You mean, we've only managed to reach the moon?

I love the look of this ship, it has all the beauty you expect from high tech stuff but none of the nasty drawbacks to the environment.  It just looks space ship like.  

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/apr/01/turanor-solar-power-yacht-launch 

Speaking as someone who was eleven when mankind landed on the moon, I have to confess my complete disappointment that the moon was as far as we had got!  Reared on Star Trek and Lost in Space I had felt sure that we had at least mastered space travel to the nearest galaxy.  So, I remember trying to muster enthusiasm for the whole moon landing project in 1969 in front of excited family members, while trying to hide my own bitter disillusionment.  The actual footage of a bulky man clambering out down a ladder onto a barren landscape seemed rather poor pickings – where were the aliens, the phasers, the amazing landscapes?  I suspected if Star Trek, rather than NASA, had done the whole job it would have been much better presented and had much more action.  

This was followed by a major natural disaster somewhere in the third world, I don’t remember where, and as we watched images of suffering on our TV, I asked why didn’t they send someone like Thunderbirds to help the poor people.  Imagine my outrage when I discovered that there was not even an equivalent real life version of the team, equipped with the best kits, machines, people and technology to fly in to the zone and help.  It was at this point I began to have serious reservations about those in authority.  What were they thinking of?  If I could see what was needed at age eleven, what kind of morons were in charge of us all?  

So reaching mid fifties I found myself strangely excited about this ship, it is my kind of Thunderbirds/Star Trek piece of science.  It looks beautiful, runs on sun and produces no pollution – what’s not to like?  Factoring in that 15 of the largest traditional ships on the ocean at present produce as much sulphur dioxide as all the world’s 760 million cars together, isn’t about time such clean beauties as these were designed?

Abnormal repetitive behaviour - what's yours

Today we had an invited speaker to the college who spoke about abnormal behaviour in animals.  Videos were shown of small dogs chasing their tail until they became a flying circle of black and white.  A mouse did repeat back summersaults again and again like an acrobat stuck in a loop.  A huge elephant, chained at the leg, swung from side to side continuously.  All of them drew laughter from the audience of young students.  Until the speaker pointed out that all of these behaviours denoted stress in the animals.  These repetitive movements were symptoms of an animal trying to cope with situations far from their normal environment.  Perhaps you have seen it in the zoo where the lion paces up and down the cage wall putting his feet in the exact paw prints that he has been making for months, sometimes years.  It is distressing to watch because once you know what to look for, you can see it is not normal.  The tragic thing is that after a period of around twelve weeks of such activity the animal’s brain becomes hard wired and it is impossible to change the endless routine.  The comfort such activities bring are an end in themselves and no matter how exciting the environment or stimulating only a slight reduction in activity levels in the repetitive activity can be ever achieved.  Abnormal repetitive behaviour is usual exhibited by normal animals in un-natural situations.  If you want to see distressing examples of this behaviour have a look at this link. 

http://www.aps.uoguelph.ca/~gmason/StereotypicAnimalBehaviour/library.shtml

It struck me that we too carry out abnormal repetitive behaviour when stressed and I began looking for signs of it in myself and others.  Overeating, endless shopping, routines at work, gossiping, mobile phones, games, gambling, drinking, smoking, cleaning, reading rubbish and watching rubbish on TV.  Could these be the equivalent of rocking to and fro getting nowhere but longing for actual life to begin?  What a depressing turn of thought.  Mind you I was happy to see how much the students loved the talk and the speaker and how they were all triggered to find ways of making life more enjoyable for the animals in their care.  It reminded me what a lovely bunch of students they are and what an odd creature I am!

Best Times Worst Times, Guppies and Adsense

Happiest moment giving birth. Just blew me away this tiny person whose arrival made me forget the pain.  Given my extremely low pain threshold generally this was no small feat!

The saddest – losing loved ones.  I remember my nephew Adam was three when my brother and his wife moved into their new three-storey home.  In the carrying things to and fro they noticed Adam in floods of tears.  After a while, once he had calmed a little, all he would say was, “It’s too, too sad!”   Following more tears, they eventually found out that a small fish had managed to jump out of the fish tank being carried up the steep stairs.  Unnoticed, Adam had sat mesmerised with horror as the tiny guppy flopped its last moments at his very feet.  His father pointed out, had he said what had happened earlier the tiny fish could have been saved.   This caused an even greater burst of crying, to have witnessed such horror and now to find he was responsible!  Poor Addie, his cry of “It’s too, too sad!” is echoed by all of us who lose loved pets. 

