Not or it believe something expressed have I feel do I done have
might I else anything than more maybe but do to hard quite actually it’s know should
you. worse things made have to likely only perhaps is out this working case which
in realized you before loon a as off me written already had you maybe? on going
was what out work to you took it long  how wonder i long how knots in up tied all just
nowhere me getting was hear to want might you that meaningful something make to
words with  grappling because backwards blog
my write I’d thought i today.

There are too many books on the shelf and I am so cross with them for taking so long to read I am wondering whether maybe if I sit next to them they will just dribble by a process of osmosis into my mind. Drip, drip, drip, splodge.
Q. Is it better to read an article, where an author has summarized lots of different streams of thinking and succinctly expressed hisor her opinion? Or ought we to be resisting this microwaveable spoonfed meatball mentality and take the time to engage with what one person says with enough time and attention to hear them properly before we snap to judge them? (As in, read the book)

Today I am thinking about thinking (again). This appears to be one a perhaps over-regular activity - often I wonder if it is in the slightest bit productive but then I realise I am doing it again. Apologies if my attempt to communicate fails utterly here, call it an experiment, like my last post. Welcome, willing guinea pigs. In this particular experiment I will feed you bits of normal guinea pig food and various other substances, and then see what happens. Maybe you will explode like pigeons on bicarbonate of soda. Mwah-hah-hah-ha.

So: my dissertationy type thingy is about the quality of education' (stay with me) - that is, the nature of learning especially in a lifelong sense (beyond and outside school) and the differences in the effects of various sorts of learning/educational models. If you are remotely interested you probably ought to talk to me in person because I fear my average hypothetical reader's eyelids may be already drooping (bad reader. naughty reader) but if I am going to write in this space about anything to do with my daily life (which I decided previously to do; but may give up trying to do if this goes nowhere) then it probably deserves a mention. Here is my attempt.

In terms of thinking I have been thinking about breathing, as an interesting model - as in, how it moves (forwards? outwards?) through processes of expansion and contraction; that is, through the creation of narratives (closing down intoschemes of logic, existential stories to position and explain ourselves, to make meaningful, patterns to calculate and judge and predict) and poetry (opening up, confronting doubt and dissonance and wonder and the bigness of the un-understood). Like breathing the one can't function without the other
- it's an organic process; but it can definitely be weighted one way or
another. Some might argue that positivism and rationalism and other such potentially suffocating 'metanarratives' (overarching stories) could be explained by a heavy emphasis on the former (that is, by the desire to make everything 'fit' under one umbrella system with reason at its base and a fear of openness.also various fundamentalisms?), and postmodernism (with its insistent privileging of openness and utter disdain of closure) the latter. I am very interested by movements that seem to allow (or posit) dialogue between the two - like Kristeva's material feminism (rooted in psychoanalysis she talks about the dynamic between the ‘semiotic’ (free-flowing impulses from before birth) and ‘symbolic’ (what happens when language starts to chop up the flow to make it coherent)), Nietzsche's Apolline-Dionysiac aesthetic model (brackets aren't begin enough to explain this, look it up), pragmatism, Kant, critical realism... and right now I’m all excited about the idea of dialogism itself – (that’s Bakhtin, a bit of a clown, him) which is colliding rather interestingly (but somewhat messily) with Freire and Dewey and a guy called Kieran Egan who all have very interesting things to say about how learning might happen…

Ho hum. Was this a mistake to try and begin this? What are you
doing now strange person – are you judging me; thinking me arrogant for using big words or being interested in silly airy-fairy pictures and ideas?? Are you just encountering these words and finding no meaning
in them whatsoever? Have you decided in your mind that I’m throwing names and big words around to impress you? (If so; please be assured, I realized the other day rather interestingly that I’m actually quite stupid. I hope that puts you at your ease) This sort of stream is a piece of the 'world' (that isn't really a world) I feel I inhabit that I don't know how to share with people. Odd, isn't it? It's not emotional but itfeels vulnerable. Are you bored now – scanning quickly down the paragraphs to see if there’s anything interesting at all that will hold your attention, [STOP HERE] distracting yourself from the things you could be doing and actually maybe even want to do but it’s just too easy to slip down the easy slope of procrastination… I’m trying to work out what I could share with you my dear hypothetical friend but then I am reluctant because I realize that as soon as you get your teeth into it you’ll be looking for me in between the words in the blank space [LOOK – here I am – LOOK] and rearranging what I’ve said with value judgements attached – maybe you’ll miss the whole thing of what I’ve wanted to say either because my words meant something else to you or because you guessed (correctly perhaps) that despite the words I’ve used andthe surface meaning the logic of the text reveals quite different intentions… well I’m dead now, apparently – as soon as I have pressed publish. (Although what do
you make of the fact that I can re-publish it??): reader the text is yours – so if you are bored it’s your own fault. Ha.

