Enough already with the PowerPoint. Luckily I have the attention span of a golfish, (as well as the conversation skills of a goldfish). I blame it on the internet. It feels good having something to blame. Especially the internet, as it rarely complains. I went to an island to get away from my internet addiction. I didn’t check email, or look up the answer to anything for about nine weeks. But you’re not supposed to do overseas voluntary work to get away from addictions. It says so in my book. At least I’m not addicted to self-help books anymore.
Another reason I went away is the accursed Siemens SL45 bag-o-shite that masquerades as both a crap mobile phone, and an underpowered MP3 player. Not only does it fail to adequately perform any of it’s long list of functions, but its SMS interface is pants. I kept writing messages and attempt to send them by pressing a series of buttons which said things like ‘OK’, ‘Yes’, ‘No, really, ready to send’, but I’d never get all the way through to the last button which really, really meant you wanted to send it. But I didn’t know they weren’t being sent. So I was a bit perplexed as to why my friends weren’t answering my messages. So I decided to leave the country. Actually, I tell a lie about the Siemens SL45. It does make a passable, if expensive, dictaphone, which is useful to remember what you were saying to people. This came in useful to capture Joe telling a nice girl we met in a cake shop that he wanted to take her to the biggest restaurant in the world. And the nice girl trying to improve Joe’s Thai pronunciation.
But I digress. But that’s because I’ve got attention deficit disorder. Is that my attention span thats lacking? Or that I need attention? I can’t be arsed to read the whole lot, but I do feel that ‘My thoughts bounce around as if my mind is a pinball machine’, and ‘My brain feels as if it is a television set with all the channels going at once’. But I have no fear, as ironically enough, the internet has lots of sites giving information about the short attention span that using the internet causes. Luckily most of the articles are quite short.
Given that I’d escaped the internet on my beloved island, I’ll get back to the way my mind worked when I was there. What I loved about the island is that you could wander about on the way to doing something and really easily get involved in something else. You might be going to drop something in the dive-shack, and you’d find an inflatable boat that you could repair. So you might go to get some glue. On the way you might stumble into a conversation about something, or a pull-up exhibition and get embroiled in that, until someone needed some firewood to cook some dough in the oven. So you’d go to get your jungle-proof shirt from the washing line. And you’d see Alli chasing the chickens because they had invaded the (defenseless and crippled) ducks pen. So you’d start a pincer movement with Rich to drive the inconsiderate hens into a bucket so that you could throw them into the sea. And when the hens had invariably outpaced us over some of the dangerous terrain, you’d end up repairing the duck pen.
After that, you might remember that the chickens job was to lay eggs, and you’d check their hutch for evidence of any protein balls that they’d deposited. This might lead you back to the kitchen with fresh eggs, and then you might get involved in a bean-burger disposal exercise. This invovled trying to drop kick all of the left-over kidney-bean-based-burgers as far as possible into the sea. I’d lovingly handmade those burgers with Ros and Jamal, and the pigs weren’t going to get them, that was for certain. Feed the fishes, screw the pigs, that’s what I’d say, until the RSPCA turned up.
So then you might see the dough hanging about, waiting to be cooked, and you’d remember the firewood, and like a goldfish, do another lap of the hut, doing simple things on the way. Eventually, you’d see enough of the things that you were in the middle of doing to give you some kind of mental escape velocity. You’d get enough pointers and clues to allow you to follow the trail of activities that you had half-started, and start to half-finish them.
Talking to an ex-colleague last night, I said that I wouldn’t mind doing a lot of meditation somewhere for a while. She had tried a ten day retreat here in the UK, and said that she managed to escape with most of her sanity after four days. Apart from the knowledge that she had endured 96 hours of mental cruelty and anguish, she said that it wasn’t all bad. A new string to her bow was the ability to see tasks through to their completion without being horrifically distracted. I could do with some of that.