Pleasures and is edited by Dan Kieran and Tom Hodgkinson.  Dad is trying his hand at this thing called retirement.  He’s a very young 79 this birthday and has been working 7 days a week in my brother’s company for the last 4 years.  It helped him tremendously when Mum died in 2007, but now is the time to rein back a little and only work for a couple of days a week so that he can begin to enjoy his time to himself.  To give him a little help and a few suggestions along the way, this book is full of short ideas such as ‘Reclining on Top Deck of the Bus’, ‘Doodling’, ‘Whittling’, ‘Lying in a Hammock’, ‘Walking Back Home Drunk’ - although I don’t think Dad will go for that last one, somehow!!  The contributors write for The Idler, a magazine ‘that celebrates freedom, fun and the fine art of doing nothing.’  Their reason for writing the book - “We want to comfort and inspire you with philosophy, satire and reflection, as well as giving practical information to help in the quest for the idle life”. 

Sounds like a great idea to me!

I love words.  They have the power to harm or to heal, to empower or to reduce, to inspire or to deflate. 

I try to write a journal most days and I do that in the mornings, before the day’s tasks and “must dos” get in the way.  It’s a stream of consciousness thing – quite often it can be the events of the previous day – or thoughts I’ve had whilst out walking Charlie (my dog) in the fields.  This morning I exchanged casual comments with a couple of people whilst walking along the pavement.  The first was a chatty, friendly ‘your dog is just gorgeous’ comment, guaranteed to make me smile and feel great! The second was with a neighbour.  It was just comparing the weather of today, beautiful, sunny but cold, with yesterday’s freezing, windy rain and yet, a chance comment of my neighbour’s, saying he was far too sensible to get caught in yesterday’s weather (unlike me)had me chuntering away to myself as Charlie and I continued our walk.  Somehow I had felt that comment as a reflection on my intelligence and I thought of all the clever responses I could have made which would have left him suitably chastened (or not!) when I suddenly pulled myself up short. 

Why was I feeling so defensive?  What was I doing, allowing a probably innocent if perhaps thoughtless comment churn up my stomach and bring me down when I should be enjoying the beauty of the day around me?   It was quite an effort to move my thoughts away from the negative reaction I was experiencing and direct them into appreciative appraisal of the sun and shadows on the fields, the beauty of the remaining leaves gently fluttering down to earth, the easy elegance of Charlie running across the fields.  But once I had focussed my attention on positive things that were happening right now, I felt so much better and my thoughts then turned to a sudden inspiration for another book idea. 

When I got home I started thinking about how quickly I had allowed myself to be brought down and that it took a focussed determined effort to pick myself back up again and turn my thoughts to positive things, and I realised how much we are affected by seemingly random or thoughtless comments.  As a teacher, it is something I’m always aware of when chatting to students.  As a student, I know how vulnerable and defensive I feel when trying something outside my comfort zone, and in that frame of mind how easily one can go from being excited to being depressed and feeling worthless and useless. 

It also made me reflect on how easily close relationships can change from happy and open to defensive, usually by a simple misunderstanding and how it is so true that to ensure good communication we need to seek first to understand, and then to be understood.  So, for today at least, I am going to try to listen first of all, then think before I speak….. 

Views change in different conditions.

What an ambiguous statement.  Do I mean views as in opinions?  Or views as in vistas? 

Actually this morning I mean vistas.  I was walking Charlie along a familiar route, but the weather was very misty and very cold – snow topped with a heavy frost on the ground.  The visibility was about 200 yards and I realised what a difference it made to how I normally view the scenery (yes, I did mean that!).  What was normally prosaic and mundane became somehow magical.  The track down to the farm that is normally just a track down to the farm became a track shrouded in mystery (mistery???) with a destination unknown and unknowable unless you followed its path.  It was enticing and I felt tempted to walk along it.  The trees, which I normally see within a landscape that stretches way beyond them, became the limit of my vision.  They were now the boundary of my visible world.  Crossing the road became a task of judgement – of trying to listen more and rely less on my eyes.

I realised that there are positives in this narrowing of vision – this closing in of our world – as well as negatives.  The negatives were all too obvious.  What was normally a comparatively safe thing to do ie crossing the road, became problematical and more risky.  There was a shorter period of being able to adapt or amend or alter your actions because visibility was reduced significantly.  Therefore you had to be ‘on your toes’ and aware of things in a much more immediate way, employing other senses rather than the eyes. 

On the other hand, my attention was drawn much more particularly to objects closer at hand than perhaps I would normally focus on.  The trees against the mist were so beautiful – their skeletal forms etched starkly but yet with wisps of mist blurring the outlines in places.  The frost on the snow was clear, and crisp and also very beautiful.  The ice on the puddles was a feature on its own, not getting lost in the myriad of other things to take my attention.  The few birds that flew into and out of my vision became much more prominent because other birds could not be seen.  Their sudden appearance and disappearance was far more unsettling because it was unannounced and unexpected because of my limited vision. 

