IN PRAISE OF OCCASIONAL AIMLESSNESS

MBA courses and politicians hectoring businessmen for their poor productivity, all demand that we focus. As with the poor schoolchild a failure to pay attention is a detention-able offence. (Incidentally, demonstrating my own lack of focus and tendency to take detours, did you see the news item about a school advertising a role for Head of Detentions and Isolation? That’ll teach them - not).

My current aimlessness started with my going to watch a cricket match which, to those unfamiliar with this “art form,” lasts four days.  It’s the paradigm for sunlit wandering.  Yet Lord’s is a beautiful place to watch athletes in a temperature of 35 degrees C (95F) and to have roving conversations not focused presentations -  about all sorts of things including the joys of lunch.  It was there, whilst actually lunching, that I reflected on the benefits of a good aimless, talk-filled lunch and that in my life that there should have been some 15,000 creative opportunities for these already.

 

It continued on Friday as I wandered through “The Country Brocante” in Cowdray Park  which included  a surprising collection of Sussex craftsmen. The bric-a-brac stalls matched my bric-a-brac mind. There I saw a baby kestrel nesting in a ruined mediaeval tower peering down with bleating mews of mystification and hunger. I’ve never seen one that close before - praise be to aimlessness.  On I went, talking about wine-making and the peril of air frosts; about perfume creation and the way different scents open  gateways to different moods (in my case dilettante flaneurie); about using soya in candle production to achieve a long-lasting clean, fragrant flame and about how to conjure a broad bean hummus of exceptionally hedonistic sweetness.

Amidst all this riff-raff of thoughts, tastes and smells with my mind like a lazily fluttering butterfly doing little to solve the ills of the world, there is a serious point I want to make.

In our lives, at work and especially in education we are losing the ability to let our minds wander.  If you believe (as I do) that our future will be more fruitfully developed through creativity than just through productivity then, occasionally, going for a bit of a ramble physically and mentally is essential. Artists, it’s been said, perform best when up against a deadline in a freezing garret. They should also foster a suicidal depression and drink heavily. A la Bohème? What utter tosh!

Creativity instead is enhanced by having the time, space and frame of mind to notice what is going on around you and to let connections happen. As in sport let the ball come to you or (better) as the ice hockey genius Wayne Gretzky said:  “A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.”

You won’t do that by being stressfully focused on the present but by letting your thoughts go on a stroll uncertain quite where they’re aiming but enjoying the journey.
 

WHY I FEEL CHEERFUL (most of the time)

“Bounce, skip and hop”… synonyms for “spring” and this Spring, which has been especially colourful, has given me feelings of joie de vivre.

This was heightened as I went to Lords on Friday to see Middlesex play Essex. For those not versed in cricket let me explain it’s an English pastime that’s a cross between baseball, ballet and chess that can last four or five days. Like steam trains it was on its way out commercially but as the recent relaunch of the Flying Scotsman steam engine showed the past can be recreated and a fan base re-inspired.

I recently saw an advertisement for Jack Daniels. Here’s the bit of copy that stuck in my mind. It observed:
“That simpler things are probably better. That when something works you stick with it till it doesn’t. And that change is fine so long as there’s a good reason for it.”

It seemed an appropriate philosophy as I walked around the “Home of Cricket” (as its marketers style it.) Only one word can describe the architectural perfection, summer green grass and ambience here - “gorgeous”. But no longer is this place, as it were driven by steam, it’s been transformed from a noisome old boys’ club to a world-class entertainment arena with brilliantly modern and fragrant loos, excellent food, comfortable places to sit and always that smell of Spring and the sense of a hot, lazy summer waiting in the wings.

The game has changed and is now a 21st century contest with the 3 hour versions (20:20 Big Bashes as they are styled); these are the real money makers through TV rights. Think baseball on speed and you’ll get the idea.

In the Sports Shop I looked at the “new” equipment. To fully equip oneself, as I’d have done when I played 20 years ago, would cost around £2000 (you could pay less but I liked the best). Everything is lighter, better, more powerful or more protective. This is not a men’s game anymore. It’s an athlete’s game. And that’s a big difference.

So Lord’s and cricket itself have managed brilliant transformations.

But my bucking, seasonal good humour was dampened a little by two stories I noticed last week.  The first about Joanna Coles, chief content officer at Hearst Media (no me neither) who has a treadmill in her office on which she walks in high heels whilst phoning or emailing and, to save time, watches all her TV on double-speed. Why not? Elon Musk has a diary broken into 5 minute slots. I’m going to try that (not).

The second is about Sir George Buckley, Chairman of Stanley Black & Decker and the Smiths Group who gloomily says: “Every company in the world is dying, the trick is knowing what to do next.”

Hell, we are all dying. The real trick is to leave a memorable legacy and  wait for the next Spring. Nature has a great way of renewing itself.