Men's things - XVIII

Rescued to the uttermost

The righteous person faces many troubles, but the LORD comes to the rescue each time. [BibleHub: Psalm 34:19 (NLT)]

This thinking is the fundamental of the challenges and triumphs of 2024, so far. The thought of rescue is a mindset that I am not alone and that there is help well beyond my capability, facility, or resources that plucks me out of dire situations into safety and security. This is a blessing as it means one is neither hopeless nor helpless.

In writing to a friend, to whom I was relaying the events of this year I realised that each month brought interesting and wonderful developments, I am full of thankfulness and gratitude, everything will turn out right.

A blessed year showing up

In January, 2023 had come to an end without any idea of what the New Year had in store, I attended a church service in the suburbs every turmoil set aside for fellowship and praise. Then I had to face some realities, a need for reengagement and the niggling issue of a blood test that had indicators of concern. I received good news and an invitation to attend the doctor’s surgery for some tests.

In February, the blood tests showed that I had anaemia and on the other front, a prospect was taking an inordinately long time to complete. I got to travel the farthest I had in more than 18 months and met up with some old friends who were glad to see me but preferred another. As I boarded my train, a blessing dropped into my life and a moment of great change beckoned. What I wanted was only deferred, I just needed to be patient.

Wisdom is the principal thing

In March, my joy was complete in that I was glad to be counted among the living, the thriving, and the blessed. On the blood front, the anaemia was dealt with, but my prostate was telling concerning tales. That needed checking out. Meanwhile, I had to manage my particulars and experience to fulfil all the requirements for an engagement which was sometimes stressful but not insurmountable. Where I ran out of ideas, wisdom came to rescue me in ways I could not have anticipated.

In April, I was ready for a new challenge even in areas where I thought I had little expertise, I felt it was an opportunity for growth. My doctor had a quick touch and felt my prostate was enlarged too and he referred me to the urology department of our NHS trust, and this set off a range of other tests and the need for an MRI scan. I had much better music to listen to this time.

You are owed an explanation

In May, as I was taking things in my stride, I was invited to the hospital to discuss the results of the multiparametric MRI scan. I had many questions before I could agree to have a biopsy of my prostate. The challenge of facing paternalism in medicine, where they do not believe you should be intimated with every detail that leads to a decision reared its head. We had an interesting encounter and a lasting lesson: I need to be treated as knowledgeable and respectfully informed.

In June, it was just a short email informing me that a period of review had been successfully completed. My annual checkup contained information that should have been better managed as I had not seen the consultant before the detail ended up in my notes, it was a careless mistake. However, I knew it was prostate cancer but that had to take a backseat, I was going to see Brian and that was a beautiful thing.

Celebrate life over adversity

In July, before returning to discuss the options for the treatment of prostate cancer. We had a wonderful time in Cape Town. Understanding what prostate cancer meant was daunting and neither of the intended procedures seemed pleasant when looking at the post-operative or post-treatment situation. I was sanguine as I began to understand things better to do things I had only dreamt of being able to do.

In August, I found myself embedded in a changing and exciting process where I automated and facilitated things that at first would have been painstakingly difficult, manual and prone to error. My confidence grew in areas where I would not have projected my abilities. Then another encounter with medical paternalism was both challenging and upsetting. However, I had got all the information I needed and was ready for my treatment plan.

Maintain the God perspective

In September, there is growth, blessing, anticipation, and expectation. Even as I begin treatment next week, I am also enjoying what I do, each challenge becomes an opportunity to see things differently and find solutions in exciting ways. I am thankful for the blessing of confidence, comfort, and love. To have love and friends who care so deeply and fondly for you makes it a wonderful world.

There are more things of goodness, mercy, grace, favour, and blessings, to come. I am irrepressible because the Lord delivers me fully, wholly, wonderfully, and beautifully. My mouth is filled with testimonies, this little inconvenience will pass, and each subsequent month will have more amazing things to share. The men’s things will dissolve into nothing, and God’s things will be astounding miracles.

