What happened?

The question goes "What happened?" and the the reply "God alone knows!"

What happened this last week? In fact what happened since Christmas? And 2007? Where did that year go? I feel time has disappeared.

Ignatian spirituality has a number of key elements. One the use of imagination especially in reflecting about the Gospel stories. Another is the examen. It is simply to pause and be aware of where God has been active in your or my life. It can be for the last few minutes, hours, day, days. week, months, or years. It is not just self-awareness rather heightening awareness of a life lived together, forever in the presence of God. We tend to sing worship songs in excess about this and fail in any effort of will to live it out. Life has been too hectic or full over recent months and this last week has been forced pause. Sometimes sickness is the only thing to force a pause . For some I know it has been unbelievably dramatic and the ground removed from beneath their feet. For a small family back home on another continent there can seem no purpose or reason, and I'm sure there is the potential to see only absence not presence.

I heard last night that Mel passed away leaving a daughter and husband. Working with young people in my neighbourhood, I knew her as a little sister of her older teenage sibling Sarah. I have many endearing memories of her watching her grow up: her matter of fact innocent way of talking, her wide-eyedness at the world around her, a gentleness that called to be protected, a real spark for life and living. There is no making sense of it all and perhaps there should be no seeking for reason only recognizing the sadness, accepting the darkness and looking for glimmers of hope for another fire.

When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. ... Jesus wept. John 11:33, 35

Ten hours straight

Well I've had my first square meal since Monday, vegetable. chicken and rice cooked in a soup stock with creamed corn (3 cereal bowls full). Before that I had 5 bowls of chicken congee over 4 hours. Things have now changed considering in the last 3 days I'd consumed 2 slices of dry toast, one can of Campbells vegetable soup, a cereal bar, a packet of seaweed, and half a litre of concentrated Ribena (in hot drinks). Still it's good to start kicking again and I'm 6 pounds lighter than Monday.

Why the strange diet today? Well I've just completed 10 hours of video editing. I reviewed 5.5 hours of tape and chose the clips and then edited them to my sound score I'd created, mangled, assemble and put together. I am frequently amazed how things come together. word, images, and music. Given that the limits of my technology and software forces me to imagine a visual sequence, somehow put together something that matches that approximately in audio and then merge the two together using the score and video soundtracks. It is a process impossible to be analytical, it is only something you can feel and intuit. During the 10 hours I only stopped to pick up a bowl of food or move laundry on but kept at it, eating when I felt hungry, which was most of the day!

The fruit of my labour is 6 minutes 33 seconds of video for my international students event over Christmas. Perhaps you see that my personality type is INFJ thats J with a big "J". Even with bppv, some messed up blood sugar, and some problems regulating body temperature, I have to reach that blissful feeling of completing something, at least one small step. There are many more steps, and hurdles to jump but there is a good sense of moving again.

However, I consider my life worth nothing to me, if only I may finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me—the task of testifying to the gospel of God's grace. Acts 20:24

sick, sick, sick,

There they are. Quite beautiful but sufficient to confine me to bed and the washroom for 36 hours. Monday night I came home and felt quite ill and during the night I was so. Tuesday was up and down and drinking small amounts of fluid. Then wednesday afternoon everything was calm and I could begin to sleep longer than 45 minutes and also flat instead of propped up. Yesterday I felt fragile and a little hungry so I ate a little soup, and congee and risked a cereal bar. Today I'll try and eat some real food again - I feel OK.

I posted a 12 days ago about shalom and peace and the concept of right functioning in creation. I wonder, if everything were functioning in a state of shalom then the rotavirus would not have struck me down, because my body's natural defences would have dealt with it immediately destroying it? Or perhaps, because the viruses no longer infect my cells or no longer exist? Maybe I'm pondering things in the wrong direction perhaps my body was in a state of shalom functioning as it should in an imperfect world.

(btw Tuesday's posting was something I wrote over the weekend!)

I'm not perfect only flawed

So many of God’s servants are hurting in their body, families, marriages and in ways I cannot label or identify. ... Yet these are some of God’s best servants and most Christ-filled saints. Some of his most useful, loving people. The crucible does not need to be approved by me or you to be effective. God chooses his own instruments, preparing, sharpening and equipping them as He chooses. His agenda is Jesus. Mine would be comfort, wholeness, happiness and so forth, with Jesus as the end result. God is only interested in making us like Jesus. internetmonk.com

Michael Spencer wrote the above in his blog (here) and it reminded me again why I'm doing what I do. But it also reminded me to sensitive to the facades or masks of having all of life sorted out carried by many Christian leaders, not in a spirit of condemnation or judgement but rather in sadness.

Tears are strange things because of their duality and yet for me they remain in the domain of sadness and not joy. Strangely only two people could ever fully make me cry instantly with their tears and they were both named Janice. I cried with and for them even though they are now far away. I believe that we are to cry with those who are crying and cry on behalf of those unable to cry. This is core to the life together. Dietrich Bonhoeffer's book Life Together is one of those on my reading list but I understand that his central idea is that the Church is not a mere association of people with a common purpose which is frequently what happens. Rather it should be community focused upon Christ, not merely as goal but also means.

