Nat Geo article

Check this out: http://natgeotraveller.co.uk/how/features/332575/

an article in Nat Geo traveller about a rubber boat journey in cairo a few moons back

energy is liberated when something happens

I was down, musing on the downside of life in Egypt when my wife and kids came back from a basketball game my daughter had been playing in, a game they had slunk off silently at an early a.m. leaving me musing over a mug of tea…but now they were back and instantly I was  brimming with energy, fun upbeat energy all derived form this game they had watched and played in. Something had happened that they had been a part of. I thought if they had all stayed home, and watched TV or whatever, none of this energy would have happened. It would have never existed. So humans Not Doing Stuff deprives the world of energy. Watching TV and playing computer games drains the world, deprives it of life.

Think about machines allowing one man to do the job of several. Again very little energy is generated compared to a group effort. The pinnacle of this idea is the Amish way of barn raising- do it in one day with the whole town participating and then have a party. I used to have an allotment but trudging down there alone to dig a few silent trenches on a cold morning was a drag. I now know I should have had a dig for victory party where everyone brings a spade and digs for half an hour or so all together. There are few things more fun than reasonably easy manual labour going on for not long with a bunch of people you really like. I keep being amazed it’s that simple.

living in the moment #2

Having written that piece on living in the moment I found myself in a taxi heading to a two o’clock meeting stuck in traffic and watching the meter ticking with increasing anxiety as I had the bare minimum for the ride in coins. If we went over I’d have to offer a fifty pound note and many taxi drivers have no change so I’d be walking into shops to get change making me even later for the meeting. Which I was already late for as the traffic was still not moving. If ever there was a time when I was NOT living in the moment this was it. So I thought I’d experiment and notice my reactions. I didn’t try and ‘stop’ feeling agitated, I just noted that I wasn’t ‘living in the moment’. Strangely just repeating this phrase effected a major shift. This has happened to me before with ‘mantras’. If you’re slogging through the desert on foot against the wind or canoeing against the current you can find a phrase, that, if you endlessly repeat it, somehow powers you up. As Ranulph Fiennes the English explorer (and cousin of Ralph Fiennes the actor) puts it, ‘a mantra lasts about three days.’ After that the ‘magic’ power of the ‘power phrase’ has lost its urgency and you need a new one. So I suspect I’ve made the phrase ‘living in the moment’ into a mantra phrase so it will be a powerful switch of emotional state for a few days and then I’ll be back to normal. That’s why, incidentally, I am wary of the massive claims made by NLP and other systems that employ ‘emotional reboots’ of one kind or another. They promise permanent change but actually just supply a series of emotional kicks. At the risk of going off the point I should clarify. Permanent change means removing things from your personality, from your life, from your conversations, from your way of seeing. You may add information such as, say, the need to be physically fit, but it acts as a removal of tiredness and lethargy. Abundant reality surrounds us all but we’re often blocked from perceiving it. Things and thoughts get in the way. Any plan of change that is based on a model of adding ‘new software’ to build some kind of superman battling the world to get his or her share of the goodies is just as doomed as a computer locked up with bloatware. In fact this example has some fleeting application here: imagine you’re a computer with a marvellous operating system and minimal software perfectly adapted to its correct use but somehow you’ve been loaded up with lots of free programs and downloads that keep causing you to crash. Your instinct is to find yet another program to cure all the others. Actually you just need to start stripping away all this stuff you don’t need. Or, more practically, recognising it can be used for temporary gain or boost, but then must be ditched. Hence mantras. There is no question if you are engaged in some hard boring task and you want to blast through it find a mantra that works- power phrases of the right kind usually suggest themselves at the time (‘never give up’ ‘I am unstoppable’ etc etc) and then as they lose effect try and find another. If you need it. But each mantra is ditched as needed, not left around to be worshipped as some ultimate truth- which only clogs the system.

Stripping it away rather than adding and adding has to be the overall strategy. And it is supported time and again by experience. For example, by stripping away thoughts about past and future one will feel energised. The freer you feel the more energy you have. The more ‘tied down’ you feel the less energy you have.