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Blog - Men's things - XVII

Thought Picnic: On the way of thoughts

Zooming along

From the slip road of contemplation, my thoughts ride into the freeway of life where other thoughts some slow and others at speed race on to destinations indeterminate, each oblivious of the other, yet aware of the presence of mind to be considerate and understanding that no one thought is uniquely so different as to gain undue pre-eminence over another.

For as we coexist in our goal for our different or similar destinations, to home, to work, or any other activity, the expectations of safety and security are predicated on every other thought being reasonable and probably lawful too.

Caringly aware

At a point, we might swerve, then at another, there is a diversion that limits our freedom to manoeuvre sometimes due to essential roadworks planned ahead of time and notified to many or by reason of an impromptu even, an accident borne of error, mishap, carelessness, or incomprehensibly outrageous thinking. In which casualty might happen and fatality could result.

The guide rail of thought will sometimes protect and prevent, especially from veering off the side into a ravine of lifechanging consequence. We must always journey, leisurely, decisively, confidently, and purposefully, even when aimless, it should still be in sobriety that we might arrive safe to the company, care, and comfort of those whose thoughts surround us, inspire us, and keep us living for something. Where are our thoughts leading us?

A WEIRD prism is just one perspective

Influences of significance

When my dad said over a decade ago, “You have always thought like a Westerner.” I feigned ignorance of what he implied, but it got me thinking about things that baffle me daily. How it is that my worldview on many issues and situations are so radically different from many with whom I am supposed to share a heritage.

Then again, I realise that I have also fallen into a trap and a misconception about culture and values needing to converge to a Judeo-Christian Western construct with the view that those who appear to deviate from such might not represent the best of our humanity.

How marriage changed us

Indeed, many of our international laws of trade, of industry, of life, or of diplomacy follow a broadly western model that has become a synonym for modern and civilised, we miss out on understanding other constructs, cultures, civilisations, and customs that makes other members of our diverse humanity uniquely different, interesting, and rich.

This was brought into stark relief when I listened to a podcast The West and the Rest by Matthew Syed on BBC Radio 4 on his Sideways series, which started with the observation of different psychological responses to what was studied and expected in the West to how intriguingly the advent of Christianity changed marital norms like forbidding marriage to cousins, opening clans to strangers and birthed the kind of innovation and mindset that typifies the West today. [BBC Radio 4 Sideways Podcast: 3. The West and the Rest]

Weird as we come

It begs the question about who the weird ones are, we in the west or the non-western cultures. Whilst there is no way I will pass for a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant), I am most definitely one of the WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialised Rich and Democratic), a psychological term that was defined in the 2000 book, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich.

Having an audible copy of this book, it would probably give me an appreciation of why I think differently and why I should make ample accommodation for how other cultures will not converge to my worldview. This would mean we need to negotiate and agree on certain principles, attitudes, and rules for the good of humanity even if implementations will differ.

I come away with the insight that cultural divides will only be bridged with an openness of the mind and the putting away of the western hubris that has led us on spectacularly failed escapades of sowing seeds of our kind of civilisation around the world.

Read or listen

The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous [Amazon]

 

Thought Picnic: Problem Solving or Providing Solutions

Tyres and travel

Problem-solving can be interesting, you find yourself in the middle of some difficultly and caught in the maelstrom of something not going right that you need to right.

Problems however have a small sphere of choices to tackling the issue. A problem can be a punctured tyre, you fix it by changing the tyre.

You probably cannot stop a problem from happening, but if you had the greater scope of tackling a problem with providing a solution, you might get better tyres, ply a different route than one riddled with nails or sharp objects that could puncture tyres, have the road swept or even travel by other means of transport, by rail, by water or by air.

Time of travel, route and destination being factors and variables of that solution beyond the risk of a flat tyre.

Nailing the problem

Solutions have the latitude of choice because you are free from being tied to a particular problem to looking at all the issues and circumstances that present that type of problem.

Then again, a problem can be a nail that for whatever reason cannot be hammered in properly to complete some furniture. Obviously, you could hit the nail harder, maybe try to prise the nail out and try to hammer in another nail and still end up with the same problem.

