Abundance in the midst of poverty

What a lot of great articles there were yesterday – I’ve had a fun time just reading through a fraction of the contributions for Blog Action Day.

Ian McKenzie (Ian’s Messy Desk) offered a nice straightforward list of practical suggestions Blog Action Day: How To Eliminate Poverty as did Ibrahim over at Zen College Life Blog Action Day: Poverty

Lifehacker had a rich set of contributions  during the day. I enjoyed the pragmatic guide to fighting poverty by getting rid of your old kit  Donate Your Old Hardware to Those Who Can Use It [Blog Action Day 2008] and Gina Trapani’s very personal and obviously heartfelt take Two Great Charities at Work to Beat Poverty [Blog Action Day 2008], however the one that struck a chord for me was Jason Fitzpatrick’s article  Attack Poverty Through Literacy [Blog Action Day 2008] which very neatly echoed the Sidonie Gabrielle quote that “Real poverty is lack of books.” used by Henrik Edberg in Three Timeless Thoughts on Poverty over at ‘Personal Development with The Positivity Blog’

Four Easy Reasons to Ignore World Poverty from Charlie at Productive Flourishing contained some eye popping statistics as well as knocking fown the type of myths and woolly-headed thinking that prevent people from doing more to help. A tack also taken by Jay White in  The Poverty Myth over at Dumb Little Man who soundly challenged the idea that as individuals there is nothing can do to help.

Celine Roque at Web Worker Daily wrote a very thought-provoking piece about her own experience of the empowering nature of web work Blog Action Day: Web Work as an Alternative to Overseas Worker Migration

LJ at  the SimpleProductivityBlog.com in Blog Action Day – Poverty suggested lots of ideas for helping locally while Ellie from Living The Law Of Attraction Don’t Fight Poverty… Support Abundance! showed that there are no geographic boundries to helping others on a personal and individual level through networks such as Kiva which I’d not been aware of before. Agentsully at Life Learning Todayalso mentioned kiva as one of her many simple and straightforward ideas in Blog Action Day 2008: Poverty, When You Help Others You Help Yourself

In both articles there was a distinct message that by focusing on the positive rather than the negative – that creating abundance not tackling poverty should be our aim. A thought given an intersting twist by Lyman Reed Though Abraham-Hicks on the Economy – Charles Fillmore’s Prosperity – For Blog Action Day ‘08 who picking up on Ellie’s article showed that poverty through not making the most of your resources is a sin.

Who would have thought that poverty could produce such rich pickings.

Saving the world – one cone at a time

I wanted to write something deep and worthy today – but reading through all the facts and figures I was caught by one amazing statistic.

According to the poverty facts and stats over at global issues 11 billion US dollars or roughly 6.3 billion ponds a year is spent on ice cream in Europe.

A large percentage of that ice-cream is made by companies that many parents, including myself and groundhog mum have decided that the don’t want to support for other ethical reasons.

That aside, as a simple thought experiment if every household in Europe made their own ice cream that would be a lot of households that would be better off.

Our own experience of using our own wee ice cream maker is that a litre of home made ice  cream costs less than a quarter of the commercial product. Scaling up that would release nearly 5 billion pounds which could be put to far better use.

Even if only one quarter of the saving was passed on to help eliminate the real grinding poverty that today is about thats one billion pounds would make a huge difference. All it would take is for those who can afford to to switch from buying expensive ice-cream and to put aside a few pence ever time they benefit from eating cheaper home made ice-cream.The more ice-cream eaten the more everyone benefits.

If you don’t know what to do with the money – then read some of the information at the link below. I defy anyone to read through the info and not find something to be outraged about.

Go on, make a difference make ice-cream together as a family and help someone at the same time.

Its certainly a campaign that would be supported by my family on grounds of taste alone.

Starting Blocks

First thing is to put my thoughts into some sort of order. For the past few months I’ve been using google reader to squirrel away articles that I though might be helpful. Looking through them there are several different things I want to change and so I can sort them into approximate piles:

• Workspace – building an environment that lets me be productive whether at work, home or somewhere on the move.
• Tools- possibly interesting or useful additions to my workspce or references that might be handy in particular circumstances.
• Attitude – Things I can work on to improve my communication with others,  ways to focus on why I’m doing things a particular way.
• Process – sytems, checklists and tools – ways to focus on the what and where of doing things a particular way
• Fitness – improving my resiliance, so I can tackle things better
• Money – improving the financial security of me and my family
• Coding – improving the specific knowledge and experience I need to do my job
• Books – articles, books and podcasts to be viewed or read later

Next step is to start actioning each pile.

Homeward bound

Its been a great 24 hours – even the failure of my connecting bus service to connect, leaving me stranded in Glenrothis on a Sunday for an hour can’t dampen my mood.

For what its worth 15 years is possibly a little long between spending an evening drinking with friends watching dumb movies and eating crisps. I would definetly advise anyone to try doing it a bit more frequently.

Of course it doesn’t change any of the fundamental facts of my current situation, but its good to know that things can be put aside even for a little bit, and having had the chance to rest I now feel more capable of tackling them.

This dumb habit’s not sustainable …

I’m writing this sitting on a bus heading towards St Andrews, a lot of memories and some very good friends who have made it very clear that I need to stop and unwind and take a breather.

The last 6 months has been long and complicated with a lot of work and personal crisis. However there comes a point when you can’t keep living your life in crisis mode. One busy few days very quickly runs into the next busy few days and things put on hold have a nasty habit of coming back and becoming urgent at the worst possible times. Missed chances leading to more work for everyone.

