Unleash the Monkey Army

I started thinking that the journey home is the worst part of any trip. You have left behind the purpose for the journey and all that brought and you are not yet back in your comfort zone. Actually though, there are a worse things in life. Sure, it's not ideal. You're stuck with the morals of the vendors and how rapacious they are in their sale of refreshments but why should this bit be worse than any other? But it has some parallels with life for many of us. We're too close to look back with fondness on the recent memories, more fixed on the fact that they've come to an end than with the simple joy of having had the experience. And we are too far away from home to feel wholly relaxed, even if that's where we want to be right now. Where are those Star Trek transporters? I have the phone which is capable of more than I ever dreamed possible and lasers are pretty common, so where are the transporters? It is possible that I might feel entirely different if this was a ...

What ever happened to personal identity? This is a strange post for me as the issue of identity appears to have been on the social agenda for most of my adult life. I meandered through some thoughts on group interaction in my last post and, to be honest, for an awful lot of people, the idea of identity appears to begin and end there. Who are you when nobody is looking? We all put on fronts. These are about surviving and thriving with others and can be as simple as acting cheery when you feel threaders, but can be a whole complex new persona. If I am to hope to communicate with others then I need to consider the limitations and adjust my process accordingly - in the same way that for Twitter or a telegram I need to pare my message down! The healthiest among us wear masks that are closest to natural appearance. Even with that in mind, we talk about individuality, about diversity, about variety while all the time plastering labels and constructing pigeon-holes. What does your gender, your...

Perhaps it starts with a recognition that there may be some merit to not getting everything that you want. So you set out those atrophied self-control and self-discipline muscles. How it goes from here depends to a large extent on you. If you fight it you will make this much harder than it needs to be. The process becomes much more about what you are not getting and, sadly, as a focus that is always much stronger than what you are getting. It becomes a battle rather than a journey. It does not make it easy (no apology offered) but it does make it easier. Breaking away from the pack makes you vulnerable - to assault from the other members of your pack as much as anything else. If you start to deviate from the accepted "wisdom" you can expect people to haul you back in. We can see how this is a useful survival instinct, a way of guarding the continuation of the herd, but it has its downsides. The office is, for many of us at least, the modern savannah. Look around you, you spen...