If you decided to use joinery you have a solution without the need of nails, you could adopt a flat pack method that uses screws, joinery also does not require nails, maybe mould the furniture piece or forge it.

Beyond the nail, when one is abstracted from the problem, you have the opportunity to think up solutions, you move from immediacy of the particular to the appreciation of the general. You elevate the craft from the bubble of problem solving that a technician is saddled with to providing a solution that an expert is engaged for.

Stirring the solution

Providing a solution allows new thinking, resourceful thinking, allows for new approaches to a thorny issue and gives options to jettison whatever had been done before where things have been stuck in a rut.

It is the difference between fighting the politics of the way things were done before and a new way of doing things and doing those things differently and better. That is the spirit of progress and the joy of engineering solutions.

There are situations where the circumstances require that the presumptions of the resident geek be challenged, they having framed issues in their concept of what they think the problem is.

One can understand the difficulty if that becomes what solutions are being crafted for but it restricts the focus of the solution provider to that perspective resulting in a frustrating conflict of ideas, as a preponderance is being given to a situation over another quite unfairly.

Not on my rope

At which point the debate has to shift radically, let them down easily but not on my rope, one is here to provide solutions not solve problems, it can personal and one is presented with feeding the egos of geniuses who should be seriously preoccupied with something else.

Now, how do you present this in a meeting? Wisdom and tact with English reserve does not seem to be hitting the nail on the head of this conundrum, yet if we must pass the test of reasonableness, it must not be centred on solving the problem but on providing a solution. I have to get this across, assertively, aggressively and conclusively.

Thought Picnic: Fix the road and leave the wheel alone

Wheeling and dealing

Caught between the choices for the path forward, one is left looking for analogies to properly encapsulate the situation and hopefully persuade the decision makers of the best course.

I have moved beyond the concept of reinventing the wheel, it cannot be made any rounder than it is, it is a circle, and that is a closed discussion.

Probably there is a case for reviewing the materials used in the manufacture of the wheel, but that also after thousands of years of evolution, testing, change and review leaves us with the best wheels ever made in the history of man.

A little strengthening, probably for resilience and all terrain use that resists wear and tear is not necessarily ground-breaking stuff, rather it would for the inventor just be a differentiating selling point.

Fix the road

The next thing to consider is the road, the path, the way the wheel bearing load would travel and the comfort that it offers.

Much can be done about roads, and I have come to the conclusion that when the road is rough you work on the road and not on the wheel. Working on the road offers a broader advantage to every road user than working on the wheel would.

This is the kind of thinking that should go towards solving technical problems too. Understand what the wheel is and what the road is and act accordingly.

Decade Blogs - Dupe Killa - The Broken Ones

Decade Blogs

Dupe Killa runs a familial posse of sisterly and maternal oversight on Twitter, and I first encountered her in one of those affectionate exchanges with her wards, I could not help but be engaged.

Besides, there are many times I have written blogs that pertain to the deepest things of the heart that she has commented on to commiserate, comfort and empathise.

It is on the basis of this that I asked her to contribute to my #YourBlogOnMyBlog Series commemorating my Decade of Blogging which she willingly acceded to.

Blog - To Celebrate My Decade of Blogging

Dupe Killa in The Broken Ones laments how we have lost our way, to pursuits of the ephemeral, in incessant self-aggrandisement and selfish acquisition of material things at the expense of purposeful and useful lives.

On Twitter, she is friend, sister, mum, follower and followed by the handle @dupekilla – Enjoy …

The Broken Ones…

How does one start to calibrate the damage of materialism and the emptiness it brings in the multitude of acquired ‘stuff’? Is it by the darkness of the void created by the blind pursuit of ‘things’? Or is it by measuring the reverberation of the sound of emptiness where reason (cold, deep and track-able) should have been loud, clear and objective?

Before our eyes, the pursuit of happiness has been blatantly reduced to nothingness. Nowadays, if you cannot touch it, use it, spend it, then it cannot be contributory to happiness. Under our watch, we eroded the time-tested methods of self-improvement and the uplift of humanity. We did not only move backwards, we stepped away entirely from the tracks of human progression.

