Hey!co!za

Well dear Reader, first I must note that the body intelligence scan I mentioned in my post of 27 July (“Fear and Loathing in the Loft”) did not happen the following day, but was postponed to 12 August instead.

To my utter surprise, the scan showed my physiology to be about 95% cleansed and reconditioned when compared to the very first scan I underwent in May. Three months, three phases and a bucket-load of water. Since then I have embarked on a training program to prepare me to run my very first full marathon in November. I have subsequently foregone my much-beloved cigars and occasional martini – for now at least…clean body clean mind clean soul and all…

So much for the physical.

For purposes of discussion, I would like to return to the post of 27 July, to wit:

“The dust in my loft was not a result of neglect. The dust in my loft was the result of procrastination. Procrastination is not the result of laziness or apathy. It is the result of fear. Fear neglects and covers in dust all it touches.”

Whilst I had been mulling this over for quite a while after having penned it, my lucid girlfriend Claire once again came up with a very accurate comment on the matter of procrastinating out of fear: “But then shouldn’t one use fear as an enabler?” she asked.

Good point indeed; but on further examination that would be like believing in God because you are afraid of going to Hell (which any good Christian would immediately tell you is a very shaky foundation to base your faith upon). Fear as enabler…well, almost.

And so I thought some more on how to quantify this fear that paralyses one’s life so easily.

This Tuesday evening I was running a particularly difficult 12.7km route. I had mapped it out a while before and had completely forgotten the very steep 300m hill just after the 10km mark. Now by that time my legs were already tired (where I run there is no flat road) and I had just a couple of seconds to get my head around this before starting up the significant incline….and then it hit me:

If there is something that scares you, no matter how profound or menial, you think about it constantly. You pull it apart until you know exactly how scared you are of it, how intimidating it is, how threatening it is, how undoable it is, how you are never going to get it done, how it can’t be done, how you will fail if you try, how you’ll wait just a while before trying to do it and on and on.

Now, dear Reader, while you are thinking away, the construct we know as time is passing and the world at large is getting on with its business. The only one not moving, not progressing, is you. You are thinking but you are not doing anything. This is procrastination. This is the dust on your life.

I turned that corner, saw that hill and the first thought that went through my head was that I am not going to make it to the top. I was afraid of the hill like I was afraid of the dust in my loft. Then I realised that if I started walking or stopped for that matter, I would never crest the hill. And that was just absurd. So I continued at a snail’s pace and climed that hill.

I did not walk and I did not stop and the most amazing thing was that when I came to my senses again I had crested the hill and turned on the last stretch home.

The fear had disappeared with the doing. Doing takes away the fear of thinking.

I have come to realize that I am afraid of more things than I previously thought – surprisingly so. Some fears are very profound indeed and other just menial and small.

I have started to give these things that I fear names and started doing what must be done to rid myself of them and the fear that comes with them.

The Universe applauds action and not thought after all.

Here we go – Detox Stage 4 – I am not afraid of the hill any more.

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Prices are presented in South African Rand (ZAR) and are negotiable.

Motivated buyers are welcome to express their interest at Pangaea Publishing.

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As you’ll notice below, the post I wrote about the third stage of this detoxification- and reorientation process was characterised by the fact that I had to concentrate on my emotional side and to detox my thoughts as well (the verdict is out whether water can help you here…).

Well dear Reader, looking back on what I wrote on 9 July, it seems that I had no idea what I was actually talking about. Happiness and health and all…

A while before I actually penned this post (of 9 July), I started to notice that I had a stiffness in my left shoulder which became pronounced whenever I lifted my left arm. This stiffness increasingly became uncomfortable when doing anything or doing nothing at all. If you have been following this series of commentaries, you would have surmised that I am in a high-strung type of person at the best of times; so it would be safe to assume that the physics of stress had taken over and found a vent through my back.

Skip a couple of weeks of stress, stiffness and all-round bad behaviour, up to last week Wednesday when thatchers, after a very long wait, started to replace all the ridges on our thatch roof (the loft under this thatch roof serves as the think-tank office of my company).

The work lasted until Friday afternoon, by which time I had been working in the dining room for two days with a loft covered in a ton of assorted plant material, cat’s claw, dirt and dust. Everywhere. And then some. Chaos.

In the meantime the stiffness in my shoulder had spread into full-blown spasm in my back. Stiff in body, stiff in mind…and by late Friday afternoon I was in a fire-spitting hurricane of a mood. Now I had to start cleaning the loft.

So, being the foulest of foul moods I decided not to take any more of this shit and to clean this ~#$%^&*$# loft once and for all.

Three hours later I had succeeded in cleaning close to half of it and only in the evening did I realise that I was actually feeling little bit better about myself as well. Interesting.

I continued the work on the Saturday morning with my mind clear enough to reflect on the last couple of weeks, this bad back of mine and a possible metaphysical reason as to why I had to go through this dusty process when I had so much other things to attend to…like Pangaea’s work you know.

As I continued cleaning, I started to develop the compulsion to clean everything in the loft; from the floor, my computer station, the furniture, my vinyls (very dusty), racks, shelves, and everything on them…everything.

As I started concentrating on this I realized just how dusty everything had become (even with a scheduled once-a-week clean and besides the recent re-thatching). I wondered how the room had actually gotten into such a state when many of the dusty items had been in clear sight every day.

I reached the corner of my desk where two of my digeridoos were leaning against the wall – had been leaning against the wall in plain sight for a long time gathering dust and becoming spider high-rises.

I took my time with them and lovingly cleaned them out and polished them so they looked once again as fresh as the day I made them. The moment I wondered how they could have become so neglected and dusty was the moment I realized why all this was happening.