I realised when I got home and involved in my weaving samples that a similar affect happens to us when we are caught up in the clutches of a particular train of thought or study.  We lose the bigger vision and focus on the details of what we are doing.  That is both positive and negative, and the important thing to remember is that, sooner or later, we need to think bigger again and regain our overview in order to put our thoughts into perspective. 

Hmmm.  And all because it was misty this morning!

One of the books I am reading at the moment is called 101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life by Roger-Pol Droit. It’s full of different exercises you can try to see deeper than the surface of things.

The second exercise in the book – Empty a Word of Its Meaning – is one that resonates with me in weaving as well.   You know the kind of thing – keep repeating a commonplace word and it loses its meaning, or as Roger-Pol Droit puts it, “it detaches itself and hardens.”  He continues, “You find yourself repeating a series of strange sounds. A series of absurd and meaningless noises, that denote nothing, indicate nothing… “.  This happens to me especially during a boring meeting when someone is going on about a specific topic, and they keep repeating the same word. It just becomes farcical because the word becomes disassociated with what they are talking about. 

It’s a weird feeling when that happens – you feel slightly disassociated from reality and everything gets a bit surreal – but it’s kind of nice. 

This zoning out of surface reality happens to me sometimes when I’m weaving.  If I’m doing repetitious work that needs focus but not total concentration, such as weaving a predictable pattern that I’ve woven lots of times before (as I often do in weaving samples), I can find my mind going a little somnolent.  This is an interesting place to be in.  You are aware, but not totally focussed on anything external.  Your mind is in a kind of free-fall, your body feels a bit in limbo. 

It can also be a creative place to be.  When we are caught up with words relating to everyday life, we are pinned down in our reality, fixed to the earth with concrete meanings.  When we find ourselves in mental free-fall, we have the chance and opportunity to be incredibly creative, with the sub-conscious providing new associations.  It’s kind of like having a brain partitioned like a computer hard-drive.  One part does all the obvious surface stuff, the other is for another experience.  When I zone-out of surface reality, my mind pops into the partitioned section where words don’t exist and normal sensations take on a different quality. 

Have you ever wondered how it would feel to be an astronaut floating in non-gravity?  The lack of reference as to what’s up and what’s down, no gravity to root things to where they should be in our normal experience?  I think that’s kind of what must happen mentally when we zone out. 

As children, I think we are much more aware of this side of our personalities.  Imagination takes kids to all sorts of fantastical but relevant places.  Perhaps it’s something that we need to cultivate more actively as adults – to regain that slightly disturbing but ultimately exciting and freeing sensation .  As Roger-Pol Droit observes, “Just a few seconds are enough to tear that fine film within which we make sense of things, smug with the power of giving things names.” 

Whilst not everyone reading this blog will be a weaver, or like to weave repetitious samples, we can all play the repeating word game, and find that incredible space where reality is suspended……

The first thing I need to do on this posting is to apologise to Jo Earl for giving her a new first name and mis-spelling her surname!!  My humble apologies, Jo. 

I’m still on US time at the moment, despite having arrived back in the UK on Saturday.  My flight was delayed by 6 hours which could have been a real hassle, but I spent some of the time thinking (!!) and some of the time sharing a bottle of red wine with a fellow passenger, so it went fairly quickly.

What I was thinking about was support systems and infrastructure.  In airports, you suddenly become aware of the huge infrastructure supporting this nest of ant planes, and the thousands of ant passengers.  The individual becomes important, but also loses individuality.  What I mean is that you can imagine that on this particular journey you suddenly realise that thousands of individuals are getting up early, out of their normal routine, and setting off on journeys.  They all converge on hubs of activity (the airport), their luggage is sorted, the logistics worked out, they depart in a myriad of directions for destinations all over the world, and along the way, some of those individuals touch strangers’ lives briefly before moving from their new hubs into other destinations.

It’s awe-inspiring really – all the support staff there in place who actually depend on all these individual travellers – the baggage handlers, ticketing staff, shop attendants, cleaners, pilots and air crew, cabin staff, kitchen services, and all the other ancillary staff, air traffic controllers, transfer bus drivers, tanker drivers and loaders.

And each person that you see or pass, or talk with, has their own history – their story of life, culture, geography.

The more I think about this, the more I am in awe.  The sheer logistics of moving disparate human beings around the world.  The sheer amount of individual life experiences walking around.  Wouldn’t it be amazing to glimpse each person’s experience?  What an insight into all sides of life!  To catch an understanding of another’s situation.

How best to put into words the sense of contradictions that travelling brings to my mind.  The insignificance of each individual and yet the total importance to each of those individuals.  Each separate strand seemingly random yet coming together, separating out into clumps that move for a while together, converge with more coming in from different directions, then separate out into other strands, some amalgamated, some individual, until finally each disperses.  Yet this is happening day after day in countless cities in all countries in our world – a continuum, never ending, always changing;  every day every place unique in its combinations yet seemingly the same.

I find this almost beyond words and yet I comprehend it perfectly, like so many things in our world and universe.  So trivial and yet so much an integral part of how the world works.  See it repeated in the beauty of an individual flower, and a field full of flowers; or an individual snowflake and a snow-covered tree or path; or an individual star in among the galaxies in our universe.