We are broken.

The Sea and Broken Wings by LuneBleu

Maybe it is just me but run a system check on yourself too, please. How many people in your circle can build a car? Or a phone? How many can fix a broken device…any device? How many have created something new? Something different? Do you have anyone in your orbit who can create a flying object? Do you know anyone that still flies kites? Does anyone collect anything? Stones, shells, anything? Is anyone in your network a gardener? Do they dream of creating flower hybrids or new plants? Do they ponder with you, the quandary of creating seedless fruits? No?

Okay, turn the other cheek. Are your families and friends big shoppers? Label and brand hunters? Are you all ‘early arrivals’ to the latest gadgets’ markets? Do you find yourself gasping for the ‘next thing’ just after acquiring the current best thing? Do you keep questing, thirsting for more? Are you beset by a feeling of inexplicable dissatisfaction with your life as you know it even after ‘counting all your blessings’? Do you ponder for long moments the question: ‘what is this life’ and yet have no answers?

Are we not broken?

When technology over-dosed, we gorged and are now suffering the consequences. The world shrunk, everything became available without notice or manual. The choices we had were endless and it was always going to be tough making the right call. We inevitably made the wrong calls no thanks to Sod’s law. The simple life was too mainstream, so off that went. Why fix things when you can get a new one? So off went incremental knowledge too. What we forgot is that in fixing, we learn the whys, the hows and the ‘never-agains’

The biggest tragedy however has to be the wholesale monetisation of emotions. We want it and we want it now, flunk delayed gratification. We are broke… and broken. Saliently or otherwise, we have tacitly agreed that ‘everyone has a price tag’. The evidence of that lies in the fact that the very best of us simply asks that the price be high. What a tragedy that we all can actually be bought. What a degree of brokenness…

If perchance you find some recognition or truth in any of the above and want to make an effort to fix it, it is possible. You can try and fix yourself and then focus on ensuring the next generation are not beset by your ‘brokenness’ either genetically or socially. Focus on the little things: eat and drink sensibly… give rather than receive where possible… fix it if it is broken, don’t bin it… find some simple, yet special endeavour and dedicate yourself to it.

Ask how stuff works and see if you can replicate or improve it however crude your tools and methods. Create your tools. Consciously be at one with nature from time to time. Question everything in a progressive way. Pledge on behalf of the next generation: Never Again.

Life broke us. Can you fix you?

Broken pieces by www.JaqueWatkins.com

Thought Picnic: Finding purpose in the therapy of my blogs

My unsure person

I attended my second session of freeform therapy this morning where we covered so much ground I have to reflect to understand where we are heading.

We started with discussing my interview concerns that left me a lot less confident about my prospects and the steps I was taking to ameliorate the situation.

How I feel

Then the clinical psychologist reviewing much of what I said from my writings to my lived experiences noted themes of humanity, compassion and introspection. We need to work on these elements of my predisposition to see where we need to go.

She felt I am beginning to build structures and move away from the ruinous losses than have defined the past few years. We need to find ways to take the positives expressed and use those to find more purpose in life.

The place of blogging

Whilst I do not appear to devote much time to thinking or meditation, my blogging is a channel, the way it feels I am like a man possessed when I write has qualities we need to explore.

However, the way I view things is about the story, a long story of human experience where I learn, appreciate, understand and share using the narrative talent I have in the hope that it helps someone else.

Unsure but assured

It will soon come together but as I think about the last two sessions, the next appointment might explore these issues better – I do not know where we are going yet, but I think it is all useful still.

There are discussions we have having I will never manage on a blog or with people, I already know. I am assured there are benefits to being able to share all and bare all with a professional as they help the understanding to better handle issues.

It is early days yet.

Thought Picnic: Hope shortens the day

Of news you cannot change

11 years ago, he heard and learnt with confirmation that life will be different; it will change and be the determinant of the future whether it be long or short.

He took the news with stoicism, aware that events that led to this conclusion could only have been his fault and so he had to face the consequences of his actions.

