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[ 9 minute read ]
Whiling and wiling away time
Imagining the future
On occasion, I come across a person who will stand me a conversation. Most people will do that funny hand movement that signifies they have exhausted all their methods for allowing time to make decisions for them on how to end something they have just come to recognise as laborious for them.
One of my favourite things to do is to examine a subject from as many perspectives as I can, including the person I am having the conversation with. Generally though, they haven't really thought things through before I button-hole them and bend their ear. I think you might look upon this as; I intimidate people with word-wizardry. Except this kind of wizardry is not Mickey Mouse in 'Fantasia' incompetently fighting a broom, or Harry Potter waving a wand and conjuring solutions to problems that only he can fathom. Most of the time I know what someone is going to say. That may sound supercilious and self-promoting, but it is not meant to be. And, here we have a problem I identified long ago. If I make statements like that the listener will immediately second-guess me. They actually believe that I believe that I can read minds or something. No, I mean that I expect to hear a common standpoint that conforms with the zeitgeist of a society.
This is how my conversations usually work. I want to understand why something is so. Yesterday, my attention was piqued by a newspaper article I read in my local Post Office shop.
As I approached my local Post Office shop I noticed a woman leave the shop and open the boot (Am. trunk) of her car. Mindful not to just throw my bicycle against the plate glass window of the shop, I had time to view her activity. She moved some bags around. Rather than practice my superb rendition of a gawking three-year-old with a 'why?' question on my lips, I 'thickened the air'. I do that sometimes when I sense something amiss or portentious. Anything that happened from that point on would leave a trace that lasts a few seconds; a trace that will allow me to identify commonalities to other traces and tracks within the same soup of 'now'. In plain English that means I paid more attention than I normally would and carefully stored my perceptions.
It is highly unusual for me to need to actively consider events that immediately precede the present I find myself in. Normally, I ignore pretty much everything because most of the time, stuff goes on around me and it is just thin, flavourless and clear dishwater; not worth keeping, because being the past as soon as it has occurred, it has no value; no freshness and no energy. We don't derive any nutrition from the past. It is consideration of the past, in the present, as much as it can be, that sustains us. And there it is, the present has value; which is why I like the present so much and the past not much at all. Even the future is preferable to the past because the future is bendy. (I prefer to hope that the future is bendy; 'malleable' means can be shaped and for me usually means with intent - I prefer the weather to uncontrolled manipulation by hopeful tyros).
The future is bendy. It has curves in it that make the journey interesting. It has, within it, scenery and events seemingly scattered by the hand of a Supreme Being. Of course, there is no Supreme Being who idly chucks fantasy Lego bricks across a carpet for us to assemble or tread on bare-foot in the dark, as might suit our wit. It is the past and the manipulation of the present that shapes the future. I know this is as it is, so my playful protestations that I am prescient fall upon my own deaf ears. If other people hear me state that I am a seer they should recognise it for an umbrella position that encompasses 'I looked at the past and some futures and there is a high probability that one future could manifest as this or that'. And here is where most people I talk to get lost; they have no idea that I want to tell them about a future. They, invariably think I want to 'while away' the time, when I actually want to 'wile away' a future.
I can't remember where I heard or read this parable. (It should be known that I did not come up with this and I have reproduced it verbatim to the source in order that in a future it may be used in a search term to establish its provenance):
A Parable
It was a chilly, overcast day when the horseman spied the little sparrow on its back in the middle of the road. Reining in his mount he looked down and inquired of the fragile creature,
"Why are lying upside down like that?"
"I heard, the heavens are going to fall today." replied the bird.
The horseman laughed, "And I suppose your spindly little legs can hold up the heavens?"
"One does what one can." said the sparrow.
We know that 'to wile' is to use guile and manipulation. In one kind of reality anyone can plant a seed of doubt and expect a change. We can't control the trickle of change when other people become involved in the making of a torrent though.
