Re-structuring

Let me contradict myself

A while ago, my wife made a passing comment that (like many she makes) struck me as worth dwelling upon. “You don’t really create much structure in your life, do you?” she said. I have to admit I hadn’t really noticed that before. Since I am always in the midst of my life, and I only have one, I don’t really have much perspective on it. But once she had pointed it out, it seemed obvious - I do indeed hate to be hemmed in or dictated to, even by a plan I made myself. I prefer to be able to act according to how I feel and though this can appear whimsical, it seems to work well enough much of the time. However, that doesn’t mean it isn’t also a shortcoming.

At this particular moment, I would do well to heed her observation. After twenty years living off-grid in the mountains, we are in the process of moving to Madrid. The flat we are moving into is new and as with many new-builds, there have been a series of delays. And because we aren’t selling the old house, the move has become a slow, gradual, protracted process, not one high stress day with a truck.

For a few months now I have been neither in the city nor the country but in a chaotic limbo somewhere in-between, which means I never know where the phillips screwdriver is, whether we still have my youngest son’s exam certificates, or if I have enough clean underpants for however long I am staying wherever I happen to be. Nor is this discombobulation likely to be over any time soon, as we struggle to work out how to use of the off-grid house in a way that will make sense and pay off.

In the midst of this geographical confusion some temporal structure sounds attractive. To have a regular rhythm across each day or week feels like it might be a relief. I also imagine that creating a pattern in time would help my work, because as it happens, I am also in a new phase professionally, slowly taking the reins (or the helm, or perhaps just the ouija board) of the Oxford Praxis Forum from its founder Marshall Young, in a gradual transition which lacks any external deadlines, firm obligations or clear processes and thus mirrors the vagueness of our house move. A little constraint might be useful there too. Without any structure to cleave to, there is a risk that things just drift.

At this point, anyone paying even a modicum of attention to these writings might smell a rat, since it was only a few weeks ago that I wrote a piece extolling the virtues of allowing myself not to structure my time and lauding the idea of simply doing what I feel like at any particular moment.

And you would be right, I am indeed contradicting myself. But I make no apology for that - it is what I promised to do with this writing. Moreover, like people everywhere, I am fabulously inconsistent. I resist becoming a single thing. I don’t aspire to sameness.

For decades I have been confused about why people think quite so highly of relentless consistency anyway, even for companies or brands, let alone for a person. It smacks of an industrial way of thinking, based on the need for uniformity of materials and processes that matter when you are trying to stamp out a large number of identical objects but which to me, seem to squash the delight out of life.

That drive for consistency has something of a shady past anyway. It came from the shortage of skilled labour in the United States in the early nineteenth century. They wanted machines to make up for the people they didn’t have. And the holy grail of that pursuit was to make make guns with interchangeable parts. Back then guns were finished by hand so if you swapped parts from one gun to another, it either wouldn’t work or would blow up in your face. Hence the desire for standardisation.¹

But I am not a thing at all, but a flow, that, like water flowing over rock, is shaped by the context I find myself in. I change moment by moment. I am full of leaps, gaps and inconsistencies. Within the general drift of the current that is me, there are eddies and whirlpools that head in opposite, if not contradictory directions. I change to stay the same and I change to adapt to what is changing around me. I change because my needs and my understandings change and because life is a process of change, moment by moment, day by day, year by year, eon by eon. So yes, I want freedom and yes I also want structure. How they inform each other and how much of each I want at any point in time is also going to keep changing as well.

At least, that’s what I think for now - until I change my mind…

1. Funnily enough I found all this in a book called ‘The Dawn of Innovation’ by Charles Morris, that my mother came across by chance and sent me for no obvious reason.