We need to stand together in weakness and not strength for in weakness we become strong. Not in and of ourselves but through a God who would transform us into the likeness of Christ.

After the suffering of his soul, he will see the light of life and be satisfied; by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many, and he will bear their iniquities. Is 53:11

Continuous Partial Attention

I believe attention is the most powerful tool of the human spirit. We can enhance or augment our attention with practices like meditation and exercise, diffuse it with technologies like email and Blackberries, or alter it with pharmaceuticals. In the end, though, we are fully responsible for how we choose to use this extraordinary tool. Linda Stone (see article here)

Multi-tasking is one of those jargon words very popular and a key word used for resumes to the excess, it has become almost meaningless. Linda Stone has distinguished between multi-tasking and continuous partial attention (cpa). Though superficially similar, at core they are different.

When we multi-task, we are motivated by a desire to be more productive and more efficient. We're often doing things that are automatic, that require very little cognitive processing. ... To pay continuous partial attention is to pay partial attention -- CONTINUOUSLY. It is motivated by a desire to be a LIVE node on the network. ... NOT TO MISS ANYTHING. It is an always-on, anywhere, anytime, any place behavior that involves an artificial sense of constant crisis.

Stone sees that we have moved from an age of multi-tasking to an age of continuous partial attention: from a need to manage time, to now a need to manage attention. Is this good or bad? Well from Stone's opening quotation you can see she understands that something important is happening.

[I]n small doses, continuous partial attention can be a very functional behavior. However, in large doses, it contributes to a stressful lifestyle, to operating in crisis management mode, and to a compromised ability to reflect, to make decisions, and to think creatively. In a 24/7, always-on world, continuous partial attention used as our dominant attention mode contributes to a feeling of overwhelm, over-stimulation and to a sense of being unfulfilled. We are so accessible, we're inaccessible. The latest, greatest powerful technologies have contributed to our feeling increasingly powerless.

In my life I have done massively mundane work in a office for example assembling agendas or stuffing envelopes over days not just hours. We used to talk until someone got a walkman. (Yes that dates me pre-CD and mp3 players!) Suddenly everyone in the room started using them. Instead of talking we isolated ourselves and listened to music while we carried out this repetitive work. Multi-tasking removed the monotony of a task but generate a solitary individualized world, however cpa can drive us crazy as we cut up our ability to be attentive into smaller and smaller fragments - driven by the desire to be connected. Convergence in technology, combining our phones, pdas, internet browsers, emailing, game playing and entertainment is the cause, pathway and expression of all this.

Linda Stone suggests we are entering an age of uni-focus, or an era of protection and belonging. This means that we will learn to effectively get our priorities straight and stick to them, supposedly. Software is being developed and has already appeared to enable this. Some bloggers are less than positive with the outlook about this. I wonder if voice recognition is a good example, where users were forced to change their vocal patterns etc to conform to the software requirements rather than software conforming to the user. At the moment cpa remains a real issue as all this attentiveness dispersed causes stress, and strains ultimately our ability to be attentive, to really pay attention. Would Samuel have heard God among all the fragments if he was exercising cpa, continuous partial attention? I need to switch off the technology and sometimes give God my total undivided attention.

So Eli told Samuel, "Go and lie down, and if he calls you, say, 'Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening.' " So Samuel went and lay down in his place. 1 Samuel 3:9

synaesthesia

At Bartleby.com synaesthesia or synesthesia is defined as a condition in which one type of sensation evokes the experience of another, so that when hearing a sound one sees a color. It seems that a small percentage of people experience this but it is not a disease. It's more of a neurological condition where the senses overlap. For many it involves the colours and sounds or even attribute personality characteristics to inanimate or abstract things. Often, I understand that they have a spatial understanding of time.

Why am I blogging about this? Well I just remembered a friend years ago asked me if I had this condition. And I immediately said yes even though I have never been diagnosed it. I have read about it and seen documentaries on the subject. Of course I can see a colour and tell you what colour it is correctly. But ask me to imagine a colour and I can only feel it as sensation of touch. Significantly I really don't dream in colour only black and white even though I know what colours things are in my dreams when its important. Fortunately touch is pretty broad for example it includes temperature, pressure, texture and location.

This helped me realise why focusing has been helpful for me at times as much as dreams have been also. Focusing was first brought to attention by Eugene Gendlin, a philosopher and psychotherapist. He believed that those who benefited most from psychotherapy had the ability to sense vague, still unformed feelings in their body and connect this ‘felt sense’ with words and images that were used to describe it. I have found that attentiveness to my body feelings is a form of listening to myself and recognising what is going on inside of me, which in turn helps me to be aware of external relationships and situations, which in turn can heighten both my intuition and even discernment.

All this has just suggested to me why my whole sense of time is currently disrupted. I've noticed the return of my Bppv (Benign paroxysmal positional vertigo). I had in in the early summer bad enough to go to the doctor and sit and wait for 2 hours for a 5 minute session. But it went away or at least I edited it out again. Recently I been quite tired and the vertigo has returned albeit mildly. More a little twitch as the world jerks perceptively, rather than the wild spinning of before. Still my sense of the passing of time is wrong or off!

Still I wonder why my friend asked me whether I had synaesthesia years ago?