Floating...

Recently been trying a form of gentle meditation...It's quite a simple technique: allow yourself to become more aware of the noises, events, visual and otherwise around you...Let youself become absorbed by all of that...
I find listening to music helps with this, but, anyway, it proves very soothing, and deeply relaxing

Question for Friday - Shoelaces

Why do shoelaces so easily become undone when you are in motion?

Why are shoelaces so hard to undo when you are still?

Answers on a postcard please to...

Another question for today

At what point does being lost become being found?

Answers on a postcard please to...

Being able to Read Fast

On my commuter train home tonight I sat opposite a guy who was reading a large paperback book. I noticed something quite remarkable (to me at least) about the way he was reading: he sat, calm, still, impassive, completely in the book. Two minutes after leaving the main London terminal he had flipped over a page. By the time we reached our first stop 3 minutes later he had flipped over another page. I realised he was averaging two pages every three minutes. That struck me as an incredibly fast read, incredibly fast...I suddenly wondered how is experience of books must be so diametrically opposed to mine...Really spooky-wooky. Then I got to thinking...And how fast does this guy "read" life, absorb life itself...To have a swift comprehension, a rapid understanding...Wow, I wonder how that places you in to the world, as compared to folks whot take maybe five times as long to read something...I switched on my Sony CD Walkman and reverted to the less user-activated process of listening to Classical music: Mendelsohn's Variations Serieuses in D Minor, performed by Aleksandar Serdar, a debut recital on EMI Classics. (Picked it up in Marylebone High Street Oxfam shop for a stunning four pounds 99 pence, fell in love with it, and have been listening to it ever since). Doing this made me feel briefly more centred and less disoriented. But raising my eyes up and across, and looking at Monignor SpeedReader opposite made me feel quite nauseous and frustrated again.

Speed-Reading Resources

A question for Today

What are the best ways of saving time on washing-up?

Rules of engagement:

• No dishwashers allowed
  
• No takeaways allowed
  
• No ready-meals allowed
  
  Mail me your answers and I will post them on this Blog.

Feeling Lost and somehow rootless, somehow apart? Try Steak

The past two times I've been to a restaurant, I've had the quasi-sensuous delight of eating steak, and relished every second, to the extent that I was oblivious to all the conversation being thrown way by my dining partner(s) (this often happens to me in restaurants, I slip in to a closed, womb-like, eerily silent world of rabid ingestion). I Felt more complete, more fulfilled, and a more wholesome/whole person afterwards...It felt like an act of primal, somehow essential agression...My friend John once proved his manhood to his father by eating a humungous steak in a restaurant somewhere in the deep south. Apparently it was part of a competition run by the restaurant...Something like "No-one has ever got through this steak before...Can you meet our challenge...?" John being John did so...

I wonder what kinds of action make one feel "restored", more complete, more part of the world? Why the hell eating steak should do this I don't know...I recall a conversation at an otherwise boring party with a very nice fellow - a therapist and drug counsellor, who wouldn't hurt a soul...He told me that he had been a dedicated, even obsessive, vegetarian, all his adult life...Then one day, out with his new partner, her child, and some friends, sitting in a restaurant, he savagely ordered a steak...And ate it, and enjoyed every second...And he never looked back.