Getting on with it
Some days it is just about putting one foot in front of the other. I am now wondering, if, as you go older, the wonder starts to wear off.
I think I am slowly becoming an old cranky person. For a start, I think that maybe I don't know if I really like meeting new people. I wonder if at some point in your life, in my life, it gets to be, actually, I don't need to know any more new people. Which makes me think, why do we want to meet new people...? I don't know, I think I'm just being temporarily cranky.
My feet are killing me. We walked 10 miles today. It was a really beautiful day. It didn't feel like end November at all.
So many many thoughts.
First thoughts are, all the ink and education and the noise and the interconnectivity and the result is a more fractured and damaged world. I have never been so depressed about the state of the world. The self importance as well. The self importance of the people who have more or less created the mess who then say to all of us, I am now going to clean it up. This mess which I definitely did NOT create. I am so tired of watching this though. At first, I thought surely surely this very very old hat, right? How come people are so stupid? Why do they keep hammering their heads against brick walls in a futile manner? I don't understand how come people don't seem to understand what important things in life consist of. Love, being with those you care about, doing meaningful things, and when I say meaningful, I mean things which are beautiful and contribute to the general well being of humanity... people seem to be constantly obsessed with trying to be important...anyhow... what are these people trying to do?
Also the maya - the maya - the ability to be fooled by the illusion, that I really don't understand. Surely the entire point of education is to eventually engage with reality - and i mean real reality, the reality in which physics exists, not the nonsensical reality which the DUP and the racists and the neoliberals promote. A reality in which if you are elitists and horrible and judgmental, you will end up being karmaed big time. After all, what is karma, apart from physics in action? Centuries and centuries and stories and fairy tales and acres and acres of ancient wisdom... and we have some to this?
I also realise that I have been operating in a Steiner bubble. What is this bubble... well it is a little bit more like a Steiner teacher bubble. It involves mostly doing lots of reading about many many things and trying to condense them so that you can give the essence to the children. So, over the past years I have been reading all kinds of things, ranging from the collected works of Grimm to the Ramayana, learning about Astronomy and Ancient Rome... the list kind of goes on... on the outer limits of this, I have read about the Holy Grail, several Arthurian and Parsifal myths, looked at sacred geometry, etc... and it has been just mind blowing really. In between I cook, garden, be a mom... do some running, try to have a social life... it is really a very busy life... when I step out of this bubble, I constantly find two things... first the things which preoccupy people are vastly different from the things which preoccupy me, and secondly, how I seem to be really unable to relate much to anyone else beyond this bubble. It is not a great admission to make, really it isn't.
Also not a great admission is how much I prefer the Steiner-Stephanie bubble.
It is also quite depressing how stupid the world has become. Despite being able to share great works of art, poetry, discoveries, history, conveniences, communicate constantly, this has actually NOT improved or augmented our general intelligence one bit. In fact, rather worryingly it has disguised how stupid we are. What it has done has managed to create the illusion that we are intelligent - it is a bit like the Emperor's New Clothes. People now think that they have this fix for everything... the solution is OUTSIDE ourselves. The solution is never outside ourselves. If there is a problem we are both the cause and the cure for it. Thrashing around and finger pointing and trying to fix things beyond you ... that is just never going to work.
What else? It is also deeply frustrating that people think that solutions can be systemically solved. I have now come to the conclusion that there is an optimal size for an organisation and that beyond that, it cannot be resolved systemically. Systemic solutions are illusions. Solutions need to be real, concrete and tangible because people are all different. You can never EVER cater for everyone - whether it is in health or education or leisure, these things cannot be solved in a big way - instead they need to have local, small solutions. And it is when these local small solutions all come together, then you can get a great tapestry. But it doesn't really start with an omnivision - it is little, authentic, deeply rooted vignettes... and these will come and go, grow and die, like trees in forest.
This is actually the entire point of education... to create these self-sustaining, open-minded, flexible, creative people. However, as we have seen, over the past fifty years, education has clearly failed because the metrics of success have been exams and this has created an addiction to maya.
Being measured, needing to measure things according to a false set of values.
I suppose the only comfort I can take is that we are all equally at sea, all equally lost. There is no doubt about that.
