Robert Paterson's Weblog

My Many Lives - What next?

I feel like a teen again. At 61 I wonder who I will become in the next few years. So I am going back to the big choice I made when I had to decide what path I was to take for the working part of my life.

If I had to live my life all over again, I would have chosen this. I chose it then. I was all set to go to RMC and enter the Canadian Army. But I had second thoughts and backed out.

I loved acting too and was good at it. Many encouraged me to go into theatre. 

But what decided me was that I needed to get away from my family - in every way. And so earning the kind of money that would make me independent early was the decing force. So Soldier Rob and Actor Rob did not grow. Though they both still live in me.

I became banker Rob

Here I am in my uniform!

But in my mid forties I could not be Banker Rob any more. I became Teacher/Consultant Rob.

At first I worked with large organizations and still kept the "Look" of that world.

But as I began to immerse myself in nature and networks, I drifted away from the Corporate World. We did not fit anymore.

I became more relaxed.

Here I am at NPR having a good day with Doc Searls and Jeff Jarvis.

As I drifted even further from the corporate world, I toyed with becoming the sage.

But now I feel the warrior returning. I feel that I will have to fight for the new world that is the only way my grand children will have much of  chance.

Funny how life comes around?

 

Why are we so fat in rural settings - Part 4 - Because we don't fit the industrial world

In this last post of this series, I will explore the downside and the upside of our special tribal Gael and First Nations culture in rural Canada and America. 

We have seen that there are many physical reasons why those who live in big cities tend to be thinner/healthier than the rest of us who live in rural settings.

We have seen that a major factor is also status. In a city like Paris, London or New York you are part of the elite of the Industrial world. In rural areas like PEI or Louisiana we get the crumbs of this system. They tell us what we can have and it's not much.

We have seen that a factor for why we are fat is that we are influenced by our friends and family.

We have seen that our ancestry plays a role too. Most of us are Gaels or First Nations. We are the last of the Western Hunter Gatherers and so we are the least adapted to the modern diet.

Today we are going to look at our culture. This too is a factor in why we mainly live in places outside the best oportunities in the industrial system. It is why if we have to leave to go to the big city for work, we long to come home. To come home to a place where there are few jobs. It is why we like the seasonal nature of our system.

We don't want to make working for the man the centre of our life.

Our Hunter Gatherer culture is a powerful force that lingers on in us. Culture hard wires into behaviour. You can see this easily in dogs. A Border Collie that has never seen a sheep will still have all its cultural wiring in place to herd. Even a Pekenese will defend her owner as she was once a guard dog. 

So do we. For, underneath the veneer of modernity, we Gaels and Native North Americans are still Tribal Warriors.

This is a reason why we are not well adapted to industrial life. This is why if given a chance we want to live on PEI, in Appalachia or in a tribal setting. 

Not having been farmers for millenia we don't do "clock" very well. We don't like to be told what to do. We love working out doors and don't like the inside that much. We don't take well to roles that are not earned. We like to know who people really are by reputation. "Who is your father?" is not a stupid question. Nicknames based on character are common. Your name is very important. Your family is important. Your place is important.

This has meant that we make poor peons and serfs. 

So our health is further compromised by poor opportunity and poor fit with the prevailing system. We remain the outcasts and the edge dwellers. We are the butt of jokes and predjudice. We have among the lowest status in our nations. 

But I think that we are just the right people to get our power back when a new form of Tribal/Networked/Local/Dispersed econonmy takes over from the impersonal money based power based Industrial system.

We have the best chance to get our health back by going back to our traditional diet. And we are best suited to a new economy that is based on the personal, the trusted and the tribe.

Those who laugh at us now will find life outside their comfort zone very challenging.  

That is quite a statement. So I will post a series on this next week. I will explore the new emerging reality of the new Tribal Economy where people live again, but in modern circumstances, the lives of Hunter Gatherers. 

But in closing this post on Canada day weekend and with July 4th on Monday - I would like to show you how much we have in common with each other. I would like to show you what special people we are.

We love to dance.

We love music

Our women are tough and noble

My Great Great Aunt Marguerite (Mackenzie) Allan - who lost these,both her daughters, on the Lusitania, her son on his first mission and who stayed on and founded a hospital to look after wounded Canadians.

