Day 93: Reflections

“Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?” ~ Albert Camus

I knew this photo I took last week had a story to tell.  I didn’t realise it would be story about suicide.  I am glad that it was Albert Camus that posited the choice between suicide and coffee.  I don’t think I would have been brave enough to articulate my experience of dipping into suicidal waters in this way if he had not gone before me.  Suicide is not a subject to be touched lightly and I apologise in advance if anything I have to say appears frivolous or callous.

I assured myself that any contemplation of suicide on my part was dramatic posturing even though all the drama occurs in the privacy of my own head.  Over the years I have got used to the comings and goings of my inner drama queen; cue enter stage with a flounce and a huff  ‘WHAT is the point?‘ wail, ‘What have I got to live for?‘ gnash, ‘Look at all my failures’ followed by the a list of the ‘specials’ of the day and more wailing and more gnashing.  This little scene may be a matter of minutes or hours with variations on a theme.  On occasion it is a long rehearsal spanning days or weeks.  It is not a great place to be and there was a time when I believed this character that I was playing and wondered if I should be honourable and follow through.

I managed to ride the cycle without mishap until a raw conversation with Laura Kenyon*, an insightful homeopath, about 18 years ago now.  I knew I had to talk to someone about these feelings.  She gave me a perspective that has served me to take the charge out of this recurring drama.  She suggested to me that I was in reaction to the impact of circumstances beyond my control, that when life is not playing out as I would like there is a part of me that looks for something to take control of and comes up with this whole notion of taking myself out of life.  In this space I assume that my true value and right to be in life is predicated by external validation.  I observed the truth of what she said then and I see it each time this drama comes up.  I do not suggest that this is the same for everyone.

When I ask myself is this what I want to believe my answer is no.  I refuse to accept it as true.  Now this drama is a hook that allows me to acknowledge that life is not playing out in a way that gives me external acknowledgement or love.  Yes it feels real and if I am unwell or exhausted it is even more intense; I prefer to stand well back on the tube platform and avoid heights and knives.  I can see that suicide could just be a choice away – as easy as will I kill myself or have a cup of coffee? –  but the choice I make is to wake up and smell the coffee; to choose my heart and what I love in that moment, in the simplest of things.  I know now that there will be other times when I will face that question and have to make a choice. I don’t intend to take myself out but if I do please no angst for me , how could anyone expect to be there for me in that slow motion minute of that choice.

I have no idea whether my experience is true for everyone but in the past week I have had two conversations about suicide.  One with a friend who told me how they struggled with suicidal thoughts after a litany of financial failings and then suddenly realised that these thoughts were a control strategy.  With that realisation he was able to turn his life around, to stop his striving for financial success, to be and embrace the love he already had in his life.  Things are not easy but he loves his life, the work that he does and the freedom from working like a hound from hell.  The second conversation was with a friend whose partner committed suicide a few years ago.  It was a conversation we had never had, one in which my personal insights seem trite and irrelevant.  All I could do was listen.

I want to emphasis that what I share here is but a shard in the big picture.  I think there are as many different relationships with life and death as there are unique human beings.  All I write about here is what I am perceiving from the bunker of my reality.

100 Days of Awe is a playful project I set up to bring my attention to awe in my daily life. I see awe as wonder, a mixture of amazement and respect.  I expect the experience of awe to be about perception shifting awareness and that demands a reframing of some sort.  I am excited to see what will awe me on this journey.

Anne K. Scott is an imagination technologist, her work to teach, facilitate and deliver innovation for individuals and business.  She is the creator of FindYourMojo a FREE iPHone productivity app. If you are interested in what intuitive coaching can do for you or your business please do contact me.  I support clients all over the world.

*Laura practises at a number of clinics in London and the South East.

Day 92: Picnic Sunday

Kew Road slices through the northern tip of Kew Green.  Like a knife skinning a finger; superflous perhaps in the big scheme of green that is the Royal Botanic Gardens this little triangle, a flat beige flap of the map is the destination for our Sunday afternoon picnic.  In real life it green and despite the arterial traffic trundling through it has the hall marks of a country village.  The fair is in town and on the other side of the road the cricketeers are at the stumps.  The Greyhound with its mock-tudor exterior and leaded windows reminiscent of bygone time.  And then in the topmost tippiest corner Kew Pond, a place that would have done Ophelia proud, and appropriate as it used to be a mooring place for King Henry VIII’s barge.  The pond used to be a tidal pond filled from the Thames once a month on a particularly high tide.  Nowadays it has to be filled manually once a month and this is the work of The Friends Of Kew Pond.  A little corner of bucolic England the reedbeds are a draw for water birds including a clutch of cygnets the archetypal ugly ducklings, spiky, gangly and blending in to the mud.