However, at the back of his mind, he reckoned that much as he had allowed those circumstances, he could not condemn himself in the things that he had allowed. Regrets will not change the facts of the new life ahead of him.

Where hope is

The day could have been long with anger, the night following with depression, the future looming with thoughts almost suicidal, every waking hour filled with worry and the will to live sapped of all its verve that tomorrow will never come.

He did not let that dominate his thinking, for beyond this was the possibility, the realisation that the missing component to the hearing of such news is hope.

For hope takes you from today to the next, it gives you expectation of change however remote it might be, it shortens the day and ushers in the morrow continuing the cycle of life for renewal.

Keeping on

That hope, despite all, has kept him going, through thick and thin, much and lack, excess and privation, having and having not, and it still shines as a beacon of things to come.

For the many milestones that the 20^th of September represents, he will not faint; neither shall his sight fail to see that things will only get better and that the best is really yet to come.

Here is to life and all the experiences that have become an elixir of life.

Related Blog

Thought Picnic: The sentence of death in ourselves

Thought Picnic: In the open and broad light of day

I know I did

The last thing I did was send a message via WhatsApp and I shut down the phone to conserve battery power. Soon after, rather than put the mobile phone in my belt holster, I put it in my bag, I also switched off my Samsung Galaxy Tab and my mobile wireless dongle– I vividly remember all that, in that order.

Whenever I put my mobile phone in my bag, it always goes into the upper zippered compartment in the bag, it is the same place where my pill box and dongle goes.

But it’s not there

As I left one place for another close to midnight, I looked in my bag and somehow, I could not find my mobile phone, my mind raced ahead of my reality – I had lost it, and with that, it defined what I could see and what I could not – I earnestly believed I had lost my phone on the second and third time of checking. I was literally driven to distraction, well almost.

Now, impulsively, I could have returned to where I was to ask if anyone had handed in my phone, but I decided it could wait, but that wait almost made the night look like it would never end.

Wait for the morning

I knew there was nothing I could do until the morning, but I had to have a plan of action, return to the venue to ask about my phone, report it lost, engage the remote control antitheft facility to locate it if it gets switched on, have a picture taken of the person using it and send a message that I be contacted immediately before performing a remote wipe of the data.

Then again, I was ahead of myself, there is too much data on that phone for me to scrub it just like that, besides, it is my most reliable point of contact in these times of transition apart from the second interview I have scheduled for Thursday – mitigation, contingency, recovery and near panic – well, not really.

I tried to scheme what I needed to do and after having made out my plan to go out first thing in the morning to ask about my phone, I did everything to switch off from the bother and got on with other activities using my handy gadget that harbours the demons that haunt me constantly – the self-destruct button – a rational fatalism and much else.

Your spirit speaks

As the dawn broke, just as I reached for my bag, a voice in my head said, your phone is with you whilst another jocularly said, Fat Chance!

In the open light of day, as I considered unpacking my bag for one last time, the first thing I picked out of the upper zippered compartment was my mobile phone.

This clearly illustrates how our minds can becloud our reality leading us to believe something completely different from the truth despite the fact that the recollection of past events were as vivid as anyone could have them, I knew I put the phone in the bag, I could not think of how it could have slipped out – but there.

A switch for the mind

Besides, whilst this was another test of how I handle situations, I have been informed by experience again that I should trust my judgement a bit more, especially where I can recollect to minute detail what I did before.

More importantly, what you just need to time, maybe a clear head, maybe just absence from the situation or a wait until the dawn – usually that means you are tackling the problem with a fresh mind and all that exacting preoccupation of the mind and plans – We need a switch for that thing called the mind.

Thought Picnic: They say and it does

Say a little

My silent prayer as each day comes and goes, long and short depending on the excitement it brings or the disappointment it sows is that I never be so exhausted that I begin to lose hope.

However, I am only human, subject to everyday emotions, moods that attempt to billow in the wind but sometimes seem to have been swept by a hurricane – a deafening sound of foreboding and scurry for shelter as one decides to be deaf and blind to the storm to find words that speak peace from deep inside.

Think it

I need insight and I need ideas, I cannot afford not to appreciate what I need to do and much as I need to know how to go about it – it is a constant process of innovation and reinventing of oneself, weighing options and discarding choices until everything begins to work the way things should.

Yes, I tire, but cannot retire, I am buffeted from all sides, blow after blow after blow, none without consequence but for every weakness that the blows exploit, I find even more strength from recesses I never knew I had to withstand and stand – I will not be vanquished.

Get there

The battle, they say, is in the mind and so I refuse to allow the clouds of gloom to gather for a thunderstorm of a crisis that no emergency can attend but rise above the cover that defines the weather into the light and warmth of sun to receive enlightenment and encouragement.

It shall pass, it cannot come to stay, but like it has been written from time before, and it came to pass that what was expected endured beyond what one dreamt was ever possible – such is the power of hope in the spirit of the man – to see and to attain.

Thought Picnic: Use your heads more than your hands

Cross, really cross

Miffed does not begin to describe my feeling a few days ago when a good week after I had asked agents to sort out the issues of my proof of address, I got another email asking for the same. I covered that issue in an earlier blog.

It simply highlighted they are done nothing since then and I was not ready to stand for any nonsense. Immediately, I despatched an email to those who matter and asked that the recommended agency be dropped from handling my business for their lack of initiative and understanding of my situation.

Sorted in stride

I was quite pleased that the matter was resolved within the hour as all the parties immediately communicated with each other and appeared to reach some sort of compromise.

My premise was that it had become an inconvenient distraction and it could begin to interfere with my ability to concentrate on what I had to do.

Besides assurances I got from my employer, the agency sent me two emails, one from my first contact apologising for the misunderstanding and putting it down to chaser emails and the other also apologising but adopting a line of defence I will deal with below.

Now, because I have always worked in Information Technology, I rarely buy the idea that computers are to blame for problems created by poorly implemented algorithms without the requisite simulation of human interaction but that is the problem with processes, they sometimes take away initiative when the process is not fit for purpose.

As for the other email, I was told I was granted a month of leniency to produce some proof of residence, it was a statement that made me all the more irksome.

Understanding not leniency

Why I would want leniency is beyond me, I have committed no offence nor have I been criminal; I have just returned to the UK and within 6 days gotten a job that has me travelling around Europe – is that a crime? There literally will be no time to set up and proof residence for the foreseeable future.

If anything, rather than understand the exceptional circumstances I presented them, I was left to run the gauntlet of a rote-serf devoid of the ability to as it were think outside the box and where incapable, escalate to better equipped and informed persons in the hierarchy they report to.

Nothing annoys me more than being offered the excuse, “I am only doing my job” don’t even get me going because it implicitly means, “I do not know how to think through the problems I am given, I have to be told what to do.”

Managers and others

That again was a situation I met at my hotel this morning after a night without wireless internet connectivity. I let it rest thinking someone will address the matter with urgency only to be met by a desk clerk who suggested the service was offered by another company and that they were not responsible, then crowning the nonchalance with the fact that the service is free.

O God, I am blessed beyond what words can describe that I will rarely be gainsaid, if ever. Thank you.

I made it clear that it was because of that free service that my team had considered booking 5 rooms and then an additional 3 rooms in his hotel. It was a critical service component that gave them the competitive advantage that he should not ignore or we will take our business and the remaining 12 days of stay elsewhere.

I then said if he could do nothing about it, I would rather speak to someone senior like the manager to which he responded he was the manager. Nothing could be further from the truth because no decent manager shirks responsibility to ensuring a critical though free service component remains unavailable without showing a sense urgency to resolve the same.

And then this too

Desk clerks are not all like that, the one I met earlier in the day allowed me to use their computer to send an urgent email to the office.

This afternoon before I left to find a café from where I wrote this, I did meet the manager and what a difference there is between a manager and desk clerk.

That same difference was evidenced at the office between managers who asked having seen us in a room before locking the door and cleaners who after cleaning the rooms and seeing us move in and out of the room still locked the doors without asking and disappeared. If people will just use their heads before their hands.

Exasperation! Breathe, Akin breathe.