Once I had selected my items I noticed the woman was conducting a transaction at the Post Office counter and the man was close by, not really doing anything except mumbling to himself. When I do that it is soliloquy; when other people do it is incoherent mumbling. 'Scary Monsters', I thought. (It is just an expression; not an impression). Reading the marks where a wooden spoon of activity was stirring the pot of slowly coagulating sauce that was developing into the past, I predicted that he and the young woman would leave together. You know, you have to recognise the past to see a future. I had time to 'while away' so I read the front page of a newspaper. The Government will mandate businesses to tell all employees that being in a union is a good thing. Good Crikeyness! Really? Have they thought this through? Young people, whom some businesses supposedly find unemployable due to their attitude of entitlement, should be told that it is a good idea to discuss the bosses behind their backs, and form a limping team that resembles the one they have had all their school lives and is resistent to external influence. This is a good thing? Of course, I already know that these young people feel alienated when they find themselves in their first job after leaving school or training. Suddenly, they find themselves bereft of a supporting team. No matter how pathetic that team was, it was a position of belonging and a comfortable bubble of confirmation bias. In order for these young newbies to be part of a new team at work, they are going to need to impress their work colleagues of their worth. That, today, is quite difficult when no-one talks in the canteen anymore. Teams are found on SmartPhones these days.
'I hate it here. It is dull and boring and stupid and I don't know what to do!'
'I know, it is the same here. I hate it too. See you later. the boss is looking at me. She wants me to work, Here she comes. Bye'.
It is plainly a good idea to cause young people to think their opinion is valued when they present an attitude of 'Why should I?' towards their work environment. Any union will leap at having someone like this on their team. 'Work to rule' is definitely on the cards and statements such as, 'That is not what it says in the job description!' will be rife. 'All out!'. I predict that the adaptive UK will be crippled. Happy empowered teenagers. That is what we want, don't we?
I don't speak young people 'Lingua-do-do' as Lady Gaga put it, or not. (She did in one YouTube video but 'Genius' doesn't think so). I might as well be Shakespeare to teenagers. Fantastic range of multisyllabic words but it takes deliberate and focused thinking to decipher their meaning, and without a team, I suggest, they shan't attempt it. So, the extremely knowledgeable chap, who lives over the road from me, had to be the only poor opening for wiling. He, though, standing in the cold, close to the Post Office shop, expected to mildly discuss unions with a handful of anecdotes brightening the environment. By this time, the coagulated past in the shop had proven to be no more than a bagatelle that was essential in snapping me into the grid of fate. Now, however, fate's train was drawing into a remote station on a heritage line.
Shaping my argument by using a second party is of course reprehensible but I can be blind to individual sentiment sometimes when the world needs to be saved. It turns out that he is not the conduit that I hoped he might be. To be honest, I didn't even have that hope with any degree of confidence that my words might stick like strands of spaghetti casually flung against the hard wall of his conscience and his concern about the demise of the horse-drawn hansom carriage. I usually cook words on the fly and without having ever read a cookbook. My 'wiling' would inevitably fizzle out in a cul-de-sac of indifference. This chap has been fired in the furnace of experience so many times there can be no expectation that any solvent will release the rigid bonds of his thinking. And, he doesn't speak teenager 'Lingua-do-do' either. But he is not the carrier; I never thought he was.
That conversation with him was stimulating, even if it was a little irritating when he kept trying to drift off into nostalgia and stereotypical views on whippersnappers voting in elections, coal, and gypsies. But I am not one to dismiss a colourful tart of delicious tidbits. Everything he said has some relevance, but like me, he doesn't join all the dots. Lecturing helps but thinking things through and trying to make sense of information or opinion bears far more fruit for a vintner of knowledge. Connoisseur, I may not be, but I do enjoy a good brandy, or distillation of loquaciousness, if you will.
Only I seem to make the connection between teams at schools, voting in elections and union meetings. I can paint futures run by teenagers both good and bad. I feel that in order to understand what we really want, we might have to use a technique that I invented after a whole bunch of people invented it long before I was born.
Imagine painting a scene of what you would like your future to be like. Now imagine painting a picture of what you would not like. What is missing from the first painting?
[ 1909 words - over 2 hours to write and edit - I hate editing so much that I had to leave it and finish with a final re-edit 8 hours later]