I got very excited about this picnic and I had an urge to cook.  It has been a long winter and Summer  slow in coming.  Solstice weekend and still we wondered if the weather will hold.  Fortunately it did, not the brighest of days but warm enough for sitting outside.  The occasion-  a friend heading off on an adventure to Costa Rica.  I thoroughly enjoyed Sunday morning listening to The Archers and Judy Murray on Desert Island Discs while pottering away with potatoes to make potato salad and a tortilla variation.  With about 12+ turning up there was a cornucopia of food covering all tastes and delights with a special favorite of mine ginger beer.  It really was a wonderful picnic and I caught a beautiful sky as the sun slipped down over the playing fields at Latymer Upper School.

100 Days of Awe is a playful project I set up to bring my attention to awe in my daily life. I see awe as wonder, a mixture of amazement and respect.  I expect the experience of awe to be about perception shifting awareness and that demands a reframing of some sort.  I am excited to see what will awe me on this journey.

Anne K. Scott is an imagination technologist, her work to teach, facilitate and deliver innovation for individuals and business.  She is the creator of FindYourMojo a FREE iPHone productivity app. If you are interested in what intuitive coaching can do for you or your business please do contact me.  I support clients all over the world.

Day 91: Trellick Tower

Trellick Tower stretches 31 stories into the North Kensington skyline.  It is a fascinating building and long before I realised that this was a famous and listed building it captured my attention in a strange twisted way; it has an ugly beauty, a beautiful ugliness, proud and tall, imposing and belligerent, unapologetic against the horizon at the end of Golborne Road and an example of what is known as brutalist architecture by Erno Goldfinger who was immortalised by Ian Fleming in his James Bond series.

At the end of a muggy mixed day the sun called me down to the closing Saturday markets of Portobello where I followed the salty whisper of Georges to a hot, bag of fresh ripped chips.  In the bright blue evening the Tower didn’t look quite so imposing or brutal. There was a quiet huddle of police and ambulance that had a sense of permanence rather than drama, detached curiousity led me past to Meanwhile Gardens skirting the canal and into Kensal Road.  Here, between the canal and the main line rail into Paddington,  is a nest of roads that I had never wandered before; modern functional low rise architecture benign in contrast to Trellick Tower, mixed with older Victorian cottage style housing and a couple of big old corner pubs now defunct.  This area was first recorded as Kensal New Town in 1876.  It was occupied by Irish immigrants and home of the bulldog dealer Bill George.   The traditional starting point for the Notting Hill Carnival is also found here in the Emslie Horniman’s Pleasance Park with its arts and crafts style Voysey walled garden, a flood lit sports area and a rather space age children’s play ground. A little pocket of London to open up my eyes while I was eating my chips.  On the way back home the quiet huddle of emergency services was still in place under the canopy of the tower, strangely somnulent and inert.

100 Days of Awe is a playful project I set up to bring my attention to awe in my daily life. I see awe as wonder, a mixture of amazement and respect.  I expect the experience of awe to be about perception shifting awareness and that demands a reframing of some sort.  I am excited to see what will awe me on this journey.

Anne K. Scott is an imagination technologist, her work to teach, facilitate and deliver innovation for individuals and business.  She is the creator of FindYourMojo a FREE iPHone productivity app. If you are interested in what intuitive coaching can do for you or your business please do contact me.  I support clients all over the world.

Day 90: Rats

I love dis great polluted place
Where pop stars come to live their dreams
Here ravers come for drum and bass
And politicians plan their schemes,
The music of the world is here
Dis city can play any song
They came to here from everywhere
Tis they that made dis city strong.

Benjamin Zephenia – The London Breed 1998

I first came across the Musuem Of London a few weeks ago when I attended a workshop on story called Stories in Action workshop.   This short visit was a tantalising taster and I wanted to see more.   Back in the East End today I only had about 45 minutes between one meeting in Bethnal Green and a train to a late lunch in Twickenham but it was enough to take a very brisk way through 450,000 years of history from London Before London, through to Modern London.  Each of the Permanent Galleries are wonderfully curated full of educational facts, curious artifacts and creative displays that capture the imagination.  I weave my way through little people, in school groups or in families. For a museum it is alive with cacophony of squeals and excited voices rather than the floating silence of dusty archives.  And then there were the rats, where I least expected it in The British Fashion Council’s exhibit NEWGEN MEN – a sponsorship scheme. Featuring work by Agi and Sam, Astrid Andersen, Alex Mullins, Diego Vanassibara, Kit Neale and Matthew Miller.  It was Kit Neale’s work that got me to look again.  Yes there were rats everywhere. An intentional homage to London; Peckham and the largely run down and dated Elephant & Castle.  Food for thought if not for lunch.

100 Days of Awe is a playful project I set up to bring my attention to awe in my daily life. I see awe as wonder, a mixture of amazement and respect.  I expect the experience of awe to be about perception shifting awareness and that demands a reframing of some sort.  I am excited to see what will awe me on this journey.