Back to the taxi. So I had some mantra help to get me started but then I began to notice what I was thinking. I found that if I turned my head to search out something new and potentially interesting to look at outside in the street I could beat getting ‘locked in’ which is the characteristic state of NOT living in the moment. I found I was observing my breathing, noting the extent of my body sitting in the chair. So making a note of sensations and then moving on definitely helps. I didn’t pursue or hang on to any thoughts that occurred. I visualised my head as ‘empty’ (true in more ways than one it has been suggested…), a place for observing ideas and thoughts and sensations and then moving on. The feeling of moving on is essential. I complimented the driver on the snazzy orange plastic interior of his cab. Beaming out a measure of goodwill definitely helps, looking out to be vaguely helpful rather than vaguely hostile loosens things up too. It all sounds rather simple because it is. Maybe it amounts to just removing the things that are stopping you from living in the moment. Worries? Just note them and then move on to noting your breathing and the blueness of the sky. If you can connect to the idea of all of life being somehow interconnected, including the inorganic, then it’s easier to avoid ‘mental lock-ups’. It’s easier because you can keep focusing outwards, keep using awe and wonder to keep your own tiny thoughts in perspective.

I am as guilty as the next person of thinking I need X and Y, and only if I get X and Y will I be truly ‘fulfilled’ and happy. What a needless penance! What a treadmill.  Humans need something to do otherwise they become unhappy. But this doesn’t mean they should make themselves unhappy trying to make themselves happy…you aim for goals because that is what humans do, that’s the way we structure our days. But goal setting and achieving, though energising, won’t make anyone happy. Happiness is the natural state, the basic condition of life when you remove distracting thoughts and sensations.

crossing cairo roads

The key thing to remember when you launch out to cross any crazy road in Cairo is that you have as much right to be there as the biggest bus and the smallest moped. There is an essential democracy of the roads, which, though the biggest will tend to bully, they cannot take away from you. And every car driver accepts this. So if you should step right in front of something they may hoot and scream but they will stop. Not so in the West where a pedestrian’s rights only extend as far as the pavement and the zebra crossing. On the road he takes his life in his own hands. There are even countries like the US where crossing roads not at the special crossing is an offence. Get rid of that mindset in Egypt. Here, on the road, we have our right to be there, and, knowing this, one can launch into any stream of mad cars with equanimity. You will be respected, rather as a slow car is respected in the West when it tries to cross a busy road. If you launch out, cars will stop, not just because they don’t want an accident, but because you have as much right to be there as they do. Think of yourself as a very slow and very fragile car crossing a road of juggernauts. Lock eyes with oncoming drivers and never stop once you start moving, you may stall. Show decision and telegraph a clear trajectory so the oncomers can take early evasive action. Stand sideways if the gap between two headlong plunging bangers looks especially tight.

cairo nights 2

I drive at night reluctantly in Cairo, partly because I have poor night vision and partly because only one light works on my car and that single cyclopean light is wrongly adjusted so that it shines in everyone’s faces and mirrors and makes them flash angrily both red lights from behind or white lights from the front, or sometimes the plucking fruit gesture they make with extended arm sticking out of the car, this Cairene gesture deserves more than this but succinctly it means ‘cut me some slack will you?’ So usually I AM DRIVING ON SIDELIGHTS ONLY like some cave fish groping along half-blindly navigating the dim streets looking for the road where I dropped my daughter off only hours before in scorching daylight. Now the place is quite different, utterly different, a group of three men watch a TV propped on the curb- the only light source around, black wind rustles black leaves, side roads appear at random, or so it seems. Yesterday a man told me he couldn’t get used to not seeing the stars in Cairo, he was from new Zealand, a remote part I would say as not seeing the stars is what happens in any city you live in the world over. At least you can see the moon I said determined as I usually am to stick up for my adopted home. The moon is very yellow in Cairo , decadent, not like the icy silver moon you see in the frozen north. How can the moon vary so? It does. It also seems bigger on occasion, so big that it might break something, the night horizon, or be pregnant.

Of course I could fix my car but you see here in Cairo there is actually a law that says you should turn off your headlights when driving under streetlights. Police cars obey it as do many taxis. Me too. A strange pedestrian-friendly law. A strange law for a strange place.