Sometimes, the can-do nature, my can-do nature can become exhausted, eroded. It is hard to stay positive in the face of all this stupidity.
I think I am slowly becoming an old cranky person. For a start, I think that maybe I don't know if I really like meeting new people. I wonder if at some point in your life, in my life, it gets to be, actually, I don't need to know any more new people. Which makes me think, why do we want to meet new people...? I don't know, I think I'm just being temporarily cranky.
My feet are killing me. We walked 10 miles today. It was a really beautiful day. It didn't feel like end November at all.
So many many thoughts.
First thoughts are, all the ink and education and the noise and the interconnectivity and the result is a more fractured and damaged world. I have never been so depressed about the state of the world. The self importance as well. The self importance of the people who have more or less created the mess who then say to all of us, I am now going to clean it up. This mess which I definitely did NOT create. I am so tired of watching this though. At first, I thought surely surely this very very old hat, right? How come people are so stupid? Why do they keep hammering their heads against brick walls in a futile manner? I don't understand how come people don't seem to understand what important things in life consist of. Love, being with those you care about, doing meaningful things, and when I say meaningful, I mean things which are beautiful and contribute to the general well being of humanity... people seem to be constantly obsessed with trying to be important...anyhow... what are these people trying to do?
Also the maya - the maya - the ability to be fooled by the illusion, that I really don't understand. Surely the entire point of education is to eventually engage with reality - and i mean real reality, the reality in which physics exists, not the nonsensical reality which the DUP and the racists and the neoliberals promote. A reality in which if you are elitists and horrible and judgmental, you will end up being karmaed big time. After all, what is karma, apart from physics in action? Centuries and centuries and stories and fairy tales and acres and acres of ancient wisdom... and we have some to this?
I also realise that I have been operating in a Steiner bubble. What is this bubble... well it is a little bit more like a Steiner teacher bubble. It involves mostly doing lots of reading about many many things and trying to condense them so that you can give the essence to the children. So, over the past years I have been reading all kinds of things, ranging from the collected works of Grimm to the Ramayana, learning about Astronomy and Ancient Rome... the list kind of goes on... on the outer limits of this, I have read about the Holy Grail, several Arthurian and Parsifal myths, looked at sacred geometry, etc... and it has been just mind blowing really. In between I cook, garden, be a mom... do some running, try to have a social life... it is really a very busy life... when I step out of this bubble, I constantly find two things... first the things which preoccupy people are vastly different from the things which preoccupy me, and secondly, how I seem to be really unable to relate much to anyone else beyond this bubble. It is not a great admission to make, really it isn't.
Also not a great admission is how much I prefer the Steiner-Stephanie bubble.
It is also quite depressing how stupid the world has become. Despite being able to share great works of art, poetry, discoveries, history, conveniences, communicate constantly, this has actually NOT improved or augmented our general intelligence one bit. In fact, rather worryingly it has disguised how stupid we are. What it has done has managed to create the illusion that we are intelligent - it is a bit like the Emperor's New Clothes. People now think that they have this fix for everything... the solution is OUTSIDE ourselves. The solution is never outside ourselves. If there is a problem we are both the cause and the cure for it. Thrashing around and finger pointing and trying to fix things beyond you ... that is just never going to work.
What else? It is also deeply frustrating that people think that solutions can be systemically solved. I have now come to the conclusion that there is an optimal size for an organisation and that beyond that, it cannot be resolved systemically. Systemic solutions are illusions. Solutions need to be real, concrete and tangible because people are all different. You can never EVER cater for everyone - whether it is in health or education or leisure, these things cannot be solved in a big way - instead they need to have local, small solutions. And it is when these local small solutions all come together, then you can get a great tapestry. But it doesn't really start with an omnivision - it is little, authentic, deeply rooted vignettes... and these will come and go, grow and die, like trees in forest.
This is actually the entire point of education... to create these self-sustaining, open-minded, flexible, creative people. However, as we have seen, over the past fifty years, education has clearly failed because the metrics of success have been exams and this has created an addiction to maya.
Being measured, needing to measure things according to a false set of values.
I suppose the only comfort I can take is that we are all equally at sea, all equally lost. There is no doubt about that.
Sometimes, the can-do nature, my can-do nature can become exhausted, eroded. It is hard to stay positive in the face of all this stupidity.
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