Week 38/2024: Mind and meditations

Week of 16 September 2024

I went to see Kramstable’s play twice this week.

The shape of mind and meditations

The Shape of Mind

This week Kramstable was in a production with his outside school drama class at Helen O’Grady Drama Academy. He’s been with them since he was five years old, and this is his third year with the On Cue ensemble for students aged 16-25.

This has been a big year for him in performances. Once the musical Stranger Sings was over, he was focused on this production, a play called The Shape of Mind by Michael Butler.

It’s a three-act play that follows a class of year one students and their teacher from the first day of school, forward to 24 years later, and then back to the end of the school year. Throughout acts one and three are a group of ‘psyches’ who provide the audience with insights into the thoughts of the characters and why they do what they do.

Like most of the cast, Kramstable had several roles, including the teacher’s dog (hilarious) and hairdresser to one of the grown-up kids in the second act (even more hilarious).

It was a wonderful play.

Funny, sad and deeply thought-provoking, it made me think of some of the people I’d come across in school.

I thought about how what to me seems an unimportant thing to say could be something that stays with the person I said it to for the rest of their life. It could even change the course of their life, in a good or a bad way, and I would never know. The same for throwaway lines directed to me. The people who said some of those things probably wouldn’t even remember, yet they’ve had a lasting impact on me. 

I loved this performance. It was beautifully cast, and the actors, some of whom I’ve seen many times in On Cue productions and some of whom I don’t know at all, delivered a sensitive and inspiring performance

I feel this will stay with me for a long time. 

Meditations for mortals

This week I picked up Oliver Burkeman’s new book Meditations for Mortals.

Four Thousand Weeks

If you’re been reading for a while, you might remember that Oliver wrote the book Four Thousand Weeks, which I wrote about some time after I’d read it.

This is a book that says the average human life span is pitifully short (on average, 4000 weeks) and suggests things we might do and mindset shifts we might need in order to make the most of our limited time. My one-sentence summary of that book was “Go read the book, stop trying to get everything done because you never will, and get on with doing what’s important while you still can.”

Oliver was at pains to tell readers not to make the book into a project that they might feel like they had to “do”, which was precisely what I has been trying to do. (You can read about how that went here. Spoiler: Not well.)

So what is Meditations for Mortals?

When I heard about Meditations for Mortals, I got the impression it was much of the same material covered in Four Thousand Weeks broken down into bite-sized chapters. And indeed it is.

There are 28 chapters. Oliver suggests you read one every day (or daily-ish) for a month and, consistent with his advice in the earlier book, don’t see it as a project to do. He says,

The chapters feature both shifts in perspective and practical techniques and my hope is sometimes one of them will change in a small but concrete way, how you live through the 24 hours after reading it. That’s what makes change last in my experience: real feedback from dong things differently in real life.

On not implementing a system

Oliver doesn’t promise to deliver a system for you to implement, after which your life will start to run flawlessly, because that will never happen. Whatever works for you, will work imperfectly because human life is imperfect and flawed  . . . and finite. And this, he says, is why we should dive wholeheartedly into life, right now.

I’m finding it to be a great reminder of the contents of Four Thousand Weeks. So far, limiting myself to only a chapter a day is allowing me to absorb these ideas more and to see how I might apply the ones that speak to me right at the moment.

Week 38 summary

Habit tracker

I want to start tracking some more habits on here as a way to try and keep myself accountable. It’s become more important to me as I now have an exercise program that I’ve paid someone to prepare for me to help me achieve my goals.

It’s not like they’re checking in on me every week, so I need to check in somewhere publicly to give myself at least the illusion someone’s watching me.

This is what I currently want to keep track of (and how I did this week):

• 2 walks or bike rides or a combination of these every day (6 days): 5/6 days
• Long walk (1 day): 1/1 day
• 15 minutes exercise sequence in the morning (7 days): 5/7 days (7/7 days some of the exercises)
• Hip stretch (6 days): 3/6 days
• Floor sitting stretch (7 days): 6/7 days
• Short exercises sequence in the evening (7 days): 6/7 days
• 9.00 shutdown (6 days): 5/6 days

What was the best thing about this week?

Kramstable’s play.

What did I notice this week?

All my PDFs on my computer at work turned into Google Chrome documents. How does that happen?

Also, no standing in the mulch.

What did I learn this week?

The 2021 banknote of the year (who even knew this was a thing) was the Mexican 50 peso note, which featured an axolotl.

What am I reading?

• The Good Ally by Nova Reid
• Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman