swishism

“Planes of thought need to land, calm skies cause turbulence
semaphore.wave.inspiration - she’s hurtling!” - [verb]swish

Great ideas can crash and burn when they are left cruising overhead at altitude, or they can (literally) live to tell the tale.

We can scream attention to the ideas that are ‘out there’, manoeuvring them to touchdown on runways (paper) with ready pens (flags), or not.

How urgent is your wave?

swishism entry capturing ideas, choice, habit, ideas, initiative, signal, wave

Everything takes longer than you think it will. For all my interest in productivity and creativity, I have found this to be consistently true.

You can have it take ‘longer’ deliberately by planning the activity carefully at the start (which takes time) or you can just try and ‘wing it’ and find out later that ‘its a loooong ting’, as we say down here in South London.

Either way, everything takes longer than you think it will.

Happy wrestling.

swishism entry patience, planning, time, wrestling

“More than sitting on O’s and splitting ‘em with commas,
I’m trying to build shoulders.where.infants.stand, honoured.”
-[verb]swish

Just a thought I’ve been having that seemed to also find expression in this shot (left).  Fair enough, the kid is not exactly standing, but that doesn’t detract from what I love about it: You get the sense that 1) the kid weighs something
2) that his Dad, head bowed and more in shadow, sets up his son to bask in the light triumphantly. Get a look at his face, he really is on top of the world! Great capture. Perhaps it really captures what being a dad is all about?

I don’t have kids yet, but when I do- I hope God’ll give me the grace to give them this. My birthday, yesterday, gave me pause to think about how much my own Dad has done this for me, not least in writing. Thanks Pops.

Picture by Randy Son of Robert
Currently listening to  Lupe’s “He Say She Say“

swishism entry inheritance, legacy, love, mentor-mentee, posterity, sacrifice, stand, triumph

This might sound like a kinda of number geek thing, but relax it’s not (I’m not good at Math).  In fact it’s more to do with  a story about the evil spy-ware I found on my ailing laptop last week (OK, so it’s still a bit geeky, but more about that in Pt. 2)

Examples abound of creative people relying on heuristics, but lets start with geometry. I just tweeted about the best dance routine I’d seen in less than 4 square feet (see left).

Now, there are no rules for how to do this, how do you pack a routine in a space like this? It reminds me of the bag-packing heuristic, which explains why we put large items into a bag before the smaller ones, when we have odd shaped items. We do it, not because its guaranteed to work, but because there is no fixed answer, no fixed rules for how to solve these kinds of problem. You just have to do it. Importantly, this could be dismissed as common sense, but then how many routines are there like this?

swishism entry heurisitic, intuition, trial and error

Hustle. I’ve always liked that word. By hustle I mean ‘to obtain by energetic activity ‘ (not the underhand kind).  It reminds me of 5-aside football coaching screamed from the sidelines way back in Primary school.

“Hustle, hustle,  give and go. Shut him down!!”

The BBC did a survey recently that said the UK works the longest hours in Europe. I think this is true, but I would go further and say that the UK works the longest hours at stuff they absolutely loathe.   I say shuffle on, but if your gonna shuffle, then whatever your (other) hustle is, do it with passion and skill, relentlessly. (’stubborn’ is also a good substitute for ’skilled’ in this swishism)

For today’s caveat though, I like the way, Canadian rapper, Shad puts it:

“Just recognise this,  success won’t make you happy, at best it makes you rich /  at worst it makes you paranoid, bitter and afraid  - anyways, there’s no use for cash in the grave”

swishism entry grind, hustle, passion, taking action

Looks like spring is nearly here.  I got to thinking today,  how do I measure up against the created order? Knowing my foibles, vices, and  imperfections, how do I compete with the beauty of a perfect sunset, an effulgent starry night, the colours of a water lily? It seems  each has a way of effortlessly and consistently singing with its strongest hallelujah.

Predictably, it’s not a new problem, to borrow from Ravi Zacharias - “All new news is old news happening to new people.”  David, the ancient poet-king had the same problem it seems. In the Hebrew Psalms he writes,

When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,

what is man that you are mindful of him,
the son of man that you care for him?

Our lives are all songs it seems - potentailly as beautiful as the lillies, but unaware of how to sound.

Well,  God, I got to hand it to ya
Life’s a song,
when sung with hallelujah .
-[v]s

Picture by Kriket on flickr , CC

swishism entry beauty, creation, inadequacy, lillies, measuring up, songs, weakness

Read a useful post on Erin Dolan’s Unclutterer.com and this one jumped out.

swishism entry perseverance, planning, productivity

Just one of the things that runs through my mind during exercise: Here are a few others:

“Almost all the benefit comes at the very end” - From Covey’s VII Habits (oldie but a goodie)

“Not this guy, he’ll knack ya ta tomorrow Rock” - Mick persuading Rocky not to fight Clubber Lang

“I’m the best, I can’t be beat!” - Clubber Lang doing his best Ali impression

“It is not!!” - Me when reflecting on some random quote like  this from Jesus Shuttlesworth, in He Got Game:

And last but not least, this classic from the Karate Kid:

Kreese: Fear does not exist in this dojo, does it?
Karate Class: NO, SENSEI!
Kreese: Pain does not exist in this dojo, does it?
Karate Class: NO, SENSEI!
Kreese: Defeat does not exist in this dojo, does it?
Karate Class: NO, SENSEI!

swishism entry grit, pain threshold, wincing, workout

Everybody hates Chris. Well at least that’s how it appears on the face of it. Nearly everything Chris does is permeated by a sense of worry. Worry about what his parents will do to him when they discover his latest screw up; worry about his peers not accepting him, worry about holding onto his lunch money.  Bullies aside though, it’s pretty clear that not everyone hates Chris; they just have funny ways of expressing their own worry.  So in a sense, that translates to Chris worrying about everybody elses worry. Sound familiar?  I know it does for me.  I can be a pretty good worrier, who’s also pretty good at hiding it. “Let people say what they’re going to say because they are going to say it anyway”, was a bit of blow to my delusions of sovereignty, but it was good advice.

Almost as funny as Chris’ worrying is the British Humanist Association’s Atheist bus campaign, a secularist ad campaign worried about religous advertising that they felt made people… worry.

Much of western civilization is built on worry; anxiety is it’s morbid choice of fuel, and the organisation and structures powered by it are not about to change of their own accord.  Thank God though, that whilst we may worry about our personal situations, He has and will continue to not worry, but act on our behalf. Whether it’s through a sun He’s invented to shine on everyone– everyday, or something He’s done once for everyone–everywhere, so that they need not worry everyday.

swishism entry atheist, campaign, everybody hates chris, invent, surrogacy, worry

simple.wisdom.is.seldom.heeded
by those that need it most.
If only I’d be all these things before I even spoke.

-[v]s

swishism entry introspection, listen, miyagi, self-examination, simple