The dust in my loft was not a result of neglect. The dust in my loft was the result of procrastination. Procrastination is not the result of laziness or apathy.

It is the result of fear.

Fear neglects and covers in dust all it touches.

Fear of what you ask? Well, I’ll discuss that in the next post – I think I am not afraid to write it any more.

(P.S. One thing that frightens me a little though, is the fact that my next body intelligence scan is scheduled for tomorrow – after this roller coaster month of little happiness and health I can only imagine what the outcome will be…my apologies in advance Illona.)

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Quickly – look away from the screen…

…can you read what follows before you look back to the screen again?

Technically the last half of the previous sentence will never be seen except for the author who has just written it. At the first reading that is…

Got an idea of where we are going yet?

I had the honour of attending the soccer game between South Africa and Uruguay on 16 June 2010.

During this rather controversial game, Itumeleng Kune, the South African goalkeeper was handed a red card and sent off the field for an alleged foul committed on the Uruguayan forward bearing down on the goal.

The referee’s decision was clearly wrong – for all to see; the Uruguayan forward was clearly offside but was not flagged by the linesman. Kune was sent off and the resultant penalty was converted to a goal which started the demise of the South African effort.

I was one of almost 50,000 spectators in the stadium with millions more across the globe watching the game live on television.

Interesting thing is, the incident was not shown in replay on the two big screens in the stadium; at all. Everyone waited for it but it never came. FIFA was probably afraid that that the crowd was ready to burn the stadium to the ground had this erroneous decision been confirmed in the replay.

Point is that the people looked but the camera looked away. The camera looked away and it was as if it had never happened. It did not matter at all that the people were looking and were seeing what what was really happening and because they did not see it again, the whole incident was simply negated.

Now let’s apply this to another situation happening as we speak; the immense oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

At this point in time the dichotomy lies in the fact that the American Government is lambasting BP all over the show and making them jump, sit, roll-over and play dead (although not too dead) – this we see a lot of in the media.

What no-one sees, however, is the fact that the press has been constantly prevented from accessing the affected areas by the American Coast Guard, Navy and various sheriff’s departments in the region. These agencies are actively assisting BP in preventing any unauthorised media reporting on the scale and extent of the disaster.

The camera is being deliberately pointed to create very specific and controlled images for public perception. The local residents whose lives have been utterly destroyed are looking, but all the cameras are looking away and the result is? The global population is largely unaware of the true profanity of this catastrophe.

The media columns in these areas to which I relate are generally regarded as being “free”; working in countries that are governed by constitutions, bills of rights etc, in which freedom of speech- and expression are well-enshrined. These countries are well-known democracies to boot.

The two examples I have mentioned here are not alone; there are many instances where the camera has simply looked away and taken large chunks of reality with it into obscurity.

Point of story is that no media anywhere in the world is free. All media everywhere in the world serves government and business in singuli in solidum – the people who pull your levers.

Don’t believe everything you hear (that one you know already), but also, start to wonder when you don’t hear anything about something. Or hear something else than what you think you should be hearing – Chances are someone, for some reason, is pulling your lever and making you look in the same direction as the camera.

Which is not necessarily where you should be looking in order to see the truth.

Time flies, days go by quickly and we forget even quicker. Until one day when something that you should have been aware of a long time ago comes up and bites you in the ass.

Then it’s too late – The camera will not come to your rescue. It does not care for you at all. It will simply look the other way and you will not exist any longer.

In the words of In the Colosseum by Tom Waits:

For the dead there is no story
No memory no blame
Their families shout blue murder
But tomorrow it’s the same
In the Colosseum

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I know, I know, it has been much more than two weeks since my last post recording this journey of mine…as you probably know, plans are the things you make before life takes over.

Well, I can proudly report that stage 2 went very well and that I have almost succeeded in cleansing this temple of mine completely. Stage 3 has been a different story alltogether and I suspect that my best intentions have been slightly derailed due to work pressure (extreme at this point), the Soccer World Cup (extreme frivolity) and very little running (winter as a rule).

In short, a lot of justification and less than usual self-discipline.

What is interesting though, is that my mentor warned me that stage 3 is a lot more psychological than physical and that I should concentrate on the emotional side of things; a “detox of the mind as well” she said.

Usually I am one to regard such statements with a measure of circumspect, but I can tell you one thing to be true dear reader, I have had an emotional roller-coaster these last two weeks.

Seeing that this whole detoxification- and re-alignment process is largely based on external stimuli received by your being, recent happenings in the world have not contributed to an easy passage.

In short, the largest and most profound ecological disaster EVER to occur in the history of Man (vociferously hidden away from the people by the United States Government and BP and ‘re-toxing’ our world for generations to come), continued political and economical instability in all regions (everyone is nervous the whole time), ever-increasing rapist mass-media consumption (a pain in the arse and completely distracting); capped off by the hard fact that I think I chipped a tooth yesterday on something very alien in a hamburger patty I should not have been eating in any case…

From the above you may be able to surmise my general state of being…as I am writing this tome, I am sitting at a bar, having a beer and smoking a cigar.

Luckily for me, I am surrounded by people who love me enough and who have enough of an interest to sometimes put things in perspective for me.

Yesterday my beautiful girlfriend Claire taught me a small and fundamental lesson; tired from working very hard, having her limits tested and having a glass of wine on the deck, she looked into the distance and said: “All we have to do is be happy and healthy, and bless those around us with happiness and health.”

As simple as that.

So, if there is something in you that is not supposed to be there, give it a name and bless it with happiness and health. Get it out.

Remove the cancer before it actually starts, make inner space into outer space – and be not afraid of what is within you.

It is a journey after all and we are but travellers backpacking through to our eventual transit points.

Be not afraid of what is within you, you are exactly what and where you have to be.

You’re only passing through here after all.

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