#274:Coffee shop Derby

The conversational nature of reality

Sitting in a coffee shop in a shopping centre in Derby.

Doing some holiday shopping and going to Tenerife on Sunday. Brits abroad.

Sitting here. I feel, very alive. Present. Aware. I’ve got a comfy seat at the back looking out at people going about their day. Derby reminds me of Stoke.

I hate shopping centres though. They feel so lifeless that they make me anxious. I feel like I can’t breathe. It’s as if the oxygen in here is somehow less real than that outside. The bright lights blind me, they’re supposed to illuminate everything but instead they push everything that matters away.

In places like this I imagine my soul. As if it were a cloud wrapping my body in vapour. And in an environment like this I imagine it completely shrinking within me. Disappearing. Yet on a walk in the Peaks for example. I imagine it beyond my body dancing through the fields, bounding like a dog.

I feel emotion in me. Emotion, like I could cry if I was allowed. Sob even. It began last night in the gym listening to David Whyte. I can’t even recount what he said, that’s the point. This is what I’m learning about poetry - and poets - artists too. They carve something that speaks so deeply to the soul and the soul struggles to write or speak it back.

It was about grief and finding an edge. Grief lowering you to a new foundation within yourself. When you lose something you then have to grow and expand into what you lost to re-complete yourself where the thing you lost had, before, completed you. Before, there was something or someone and then when they are not there you have to find a new way to complete yourself without that person.

And then to the unknown. A theme that constantly comes back to me. Most of life is undecided and we have to meet life at its edge to uncover what will be. The story of my life is always trying to predict and control and it stems from school. From being rewarded for being right. Oh how I loved being right. I was a straight A student for that reason. The answer. I loved finding the answer. Sometimes in maths exams I would complete the test so quickly and then have time to go back and add up the marks. I loved how in maths you could know if it was right or not just by putting the numbers back in the equation. I’d walk out smiling knowing I’d got an A.

Yet in life. The way we want things to turn out never quite happens. And what David has told me is that what life wants to happen to you never quite happens either. Something in the middle happens. What David Whyte calls the conversational nature of reality.

That hits me. And truth is. It annoys me that it’s true. Because I would love to be able to add my life up like a simultaneous equation. A complex one, fine. Make it hard. Make it further maths A level but I’ll take it - because I know I can work it out eventually.

This makes me think about money. Money feels like it flushes through the complexity of life and trumps it all. Like when you divide something by 1. Simple. Money gives the illusion that it’ll complete the equation for you, solve it all - make it easy.

But life isn’t like that. Life is poetry, not maths. And therefore David Whyte is right. There is a conversational nature to reality. Where I, or what I believe I am, meets life head on and we dance, play, explore.

Timely for me as I play with my next venture that feels like it has to be in the men’s space because I’m being called into that. I feel life asking me to show up there. And I feel myself saying yes. And I feel myself wanting to know what it will be. Will I build a business like Sanctus again?

Will I get this book out? Will I open a chain of barber shops?

Or will all those visions and ideas and possibilities within me meet the world and then…. Who knows. During Sanctus I shouted to the world “mental health on the high street” - I personally didn’t put a retail location on a high street. Others did and have, instead I built a business that changed mental health culture in the workplace. Me and life had a conversation and there we go.

I imagine this will happen again, and a lesson for me is to be more relaxed about how an idea takes hold in the world. Rather than try and know; stop trying to perfect the vision or plan - maybe try to not know for as long as possible - forever even? And let whatever will be take shape. Because when I look back - when it all became fixed and certain last time. When it was plans and strategies and scale. I began to die inside. Everything became so lifeless and so thought out. Yet instinct and intuition - that felt like fun. The mission and the play was alive. I was alive.

I want my work to feel like play. I don’t even really like calling it work. I’d love it if I left the house and Sarah shouted. Have a good day playing!

I’d shout back with a smile, “Thanks, will do!”

I’d come home. “Had such a good day of play today” or, “played today but just didn’t feel great.”

I’ve drained my Long Black and can see some tiny grains of coffee in the bottom of the mug.

The conversational nature of reality.

Cheers,

James