Our men are tough and noble

We are a warrior society

We love our place.

It stirs me to see these pictures - for they remind me of who we are.

I think that our future is in remembering our past.

It is in bringing our cultures back to the fore. It is seeing the principles that embody them and in applying them to how we live our lives again. 

The hunter gatherer and heroic society has been crushed by the Industrial culture - crushed but not broken.

The next economy will be Tribal - parts of it are here already. It will be possible - no essential - to master the culture of the hunter gatherer again. I don't mean live the exact life but the DNA of that life. 

A life lived where, once again, the kind of man and woman you are is your "brand". Where your wealth is your tribe and how your peers regard you. Where none of your economic eggs are all in one basket. A life where you have real skills. Skills that can't be learned in 3 years from a series of books but have to be absorbed by working alongside others. A life where there is no separation between work and family. An economy, where your kids grow up with you and your wider family and learn from your life and the stories of their family.

A life where the meal and sharing food is the centre of the system. Where we know where our food comes from. A life where home is a place we would die for.

Next week I will put flesh on these bones. But for now, as we take pride in our wider nations of Canada and America, let us also take pride in our tribes. 

Why many women worry

The image of the beautiful woman is entirely manufactured - don't believe me?
Watch this.

See life through the eyes of a child - Living in Wonder Again

Living in a Chaotic World
What do theories that deal with relativity, space and time curvature, the speed of light, big bangs, “cats in boxes” and particles have to do with how you and I live our lives?

I think that they are beginning to affect many of us and I would like to tell you a bit about how I see their impact on us as individuals. I see some new patterns, or beacons, emerging which have helped me explain to myself the previously un-explainable. I have also found a number of activities and a way of looking at the world which have helped me become better reconnected to the universe. So if you don’t mind, here is how Rob is affected by the new story and here are some of the pointers that he uses to find his way around in the new world.

Normal Reality
Most days I experience the world quite conventionally. After all, like you, I was brought up in the old story. I know that I am separate from you. I know that things are real, I can’t walk through walls. I know that big boys can beat up smaller ones. I know that if I don’t control everything and everyone around me there will be chaos. I know that should be a rational answer for everything. I know that I will have to struggle for everything that I want. I know that I am responsible for all my family and even for some of my friends. I know that my father has been dead for 18 years. I can no longer hold his hand or hear his voice. My slipped chest, my graying hair and my need to wear glasses tell me how real time is. I fear the day of my own death, the day that I will be separated from all that I “know”.

New Reality
But on other days, on my good days, I experience the world quite differently. I know that work will arrive when I need it. I know that as I help a young girl with her heavy luggage, a stranger will do the same for my daughter. I know that my “rival” at the bank has helped me more than most “friends”. I can hold my glass of wine and feel the sun on the vines. I can have “bad” things happen to me and know that I am fine. I can find the most difficult work easy. I can meet a stranger and find a soul mate. I can hug my son and hug my father. I can look into the mirror and see the boy that I still am. I can look up at the night sky and know that I am at the very centre of all time and all existence.

Sometime during this decade I crossed a line and a “New Reality” burst into my life. Now I spend more and more of my time consciously in the “New”. The New, for me, is a reality informed by the rules of connection, relationships and is nourished by an eternal source of energy.

Does the idea of a “Line” make sense to you? Can you recall when you lived only in the old? Can you now, in the first seconds of meeting another know if the new person has crossed the Line as well? How many people in the new do you meet now? Is this number growing and how fast? Do you feel sad that many of your long standing friends and members of your immediate family, maybe even your spouse, are on the other side? Do you know enough now to be careful about who you open up to in conversation.? Does it surprise you that you can be completely open to a stranger who has crossed the line?

Did you have a guide who put out their hand to you when you were standing in fear on the far side of the Line? How did they help you find the courage to take that first step? Who was this person? Was she or he a stranger or someone close to you? What role do you play when you meet others who are trembling alone at the edge?

Did you discover that you had new and powerful powers of discernment about people and events? What kind of trouble did you get yourself into with these new powers? How much do you trust these powers now? Have you found that if you channel these new powers into an intention that you, without any effort, can do great things?

Intention
Have you discovered the power of Intention? I suspect that Intention is the process that enables us to co-create a new world. I have found that if my intention is pure that I can become part of a new evolution of reality. I have found that a pure Intention has some rules. If I include the how, it does not work. If I include just me, it does not work. If I exclude others, it does not work.

Intention seems to drive another key process “Synchronicity”. I experience Synchronicity when things and people turn up in the right way and the right time. Synchronicity makes all work seem easy. I have found that a key rule for supporting Synchronicity is to keep my need to control people and events to the minimum. Synchronicity seems to drive wonderful accidents.

How big is Synchronicity in your life right now?
Synchronicity is mainly about Connections. Hope, our daughter, can be eating a meal in a small village in Turkey be told that she must come outside and meet a man who looks exactly like her brother James. The young man standing outside is identical to our son James and has the same name, James. Known as Jamie, he is the son of a friend of mine at University whom I last saw 27 years ago in England. How does the universe set these meetings up? What do they mean? Do they happen to you and how often?

Better Connections seems to improve our health and our peace of mind. In the new reality, it seems that a clear objective in life, an aim in itself, is to improve the number and quality of our connections. This appears to be a rule. As the internet expands, it becomes more robust. We are disabled by strokes because they reduce the number and the quality of connections in our brain. Have you noticed how much better you feel as your family of soul mates expands? Have you noticed how every aspect of your life improves? I am going as far as to say that my network of connections is the source of what I might broadly define as my Wealth.

Wealth
I always used to think of Wealth as having a lot of money. My purpose for the first part of my life was to increase the amount of money I had. I still think that money is important but I am now seeing that my Wealth is much broader than just money. I now see it as a function of the number and quality of my Connections. My connections bring me work and hence indirectly they bring me money. Much of what I bring to my work are my connections. I am able to bring other people’s skills which balance out mine. But this new kind of wealth is much more powerful than money. These connections bring me peace of mind and comfort. They therefore also bring me something that money cannot buy, they create the larger me. I have started to think of myself as a painting. Each person who sees a painting sees something different from other people. So each new connection exposes a new part of me to myself and to the universe. This is why I think that I am created by my interaction with others. I think that this is an important insight. It explains why those people who are not well connected seem to shrink. Does this make sense to you? Think of a time when you were so busy that you drifted away from others. How did you feel? More human or less? Think of a time when you were strongly linked to others. How did you feel then? The paradox is that when we have a difficult challenge in front of us, we often default in the doing and lose the connections and hence our power. Maybe a better way is to begin by reinforcing the connections?

As I have found the benefit of improving the number and quality of my human connections, so I have begun to notice an improvement in my life as I increase and improve the number and quality of my connections with the natural world. If you want to become better reconnected to the rhythms of the universe, think of living in a place where you are connected to the change of the seasons and have access to the night sky. Seasons and the moon have a huge impact on us: if we let them into our lives. When I lived in the big city, my life was full speed ahead no matter what the season and of course I could not see the night sky and therefore lost touch with the moon. There was no rhythm to my life. Now I live on Prince Edward Island where these forces are quite manifest. Do you feel the pull of the moon and do you change your life significantly with the change of the seasons?

Robin and I garden. She gardens and I putter really. Beyond being more closely connected to plant life (no small thing!), gardening has enabled me to connect to many species of animal and insect. It has also reconnected me to the soil itself. Soil has shifted from being “Dirt” to being a valuable living organism. Other than earwigs, we try not to kill any living thing. Sharing my dinner in the summer in the garden with the wasps has become an interesting interaction. Do you garden? Even having a window box is a good start. Do you have the time to garden?

Time and being busy were the critical barriers to my own ability to reconnect to the most important connection, to myself. The paradox of being reconnected to the universe, which seems all out there, was becoming reconnected to myself. I have come to believe that any relationship that I have with an outer being depends essentially on the quality of the relationship that I have with myself. So long as I was all over the place in myself, how could I be in a quality relationship with anyone or anything else. So long as I was so busy, I did not know who I was. Do you feel satisfied with the relationship that you have with yourself? Do you know the lies that you tell yourself?

