Moredum boredom

What’s important to you?

As a bit of an intro, I’ll share how I got here from there, as simply as I can.

As a kid I liked the odd, new, textured, least acknowledged and beautiful but quirky stuff. That was always more engaging to me than the stuff I was told was more important.

I left school at sixteen and worked in a hairdressing salon in Manchester in 1972.
1973 I moved to London and worked in a salon just off Oxford street. Went to nightclubs and gigs and galleries and cinemas and hung out with people who, like me, were odd, new, textured, mistrusted, least acknowledged and beautiful in both traditional and primal ways.

The people who employed me wanted me to be really good at cutting hair, I wanted to be good at cutting hair, and they encouraged me to work out what I felt really good looked like.

So I did.

And I liked having the discipline, support, and alongside that, freedom of expression.

After pushing that a bit too far for others, I set up my own team in my own space in Saville Row in Newcastle upon Tyne when I was twenty years old in 1976 and filled it with people I liked to work alongside.

I think it’s more or less safe to say we had a great time.

I liked the person who did our graphics and logos and all that stuff. I liked the other person that helped do the art work for our marketing. I liked the people who produced products that I felt were well made and didn’t involve harming animals and us, and, I liked the person who delivered those products to us, he used to borrow our albums that we played in the salon, tape them and then bring them back the following week… and became a lifelong friend.

I have more or less always worked with people I like and respect and learn from. I’m not sure why I would ever not do that, and I still do that now but I have a pension so don’t have to think about money and all that.
This now gets called being a volunteer… and… I think I have always been a volunteer… anyway, that hurts if I overthink it… so lets say it’s different now but I feel the same about what I do.

By the late nineties, I had pretty much peaked in terms of my own hair cutting skills and felt the need to move on. I completed a degree in environmental science specialising in soil science and spent a year… on and off… working with farmers in Bangladesh and bringing their soils home to measure in a lab in Newcastle Uni.

I liked meeting the farmers and their families and also bumped into some nomadic indigenous people who didn’t see themselves as belonging to any bordered country and had developed their own principles based around a pantheist approach to nature.
Spending just a little time with them taught me much more than I ever learned in uni. I think uni made me less intelligent, less imaginative, and limited my story telling capacity.
And maybe I had to learn that.
The way formal education is delivered could become much broader and more imaginative… and only ever left me… feeling stupid?
I love learning though, maybe education and learning are not that closely connected?

By the early noughties I had found some great little charities and they gave me different roles and jobs and they were all based around supporting people without telling them what to do or suggesting they should be doing this or that.
I got really good at that too, once I learned to trust myself, and the people I worked with, and to understand what was important for them and how they could get more involved in that important stuff for themselves.

I went on to do that (what gets called facilitation) work as an independent in my own spaces and occasionally as an employee now and again.

The common thread in all my work is that I met loads of really interesting people and each one of them had stories that I wanted to hear. Not everyone chose to share their stories verbally with me, and I liked the stories they shared in all the ways they found to express what was important for them.

I guess if it was important for them and if I liked them, it was important for me.

And I more or less liked them all.

Something here around, if I do what I like and that tends towards me getting better at it… I find other people who want to do more of what they like to do too… and from there, we can both understand what is important for each other… and that leads to us liking each other, and wanting well for each other.

I find that having someone that likes me and spends time to understand me, I am more likely to be confident and that leads toward me doing more of what I am interested in and love doing.

Over the last few years I have been focussed on becoming a useful elder. Some of the people who supported me in this came from backgrounds that were embedded in indigenous wisdoms. I also find that babies are really good models of how to get your needs met by being creative in the ways they communicate, and, being mainly attracted by doing stuff that draws their curiosity. I have known a few babies that have taught me a lot as I have witnessed them becoming children and then adults.

I was told by a Brazilian woman who offered me support a while back, that I had pretty much achieved my new role as a useful elder and she suggested I might stop worrying about that and just get on with hanging with people who were looking to create systemic change using nonviolent communication and the ancient practices of singing, dancing, making music, storytelling and seeking out the ways of nature and honouring them.

And this and that is how I got here, living in an old house in Clerkenwell, Islington, London, and still doing what I like to do, only slower than I used to.

I am currently experimenting (as suggested to me) with story telling via dance, theatre, music, singing, writing, and doing some stuff around nonviolence and
de-escalation. I’m finding that draws me just now.

Please feel free to get in touch if you want to know how you can use this shared space to share your stories.