Jan
28
God’s love
Filed Under Religion | 5 Comments
It is claimed that there is no love that can compare to God’s love for each and everyone of us. A love that is unconditional, like that of a Mother for her children, but presumably even more so.
Why is it that if I fail to let this invisible, inaudible God into my life, that at the end of my life, I will be punished in hell for ever and ever and ever. Is this revenge, acted out as if by a child, but with a power and duration greater than all men on Earth could muster, really the demonstration of his unconditional love?
Jan
15
Rafael Benitez
Filed Under Uncategorized | 2 Comments
I am as guilty as the next man in blaming Rafa Benitez for the rapid demise in Liverpool FCs performance this season. For good reason, I believe, not least his cold attitude to players making them fearful rather than empowered on the field. But I felt the reality of his position when I saw him interviewed by TV following the shock FA Cup defeat at the hands of Reading on Wednesday. As the interviewer questioned him about the quality of his team, you could hear Rafa’s voice start breaking up. The raw emotion underneath was strong and made me feel deeply sad for his plight. The interviewer tempered his tone as the interview progressed in respect.
How would you feel in a troubled season when your team had been 1 minute away from victory, and to suffer 3 of the 4 best players leaving the field injured. Just one Reading player had inflicted a broken rib on one Liverpool player and a torn cartilidge on another. Alas, we tend to lump such extremely unfortunate incidents into the ‘Manager is failing’ bucket. We also forget that Reading played with flair and penetration that totally belied their league position, and matched the assertive attitude that saw lower league Leeds beat Man United in the same round of the competition. No one, of course, calls for the head of Sir 7-minutes-of-injury-time-please Ferguson.
Quite what happens next is not clear to read. Benetiz would receive a £20M payment if ousted. The club is in severe debt so would struggle to accommodate such a thought. Difficult times.
Jan
10
Competitiveness
Filed Under Sport | 3 Comments
Virtually every day, I play the Oriental game of Go on the Internet. Truly wonderful that I can find an opponent at any time of the day or night. And I also get to play different styles from around the World. All for free.
On the Go Server I use, you can opt to play a ‘rated’ game, or a ‘free’ one. The result of only the former has an effect on your player rating.
Having protected an artificially high rating for a number of months, I decided to play all games as rated, and to focus on my game play, not on my ranking. This allowed me to develop aspects of my game without worrying unduly about losing. My ranking settled to a more realsitic level, where it has stayed since. But try as I might, I cannot shake free from a concern about my ranking. My ego hangs onto this status symbol with concerted dilligance, opposing my long term desires.
The more I watched this status obsession, the more I realised how stubborn it is. A deep rooted need to find a good or elavated level compared to others. Or at least not to slip so as to lose credibility regardless of the quality of my actual games. (It is easy in Go to play a solid game that you lead for most of the game only to slip up at the very end and see a position collapse and the gameslip away from your grasp).
So far, I cannot play without at least some concern for my ranking. My status. Maybe this indicates that I need to liberate the grip of my ego, and can use this simple status scenario as a gauge. I’ll update here if the situation changes.
On the matter of mental and emotional training, the excellent ‘The Plastic mind’ book covers this matter. They investigated the effect of decades of meditation on then non-meditative state of the meditator brains. They found that the influence of the right frontal cortex was small. During compassionate meditation, the left frontal cortex was the highest they had ever seen. Left means compassio, loce, harmony and the right ishome to jealousy, hatred, anger etc.
When questioned on hatred, it appears that the Dalai Lama not so much deeply suppresses this very negative emotion, but simple never feels it. His day to day life is free from the grip of a status obsessed ego, with all that entails.
Of course, these meditators are also liberated from the daily grind that afflicts the rest of us. They would barely have any time to themselves if parenting a bunch of children, let alone daily time to meditate for hours. But a small amount of mental and emotional training for the rest of us would probably be of parallel good as physical exercise is for us. It is just that we have not been edcuated in any way to see the value of such training. Or even how to go about it.
Jan
7
OK, here goes. 7th January 2010, I make the rash prediction that Laura Robson, World number 404 at present, will eventually get to World number 1. She has been playing in the Hopman Cup - singles and then doubles with Andy Murry, World number 4. In the game last night, many of her strokes looked the most natural and effective of all four players on the court. Technically, she was out of her depth, but her natural composure and skills made a mockery of theory.
I’ll act with my wallet and place a bet on this prediction.
William Hills would not give me odds for World #1. And they only gave me 5:1 for her to win Wimbledon before she is 25.
Jan
3
Excess
Filed Under Life, Psychology | Leave a Comment
Being endowed with the memory of a sieve, I cannot recall if I have addressed this matter before. If I have, I hope that I can at least supply a new spin on the matter.
There is some evidence to support my suspician that we are greedy by nature. This opportunist clamouring for all that we can grab almost certainly served us well in the past, where a short excursion to the supermarket was not a possibility.
But this greed is not limited to food. The drive is for greater status, assets, range of friends and so on. But the inevitable consequence of greed is an often repeated overshoot to excess. These individual overshoots are benign in themselves. It is an accumlated excess that fails to serve us.
If we step back, it is easy to see the opposite situation, where countless millions struggle to survive each day. Their life is severely compromised by the daily struggle for food, shelter and the work that might finance their supply.
Many a study has shown that a happy existance is not that far beyond such a struggle. As long as we do not struggle, as long as we have enough and a margin above this that creates a security blanket, then we have the foundation for happiness. Adding more, whether through greed or circumstance, does not have a proportionately enhancing effect on our lives.
Taken to an extreme, a submergence in excess cannot be healthy. Natural tendencies to stop eating when full are overridden by the attraction and ready availability of rich and tasty food. We can only live in one room at a time, no matter how many our mansion contains. And we flounder, lost for direction. When our drive to improve our life is gone - when we have all and more than we need, we are less. We drown in excess.
We cannot easily avoid the instinct to acquire an excess, but we can recognise when it does not serve us, and curb it’s message.
Jan
2
Roath Park Football
Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Just a quick note to supply a link to the photographs I took today of my friends playing football at the nearby park :
http://www.pbase.com/moffyuk/parkfootball
Hopefully there is at least a little artistry on show.