Anne K. Scott is an imagination technologist, her work to teach, facilitate and deliver innovation for individuals and business.  She is the creator of FindYourMojo a FREE iPHone productivity app. If you are interested in what intuitive coaching can do for you or your business please do contact me.  I support clients all over the world.

Day 89: Nature’s Fabric It is hard to take a picture of Sweet Pea that does this flower justice.  It’s petals are artfully folded to look casual, flounced and pouting, it’s symmetry a multi-dimensional mystery.  The petals are ideal material for the dancing dresses of pixies and elves, soft veined and velvety, curved edging beautifully finished.  Picked last night on my walk on the scrubs a bright pink smile for the morning and a beckoning into a little bit of nature’s magic to balance of my day of down to it doing.

100 Days of Awe is a playful project I set up to bring my attention to awe in my daily life. I see awe as wonder, a mixture of amazement and respect.  I expect the experience of awe to be about perception shifting awareness and that demands a reframing of some sort.  I am excited to see what will awe me on this journey.

Anne K. Scott is an imagination technologist, her work to teach, facilitate and deliver innovation for individuals and business.  She is the creator of FindYourMojo a FREE iPHone productivity app. If you are interested in what intuitive coaching can do for you please do contact me.  I support clients all over the world.

Day 88: Big Sky Breather

Wormwood Scrubs

Phew, a relief to get out of the minutae of my life for a moment and dealing with the slow sluggishness of pushing and pulling data up and down the internet line.  What did I ever do before internet.  There is a plethora of stuff to surf; photos to photoshop, job sites to check out, job applications to formulate and stuff to research.  It sucks me in.  We have Summer but we don’t have sun, a warm mugginess that is plagued with drafty holes.  It is weird weather indeed.

I have been under a pall a little today digesting Cancer news from a lovely friend last night; not able to really comprehend that wormhole but feeling the teetering of it, for her, for me, for the future.  But all there is now for all of us and in this moment the choice to be alive to life.  It a soft feather of a place poised, balanced and then lightened up by one of those friendships that no matter how long they are put down for just slide into a groove of exchange and support whenever they are picked up.  In that place something else comes through, an energy, a joy and oozing of breathe.  Despite the evening closing in I am drawn up to Wormwood Scrubs, the wide open expansive of playing fields a table cloth under this illusion of big, big sky dotted by sea gulls and crows on their evening passegiata.  The green parakeets seem to be already tucked up for the night. and the usual westward bound aircraft traffic replaced with lift offs to exotic places.  Night night London Town.

100 Days of Awe is a playful project I set up to bring my attention to awe in my daily life. I see awe as wonder, a mixture of amazement and respect.  I expect the experience of awe to be about perception shifting awareness and that demands a reframing of some sort.  I am excited to see what will awe me on this journey.

Anne K. Scott is an imagination technologist, her work to teach, facilitate and deliver innovation for individuals and business.  She is the creator of FindYourMojo a FREE iPHone productivity app. If you are interested in what intuitive coaching can do for you please do contact me.  I support clients all over the world.

Day 87: Blue

Yesterday I wrote about the futuristic chandelier lighting at The Village, Westfield, today I am captivated by a beautiful blue glass lampshade at a friend’s place where I am staying this week.  I am particularly aware of this lamp and it’s shade as last time I stayed here I knocked over and smashed the precariously balanced green glass shade.

I am in a new environment, I am called to attention, my spatial awareness has to be redefined.  I love having a bigger bed and I have effortlessly stretched into it in just couple of breaths, I have a big sofa to curl up on and a telly which has sucked me into it’s cache of blood, guts and gore like an old friend, I am wonderous of the powerful flush of the loo, love the big picture windows that I can sit and work in front of, I was catlike happy yesterday sitting in the chair that basks in the sun – when it shines.   I am still playing splash and dash with the shower, am tentative about the gas cooker, a bit perturbed about bending down to get into the fridge and of course am extra careful raising and lowering the wooden venetian blind that nuzzles up against that beautiful blue glass shade.  Next week the danger will be past – and I will be squeezing back into my own domain.

100 Days of Awe is a playful project I set up to bring my attention to awe in my daily life. I see awe as wonder, a mixture of amazement and respect.  I expect the experience of awe to be about perception shifting awareness and that demands a reframing of some sort.  I am excited to see what will awe me on this journey.

Anne K. Scott is an imagination technologist, her work to teach, facilitate and deliver innovation for individuals and business.  She is the creator of FindYourMojo a FREE iPHone productivity app. If you are interested in what intuitive coaching can do for you please do contact me.  I support clients all over the world.