Connected to Myself
The most important revelation that has opened up for me, is that being connected to myself, going in rather than going out, means that I am never alone anymore. The universe is not just out there, it is also in here. As this belief seeps into my being, I am beginning to realize that I will never be alone again.

This is not new wisdom. It is the oldest wisdom of our species. The difference is, I suspect, that this wisdom is becoming immanently known to an ever widening group of people. There is something about our time that is awakening many people. Its not just the baby boom and midlife crisis. Have you noticed that this process of crossing the Line is happening to people of all ages. I see it happening to younger friends in their thirties. I see it happening to people in my parent’s generation and, most wonderful of all, I see that my children, in their early twenties and late teens, are already there. I see that nearly all young children are there anyway.

Maybe all young children have always been there. Something, maybe school, happened which caused us to forget and to go back to a world of burdens and loneliness. Maybe we listened too carefully to Paul who told us to put away childish things and we forgot the teachings of Jesus who told us that heaven was only available to those that had become like children again. So we forgot what it is like to trust, to be filled with wonder, to know that to play is to learn, to use our bodies as well as our minds.

Eyes of a Child
I am now convinced that a good way for us to our lives consciously in the universe is to look at children with fresh eyes. To see our children as our teachers. To live our lives more like them than like us.

I don’t mean that adults should aim to be more childish. I suspect that this is the one unpleasant aspect of childhood that we have not given up. I am talking about being more childlike. Can you remember how you felt to see snow for the first time? To walk up to a stranger and say “Can I be your friend?. To know that what you really need right now is a big hug? To be so sad one moment and so happy the next? To be told that grandpa has gone to heaven and to know that he is safe and OK? To have to get off your bottom right now and run around the garden? To hear a story and know that it is real? To know that the next meal will be on the table?

My intention is to bring back the boy Robert into my daily life. He was, and is, the finest part of me. I have a photo of him by my desk. He is about 6, wearing shorts and a sweater, on the beach in Cornwall, England. He holds an anchor and is calling to his sister Diana.

He is saying something like, “Come here and play with me, it is such fun!”

To live like this is truly to be alive.

Adrienne Clarkson - Making her Mark

New Year 2004/5 in Kabul (Photo: Jim Farrell)

For many of her Christmases, our Governor General, who was accused of being an elitist, was not at home but in the field and even at sea with the men and women of our armed forces. She took her role as C in C very seriously at a time when most politicians paid them lip service. She gave them herself.

AC in the Junior Ranks Mess Dancing on New Year's Eve 2005 (Photo: Cpl Stephen Phillips, DND Photographer)

On Tuesday, they honour her.

What a great Governor General we have had. Best wishes to her and to JRS who was so kind to me many years ago when I thought I knew so much about life and the world.

How does the New Nexus work in Real Time with Citizen Journalists?

Here is a wonderful piece by Elliott Massie (via Learning Post) who observed how the CNN News Team are drawing in and filtering and then broadcasting a flood of blogs, video, photos coming in from Citizens and how their own journalists are turning to use satellite and final cut pro locally to turn around material immediately.

Major extract follows

What is poor - Dina's perspective

This is what "poor" means in India

Katrina - When the rulers get above themselves

Here is Peter Ustinov in my favorite role as Nero in Quo Vadis singing "Oh Lambent Flame" as Rome burns. The self centred ruler of all time?

"Images of the neurotic, wimpy Emperor warbling wretched verses over Rome in conflagration, and then seeking a scapegoat to preserve his pitiful life have been indelibly preserved on celluloid for all ages. Historians have penned more accurate accounts, but Ustinov's rendition will be forever fixed in public consciousness. As Petronius states, “Now indeed, Nero has his place in history.”

Here is the President on Aug 30th. What place will he have in history?

The perils of flashing in the Camera Phone Web Age

Thanks to Jason this pic plus comment on flickr of a guy exposing himself on the subway - how many millions have seen him now?

One way of dealing with folks like these - as you will read the police cannot help

The perils of flashing in the Camera Phone Web Age

Thanks to Jason this pic plus comment on flickr of a guy exposing himself on the subway - how many millions have seen him now?

One way of dealing with folks like these - as you will read the police cannot help

Update thanks to Gabe - he is on the front page of the News