But when the loss is a person who has filled your life with laughter and love for decades the void they leave can be devastating.  Much, much later, when they come to your mind and bring a smile to your heart, you realize they are still there to inspire you, the distance is a mere illusion.

All of you attentive ones will have noticed the adverts have disappeared from the sides of my blog.  These were courtesy of Adsense a company that places adverts and depending on clicks earns revenue.  Today, Adsense no longer will be placing adverts, so those of you who have been bombarded with “Mature dating sites”, “wrinkle cream”, “Stomach reducing techniques” etc will no longer be subjected to these.  Weird, how they choose the adverts to appear.  Worrying at times!  I never got the hang of how to edit certain advertisers so it is with some relief I no longer have to worry about it.  I have also reduced my postings to once every two days or so, due to popular requests.  You can get too much of a good thing I’m told!

What is the source of all Good and the essence of wisdom?

Trusting in God is hard especially when times are really hard, when it seems as if not just one aspect of life goes wrong but many.  Work, family, health problems can come together in a perfect storm and when nothing is going your way you still have to trust, submit and be content with God’s will.  Such acquiescence is not easy, but it does, in the midst of great suffering, mould special strengthened souls.  Plutarch (46 – 120 AD) was Greek historian, biographer and essayist knew this when he wrote these two statements.

“Those who aim at great deeds must also suffer greatly.” 

 

“To make no mistakes is not in the power of man; but from their errors and mistakes the wise and good learn wisdom for the future.”

To be really wise is to tread carefully understanding God’s commands and His love of justice.  To live one’s life not only loving God but fearing Him also.  This fear is a sturdy shield from wrong doing and the love a constant call to do what is right and just.  I love the work of C S Lewis and this quote of his demonstrates his wisdom and insights in understanding what path to walk and how to walk it.

“Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After
all, you find out the strength of the army by fighting against
it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to
walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation
after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like
an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little
about badness — they have lived a sheltered life by always giving in.
We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we
try to fight it.”

But if we are to be truly wise we must be sure we are not sheep following blindly the path others have worn down before us.  This Welsh proverb cuts to the chase and indicates the importance of reason and rational in guiding us. 

“Reason is the wise man's guide, example the fool's. “

So I wish you strength, wisdom and reason in working out a good path for yourself.

Are You Functioning on all Wavelengths?

I remember my Dad saying some people don’t function on certain wavelengths.  Like, for example, an insensitive neighbour who would say hurtful things to almost everyone she met, but was oblivious to the effects of her barbed comments.  I could see what he meant by that and years of teaching seemed to clarify such things.  He would point out that, if a child came from a family where honesty was not insisted upon then often the entire next generation was devoid of any scruples in that particular arena.  It was indeed as if an entire wavelength of understanding was missing.  It was appropriate to take pens, pencils, money etc as long as no one spotted you.  The older I get, the more I realize that each of us has our own missing wavelengths and tests and difficulties come along and show us exactly what we have not yet mastered.  My middle son was highly tuned to people around him.  

He could sense their unhappiness, joy, intent to a degree that startled me.  I suppose you could call it intuition.  Some years ago my mother fell down a flight of stairs in a hotel and I was startled to find seconds later my son appeared.  He had sensed something wrong and run all the way from home to the hotel.  It is hard to use science to explain how such things happen.  When we had visitors, my son would whisper to me, how sad this one appeared. He didn’t seem to need to speak to them to pick up on what they were feeling.  I, instead, had inherited my Dad’s lack of intuition.  We used to joke that when buying a new car we would ask Dad which car in the whole parking lot he liked, then make sure that whatever car we decided to buy, it was not the one he picked, as it was sure to be a dud!

Walking down a street one day my middle son said “did you see that man Mum he was crying as he came out of the shop?”  My youngest son had seen the man but not noticed he was crying and my eldest had neither noticed the man nor the shop.  We seem to inhabit almost different worlds at times.  I suppose you would call it a kind of emotional intelligence.  Either you have it or you don’t.  But, if life has a purpose then surely progress is required and if we are missing wavelengths we need to focus on the ones missing and fast.  Nothing highlights gaps in our wavelengths better than learning from those who are sensitive to those very areas.  If our filters are set to cut out certain parts of the spectrum we cannot rely on our own eyes and senses to spot them.  We require to have around us those, whose filters are on a completely different range.  It can be painful to see the world anew or learn that we are not seeing enough.  Challenging to have it drawn to our attention.  But I have grown to respect that such people open us up to, not only a new world out there but, a whole world inside us that has been neglected.  We need all the wavelengths functioning!

