2020 informed us about us. Aspects perhaps we surreptitiously hid from our awareness. Thrown back upon just ourselves, many have felt over the limits of their personal resourcefulness.The pandemic has also pared things back to its essentials and a simpler appreciation of life. This, for me, has been where the enjoyable bits were to be found, alongside the truly dreadful
Jnanasalin and I were able to take advantage of daily walks in our surrounding countryside and coast. Which, when you live in a place like North Norfolk, its easy to take for granted. I found a strip of lonely pebble beach where I love to go for a bit of alone time. Discovering together in the Spring a beautiful bluebell wood a brief walk from our house, we had no idea existed. Small important joys.
What curtails deeper engagement in anything, is believing you haven't sufficient time for it. My reading of novels in particular, had become reduced to a brief bedtime read before shut eye. Substantial books requiring prolonged attentive reading I've often struggled to make much progress with.
You have to slow your pace of life down in order to read well. Being driven by a perpetual state of haste, trying to do two or more things at a time, skims over the surface of literature, as well as life Rather than fully savouring each moment of the lived reading experience.
Damian Barr's Big Scottish Book Club did not just revive my desire to read, but also to read well, to set aside time solely for reading. Even developing an ongoing list of books I intend to buy from my local independent bookstore in Holt
Recommended Reading: Damian Barr /Maggie & Me - Douglas Stuart/Suggie Bain - Sayaka Murata/Convenience Store Woman. - James Baldwin/The Fire Next Time/Notes of a Native Son
Its much the same when you're listening to music, you need to provide the space to give it closer attention within. You can just leave music pootling away in the background. But not all the time, otherwise we only gain a sense of it as aural wallpaper, not the breadth and beauty of sound or emotional resonance. This year my engagement stepped up a gear in the pursuit of fresh musical landscapes. It has had two prominent directions- the individual, distinctly personal voice and the other more experimental vehicles for grand noise, with the occasional mash up of the two.
Recommended Listening: Joni Mitchell - Richard Dawson - Cabaret Voltaire - Chris & Cosey - Anna Von Hauswoolf - Anna Meredith - Silver Mt Zion - Eliane Radigue
With the inexorable rise of Zoom, meditating with others was still possible, bridging distances from a mere tens of miles to whole continents,with Zen groups from Norwich to New York. The benefits of this has been plain to see in the regular maintenance of my practice. Zazen practice encourages being present with the present. In the midst of a pandemic and all the multitudinous concerns that arise out of it, it's been useful to practice grounding experience whilst remaining openly aware and letting go attachments to whatever arises.
Time and space also allows the heart to open up more, to respond to the rumblings of deeper streams, ones perhaps rarely touched upon amid the noise and hurly burly of so called 'normal' life. The very concept of normality has revealed the flimsiness of it as a confection. I've written in a broader range of forms and more frequently over this year. At times its been quite a thrilling ride setting out into new territory.
Films and TV have been a safe and comforting form of interaction with the outside world, but also quite a passive one. Great to vegetate in front of, but sometimes you need a richer more complex emotional engagement, than flashy editing and visuals alone can provide. So from films, documentaries to comedies I've appreciated things that provide a sense of closer human connection or an irresistible positive zest for life.
Recommended Watching: Ambulance - Hospital - Grayson's Art Club - Schitt's Creek - Bait - Battlestar Galactica - The Repair Shop - American Utopia - Streetcar Named Desire
We decided to adjust our mindset from 'online first' to prioritise 'local first'. You have to be willing to forego the convenience and potential cheapness of Amazon. But these always come with a hidden cost to something, whether its cheap slave labour overseas, the environment, or to your local economy. Online shopping has the potential to isolate us still more, whilst ruining our local quality of life. I've found I actually enjoyed the process of investing more of my cash in the Sheringham area. After all we are a local business ourselves, so this has been to do with extending the scope of how we collectively and individually walk our talk.
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