I have two wonderful daughters and their lives don’t go on hold because I happen to be busy at work, and similarly work does not go away and make room for personal crisis – so everything has to be juggled. The rusult increasingly shoddy results on all fronts recognised by me, recognised by groundhogmum, recognised by my friends and perhaps most embarrisingly for me recognised by my boss who pointed out in the nicest of ways that the best of intentions are great but when it creates more mopping up for everyone else it’s the results which count more.

As groundhogmum pointed out the problem of crisis mode is that judgment and learning are the first things to be counted as optional extras. The obvious thing  is to deal with this prediction to lead life in crisis mode all the time but for a couple of weeks that’s felt like “there’s a hole in my bucket”…

To get out of the crisis I need to do less and do it better. This means having the confidence to say no . This means not relying on others sprobation because sometimes no will be an unpopular answer. The means having confidence in my abilities and judgment. While I’m in crisis mode these are the vey things that I’m finding difficult and I’m having criticised.

Which is the point that everyone very gently said – time to stop, have a few beers and start again fresh.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

A sour taste …

Looking up some information on positivity and passion in software development today I found myself confronted by something that I just didn’t expect – and I’m still not certain how to react.

Katthy Sierra, an author I admire and respect has decided to stop writing  her Creating Passionate Users blog because of a rather nasty flame war involving death threats which rapidly became a very public discussion.

There are never any winners from something like this, and in the mess of deleted sites, sensationalist reporting and public and private discussions it is hard to see the facts of the story. What I have seen is not pretty. It leaves a nasty aftertaste. Among glimmers of human decency there are a lot of nasty words and mean spirited statements. It all seems so not what the debate about blogs and content and passion for communication should be about.

I now don’t know what to do. To use Kathy’s work to illustrate a positive message of passion and desire for excellence is going to lead people to a debate that runs counter to this message and thats a tough one to deal with both honestly and with integrity.

Lessons about Time and Space

I feel there have been so many lessons about time, and personal space this week. 

Two very different books talking about very different sides of the same things. And the ironic lessos  that arose from trying to talk about either of them. ‘Flow’ talking about the pleasure of having a quest or a goal. Something that makes time rich and wonderful and which moves effortlessly round the task like a well balanced tool.  ’Faster’ on the other hand illustrating the futility of trying to hoard or save time when you have no worthwhile way to spend it. That compromising everything leaves us with nothing to hold onto. Nothing to love. Nothing to admire and respect and cherish 

It sounds obvious to say you can’t create time or the space to use time. Space is as much mental as physical. After an exhausting day there may be plenty of time – but jobs can so easily just turn to dust in the hands of the weary. And it is no use trying to make either time or space when the task is bright and fresh. My own attempts at hacking time have been spectacularly unsuccessful this week. Stretching and squeezing time like a toothpaste tube doesn’t work. It just leads to an ugly splurge of consequences that need to be worked through and sorted.

Wisdom comes in making the right compromises. Still trying, still having goals but having the realism to know that the time to achieve them is constrained. Learning to think inside the box.  Learning to compromise some of the important parameters of time cost and quality rather than losing the lot by not finishing.

One of the other books I read this week was Joan Aitken’s The Witch of Clatteringshaws. A book the author chose to finish quickly in a big bang ending, rather than to leave either the long running series of stories, or the final tale unfinished after her death

There are time when a speedy end is indeed better than a half finished story  

Faster than the speed of night.

There was a post here yesterday. Nothing exceptional, nothing grand just a little post about the irony of reading “Faster” by James Gleick as quickly as possible due to a glut of library books all arriving at once.

I came back to the computer today and my post had vanished without a trace.

I can’t remember what it said now. At the time it all made sense. Now it all seems so yesterday. I guess that’s the joy of our modern fast moving age.

A small salutary reminder to always save.

Time gentlemen please

I was so busy writing my last posting that I managed to miss my bus and not get half my morning jobs completed before the rest of the household woke up.

There is a certain irony there, but not one that was appreciated by my loving family. Serious apologies to Groundhog Mum who had to pick up the pieces. And fervent promises that it won’t happen again.

Going with the flow

 Yesterday I found a perfect description of what Ground Hog Mum has tried to describe as the zen like state you have to be in as an active parent when you’re looking after two young active children.

Its a feeling I know from writing code, but its taken me a long time to realise that it is there with kids too. Kids as the psychologists would express it are ‘a deep immersion activity’. Lose concentration for a moment and you’ll be rescuing your youngest from the debris of the telephone table. The trick to staying sane is not to worry about all the things you want to do but can’t. That when you let go you paradoxically get your control back to enjoy what is happening.

The description Michaly Csikszentmihalyi gives of flow is:

• The experience usually occurs when we confront tasks we have a chance of completing
• We must be able to concentrate on what we are doing
• The task has clear goal and provides instant feedback
• One acts with a deep and effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life
• Enjoyable experiences allow people to exercise a sense of control over their actions
• Concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over
• The sense of duration of time is altered; hours pass by in minutes, and minutes can stretch out to seem like hours

Of course it doesn’t always work like that. There are many, many times when I rage against it. I have other things I want to do. There just seems too much going on. The times when I throw my hands in the air in frustration like a comedy Shylock.

But as Mr Csikszentmihalyi rightly says when it works its one of the most valuable things there is.