Eating Sand and Ballooning Heads

I remember being on the beach in Portrush with my three children when my youngest son, under two years old, began eating great fists full of sand.  No remonstration on my part could persuade him to stop.  At one point my mother suggested I was making it worse by drawing attention to it and it would be better by far to ignore the practice.  I tried, and sat as if totally unconcerned while he seemed to spend the entire afternoon enjoying the beach as if it were fish and chips!  Later, his nappies were full of this disgusting grit filled paste, so I suspect most of what he digested went straight through his system.  Nowadays, the chances of animal poo/glass/syringes/heavy metals/pollution in the sand is higher and I would have found it impossible to ignore his determined efforts.  At the time, however, I remember it was the oddity of it that disturbed.  Other people’s children paddled in the sea, dug in the sand, made sandcastles and ran to and fro, while mine focused on eating all the sand within reach.  It was like a judgement call, spot the disturbed child, the mother who obviously has screwed up.  Where had I gone wrong?  How far back had I made fundamental mistakes in my child’s upbringing that he had this emptiness needing to be filled with the nearest dirt he could cram in?

Mothers are filled with such thoughts of ill ease.  There was a baby clinic opposite that I attended with each new born.  We would stand in rows handing over our little ones to be inspected and weighed by trained personal.  I remember with the first one, the woman weighed him and told me he was not putting on enough weight.  I cried all the way home mortified with my failure and apologising to my starving baby.  A month later his weight had improved but his nappy was filled with a liquid coffee-like poo that she told me meant he had diarrhoea and that this was very serious indeed.  More tears followed along with a growing conviction that I was not a fit mother.  It took an experienced friend to point out that the clinic was used to bottle fed babies whose quick weight gain and solid stools bore no similarity to breast fed babies, such as mine, to calm me.  By the time it came to my third baby I could watch mothers retire in tears from the row in front of me, while steeling myself not to be upset by what the nurse would say to me!  Then my turn came and she put a measuring tape around his head and showed me on a graph just how far outside normal his head size was.  There was a lot of discussion about brain development, concerns expressed about what was going on inside his colossal head.  I walked home sobbing in panic and fear as usual, while my baby’s head seemed to inflate like a balloon before my very eyes. 

Which all goes to show that as mothers we can feel we are on an impossible mission and are always ready to believe the worst and then blame ourselves bitterly for it all.  So if you happen to spot a baby stuffing handfuls of sand/dirt into his mouth, please just smile and act as if it is totally normal, you will sooth a troubled soul.

PS this June’s edition of Scientific American (2012) “The Scoop on Eating Dirt” highlights the fact that eating dirt, geophagia, is found in 200 species of animals including baboons, gorillas and chimpanzees.  Humans have been doing it since Hippocrates in 460 BC and the Mesopotamians and ancient Greeks used it to treat ailments, especially of the gut.  Soil contains minerals such as calcium, sodium and iron, an invaluable source especially in times of famine.  Soil’s detoxifying properties are also noted in this article and pregnant women who eat soil may be not only cleansing their system of toxins but also boosting their immune system.  Kaolin, a clay mineral, is used by the pharmaceutical industry to treat nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea.  It is found to bind to not only harmful toxins but also pathogens.  So I put forward the hypothesis that my youngest son, he with the enormous brain, was fully aware of the therapeutic benefits of soil/sand eating at the time of his visit to the beach.  As such, he was an early genius, not demonstrating mental instability at all!  Oh, the folly of motherhood!  Is there no end?

PPS (mind you don’t go eating the soil or sand around you as it is likely to also contain bacteria, viruses, parasitic worms, lead and arsenic) – according to same article

Speeches that stir

When the spirits drop it can help to try out listening to some good rants.  I never thought I would recommend Rocky scenes, but this section struck home because it echoes that feeling that all of us sometimes experience where we kind of lose faith in ourselves.  Good to be reminded of what really matters.  (so skip the silly add at the start – and apologies that it is there)

Then there is that false conviction that those who succeed are chosen or are lucky.  I like the way this second video knocks that idea on the head and spells out what really makes the difference.  Michael Jordan is pretty impressive.

If any of you have a favourite please let me know what it is.