Oh dearie me. In the afterlife God, please make me funny.

It’s funny I find that most of us seem to have an extreme internal resistance to it. Peculiar what you see, what you notice when your
object in travelling is not just your destination. Roofs, birds, peoples’ eyes, litter, arguments, the sky, broken shoes…But it feels so wrong, when you could make it there in half the time.

Why does it feel like such an extreme travesty to sit still for an hour and do nothing? That is, not working, or talking, or watching television, or reading, or even meditating or praying, but nothing.>> A waste of time… << But what exactly is the purpose of time? I wonder if it can be
disentangled from the purpose of life. Because it seems that so often our idea of time being valuable is based on the premise that if life has a purpose then every second must also have a purpose. It is somewhat logical, in that if life can be said to have a purpose then surely it follows that the more that the smaller segments of a single life are fed directly and productively into that purpose then the more meaningful the single life becomes. But what if the purpose of life is not quantitatively measurable? If (for example) the purpose of life (assuming for the moment that life can be boiled down as easily as chicken stock) was to become more and more alive, at times the most ‘productive’ means of accomplishing this end might be to experience failure, or do nothing, or take twice as long over a task that could be done more quickly...

I would like to become more easily interrupted.

Could it really be true that there is wisdom to be gleaned from conservatism?? I think I might as well hang my hat on its peg and wander off back to my muddy market town home and buy some wellies. But fear not open-mouthéd reader; firstly, I mean the general thought rather than the political party (we will not try to begin to contemplate its current embodiment in party-form hear, I am afraid a) the amount I would need to use CAPSLOCK would make it unreadable b) I am only the most débuting of political minded animals so I’d most likely get it wrong); and secondly I haven’t jumped on the blue jangly bandwagon just yet. BUT, ‘Conservative’ deriving of course from the Latin conservare
"to keep, preserve,” as opposed to its more common associations with
“unadventurous” or “traditional” this way of thinking (which for the instant we will personify as an ostrich with a man’s head and a judge’s wig and some very interesting aquamarine tail feathers, so that we may understand each other more clearly) seems to contain some quite marvelous insights (tailfeathers) in my opinion… Here’s what I mean:

Once upon a time there was a man called Mr Michael Oakeshott,
who smoked a pipe and was a very interesting man. (He did not invent the parachute: the picture signifies ideas) He said some rather clever
things about education and life in general a lot of which sounds like the wisdom that seems to settle on you like rather unwelcome but intriguing-looking pink algae as you get older. The sort of things you reluctantly(although perhaps with some small sigh of relief) realize as your perspective necessarily changes shape with the perpetual stretching out of life and time in both directions. I never ever thought I’d stoop to believe such things as I shall now quote (surely a reconciliation with routine and repetition concedes a barbarous defeat to the deadly saggy bellied foe of middle agedness?), but I have to admit that for the first time I am starting to think that slowing down, celebrating what is existent, and being quicker to spot the good than to suggest an alternative are surprisingly good changes to make to one’s approach to the world. Shocking! Here goes then:

'We are disposed to think that nothing important is happening unless great innovations are afoot, and that what is not being improved must be deteriorating...We readily presume that all change is, somehow, for the better, and we are easily persuaded that all the consequences of our innovating activity are either themselves improvements or at least a reasonable price to pay for getting what we want'

My inclination is always to see potential for change in each new situation. Perhaps this is not always a bad thing; it is after all a mode of existing only a second-cousin from hope and an auntie-thrice-removed (when will she get the hint?) from faith. But how often is this an arrogance of assuming I have something to offer before truly engaging with what is there? How often am I so swift to criticize that I neglect to listen to the voices of the ancient ‘conversation’ Oakeshott refers to, which has been going on for thousands ofyears before I appeared on the scene?

Conservatism in general as far as I can gather seems to spend too much time reacting and looking backwards to give space to the present
and future moment. But here is the question I want to invite you to chew on with me: How often are we so quick to desire to ‘make our mark’ that we don’t look to the value what is already being done first?