Day 86: The Village

Gabellini Sheppard Chandelier*

When I moved into North Kensington in London in 1996 we had Sainsbury’s on Ladbroke Grove for food shopping, Portobello Road for the eclectic and the quirky.   For more traditional shopping I headed down to High Street Kensington where Whole Foods Market, in the wonderful old Art Deco Barker building, is one of my favourite shops for a gander. The Cheese Room is particularly envigorating.  Now Tesco metro is on our doorstep – in place of the North Pole Gastro Pub that alternatively fizzed and dwindled over the years before it was snapped up by the hungry conglomerate – and the giant Westfield shopping centre in Shepherd’s Bush brings House Of Fraser, Debenhams and Mark & Spencers all within walking distance.

I am not a shopping mall girl. I find the cornucopia of goods on offer overwhelming and depressing in the extreme. There is something about being in a space chocca with gaping maws looking for my money under artificial lighting that makes me feel that I truly am just a hamster in the unending wheel of life.  How and ever I have discovered a soft spot for Westfield and not just because there is an Apple Store.  There is also the architecture.  Yes it is undercover, yes there is artifical lighting but the combination of the central atrium – that has hosted the Saturday’s and a good sized ice rink every Christmas – plus the unique geodeisic style roof cleaned by City Abseiling bestows it with more of an Eden Project ambiance.  Southern Terrace dining reminds me of Australia for some reason and this is a seriously big achievement. My outings to Westfield are typically mission focused driving me to take a head down in and out approach but today I take a moment to slow down and look up; the view is pretty stunning in The Village – the home of luxury brands – this futuristic chandelier designed lighting was created by New York based spatial architects and interior designers Gabellini Sheppard.

* Apparently photography is forbidden without a permit but I only discovered that after the fact.

100 Days of Awe is a playful project I set up to bring my attention to awe in my daily life. I see awe as wonder, a mixture of amazement and respect.  I expect the experience of awe to be about perception shifting awareness and that demands a reframing of some sort.  I am excited to see what will awe me on this journey.

Anne K. Scott is an imagination technologist, her work to teach, facilitate and deliver innovation for individuals and business.  She is the creator of FindYourMojo a FREE iPHone productivity app. If you are interested in what intuitive coaching can do for you please do contact me.  I support clients all over the world.

Day 85: After Monet

Lupins From Wormwood Scrubs

Every now and then I give myself permission to be awake and lazy on a Sunday morning which means I plugging in my telephone headset and listen to The Archers Omnibus on BBC Radio 4.  Aired for 15 mins daily, the Sunday edition is the weekly culmination –  75 minutes –  of English rural living unfolding as it has for over 60 years here on the wireless.  So imperceptibly that it is hard sometimes to believe that stories rise, arch and come to completion changing the landscape of this imaginary community as shockingly as electricity pylons or new motorways.  Although it is true that I can drop into the familarity of this show anytime it alway surprises me when I discover that people have died or have being scandalised and have flown the coup.

The Archers beautiful nestles up against Desest Island Discs a cosy insight into the life story and musical tastes of some inspirational, and oftimes little known, stalwarth of science, art, politics or education; someone who has earned their stripes in the proper British way, over time and despite, if not without, pomp and ceremony.  This week it was Palestinian author and human rights activist, Raja Shehadeh.  A lazy but worthy start to the day set me up for a gentle bobbing along.  I momentarily struggled for razor sharp close ups of my friend’s lupins picked up on Wormwood Scrubs but fell in love instead with the blurry edged petals and thumb splotchs of colour that reminded me of artistry and artists.

100 Days of Awe is a playful project I set up to bring my attention to awe in my daily life. I see awe as wonder, a mixture of amazement and respect.  I expect the experience of awe to be about perception shifting awareness and that demands a reframing of some sort.  I am excited to see what will awe me on this journey.

Anne K. Scott is an imagination technologist, her work to teach, facilitate and deliver innovation for individuals and business.  She is the creator of FindYourMojo a FREE iPHone productivity app. If you are interested in what intuitive coaching can do for you please do contact me.  I support clients all over the world.

Day 84: Study On A CactusShort and sweet today. A 10 penny cactus, tucked away on a friend’s window sill, drew me in to it’s magic.  Paradoxically prickly and pink, flowering it’s heart out.  Soft and so simple. A snatch, a glimpse, when explored opens up to awe.

100 Days of Awe is a playful project I set up to bring my attention to awe in my daily life. I see awe as wonder, a mixture of amazement and respect.  I expect the experience of awe to be about perception shifting awareness and that demands a reframing of some sort.  I am excited to see what will awe me on this journey.

Anne K. Scott is an imagination technologist, her work to teach, facilitate and deliver innovation for individuals and business.  She is the creator of FindYourMojo a FREE iPHone productivity app. If you are interested in what intuitive coaching can do for you please do contact me.  I support clients all over the world.