When I park my car I look up at the sky and strain my eyes looking. There is one star, far off faint. All you need.

parking fable

When I moved into my building four years ago few people had cars and there were enough spots for all to park. I had my own slot in fact. Then people got richer, credit got looser and everyone got cars, or more than one in some cases. Then the parking got a little like a rubics cube solution- there was a way to park but it needed full cooperation and everyone had to leave off their parking brakes so you could shift cars to get out. But it worked. Then with the addition of just a few cars more and one person who sometimes left on their handbrake the cars started getting parked in a way that trapped in the inner cars. So you had to wait, get the doorman to call on the people who blocked you in and wait. Never longer than fifteen minutes - but still. So in order to avoid being blocked in people started parking way back- leaving a huge gap in front of them so they could leave. Thing is: the whole front area of the building- the original parking area in fact was now unused. So now only the same number can park as they did before except their cars hang way out into the street so that no one can park behind them. So there is less space all round but less parking too and more wasted space. And more cars everywhere else. The funny thing is- people pretty much get on in this building too. Some tension but no real feuds. And you want to solve the middle-east problem? 

teaching flexibility to egyptian teams

Egyptians can be legendarily flexible: who hasn’t experienced such brilliant ad hoc problem solving as a coat hanger serving as a satellite antennae, a screw and pliars used as a corkscrew, thread to seal a leaky water joint or even a car steering wheel in place of handlebars on a bicycle? To name but a few.

But we’ve also experienced the incredible dogmatic inflexibility of someone who just won’t budge an inch and shift THEIR way of doing something to one that is obviously better, quicker and more appropriate. Or the type who having been shown a method and having appropriated it as THEIRS spend a lot of time manoevring and trimming reality to suit their method. There’s even an Egyptian story to cover it- a man finds a falcon and trims its beak and claws and finally pronounces- “At last you really do look like a pigeon”. Of course these characteristics occur in the West too, but there the culture of innovation is more entrenched and can be easily referenced and used to coerce intransigent team members. For a while I thought this 'situational inflexibility' of some Egyptians was unavoidable, just part of the cultural scene.

But the more I worked with Egyptians the more I saw that there was a way around this chronic inflexibility and it’s ally, lack of sensible initiative taking. One actually leads to the other: once you put TOTAL value on your way of doing things then taking the initiative- which by definition means doing something new- will involve a deviation from your methods and hence must be avoided at all costs.

The way out of the problem is to see it from the Egyptian perspective. To the chronically inflexible team member changing your method is seen as SELLING OUT.

That’s right- think of a writer in Britain penning poetry for a tiny magazine and someone suggests- “hey you’re a good writer why not try and do an episode of Eastenders?” Answer- total outrage, inconceivable, an attack on my integrity etc. or the avant guard composer who you suggest might pen a eurovision song contest number or even a film score. Or the conceptual artist you ask to do a mural on your kid’s wall of Disney characters…

Selling out.

To the 'situationally inflexible' Egyptian his integrity lies in having a ritualized pattern of work. A set of things he does at certain times and in a certain way. And he or she may well have been very creative in arriving at this pattern or not. But once it is in place the object is to stick to it. The more he can stick to this the better he has done, the less he has sold out. If he deviates, even if it results in a win for those employing him, he won’t be happy as his system has been breached, he has compromised his integrity. Now this may not be an exact explanation of what is happening but it works as a form of cultural comparison. We are all familiar with the concept of 'selling out' and have a grudging respect for those who don't. That respect, if transferred to inflexible Egyptian workers could be the injection of goodwill always required if you want to help someone change.

A ‘good day’ for a typical European team player is when hard work or a good idea results in a win either for them as an individual or for the team. A ‘good day’ for an Egyptian team player with an over developed sense of integrity is one where his integrity (his own way of doing things, his routine) has not been breached and neither has his team’s.The task, then, is to take these potentially very flexible team members who are mired in a false conception about what constitutes GOOD WORK which has made them inflexible in certain respects, and get them to view flexibility, initiative taking and bending to suit a new situation, in a different light. As not selling out but as being on the crest of a new and exciting wave of behaviour, linked perhaps with new and exciting forms of technology which are always eagerly embraced. ipod creating behaviour so to speak.

Part one is to explain all this.

Part two is to instill it through exercises, games and discussion.