Meditation 93

As I sit looking out of my kitchen window, the Indian summer of the afternoon has melded into the autumn chill of evening. A scent of bark wafts in through the kitchen door. I have just laid bark and wood chips over the soil in the garden borders to hopefully prevent my perennial struggle with weeds in the year ahead!

I am thinking about something Roman, which Marcus Aurelius would have used every day and something modern which we may use every day. A tablet.

You may say to yourself I do not possess a tablet myself or I pad or whatever. But is not the mobile phone a mini-tablet? We are able to make notes on it after all as well as emails and messages. I could write my meditation on it if I so wished.

This has come to my mind because a week or so ago my mobile phone was stolen. I hasten to add that I wasn’t mugged. I wasn’t alone either. I had a friend with me. We were eating outside a restaurant in Central London. My phone was taken by a beggar woman from my table. It was beside my plate and the woman used the distracting tactic of trying to grab a slice of pizza from my plate. I didn’t notice it had gone till a while later. More fool me for leaving it on display as a temptation for someone less fortunate than myself.

My friend was very helpful and called the phone company for me and the assistant arranged for my phone to be blocked. Two days later I had a new phone and thanks to that most nebulous yet essential of devices, the Cloud, everything from my stolen phone appeared as if by magic on my new one. And then all was well with the world again!

Aside from the shock of the theft and being annoyed and upset, I immediately felt rather disorientated. This feeling of being lost lasted until a new phone was in my hands. I became a bundle of nerves at times. My nerves didn’t settle until my emails and apps etc were up and running again on my phone. Even though, in the interim of only two days, I was able to use my I pad and laptop to write, send emails and texts and explore the internet. And being old-fashioned, I still have a landline too to communicate with the outside world.

This situation has made me ask myself why am I so dependent on a smart phone for my health and wellbeing? For it is dependency. I mainly do my banking on my phone, for instance, and the app provides a security code if I want to access my account on my laptop. Although my bank is a telephone bank and I could have done business that way if necessary. I have the NHS app too which has my medical records on it and I can use it to order a repeat prescription. Again, I could always call the surgery if I needed a repeat prescription on my landline, like in the old days (only a year or so ago!). So, I do not absolutely need my mobile phone, but life is getting that way!

Of course, the ability to communicate with others in such a variety of ways and so quickly on a mobile phone is a wonderful asset to have. Not to mention, taking photos, playing music, watching TV, keeping up with the news, making purchases, finding directions etc. You may be reading this meditation on your mobile phone. And, of course, they were so useful in lockdown for video calls with loved ones.

I remember watching a TV programme, around 30 years ago now, about the joys of the personal computer. Mobile phones were mentioned in the discussion. They were in their infancy then and looked like a brick against the ear – not much different from a military walkie-talkie! Someone suggested that eventually a hand- held computer will be developed. And here we are!

My worry is that not only have we become dependent on mobile phones for so many things now, but that this dependency has accelerated rapidly in the last few years. So much of our lives is now conducted on that mini-tablet in our hands. I also remember that when I was as a child, television broadcasting was promoted as a window onto the world in the corner of your living room. Now the world is in our hand – or rather the virtual world.

Did we ask for this dependency? No of course not. No-one asks to be dependent on anyone or anything. It somehow just happens slowly and stealthily. And with dependency comes addiction, if we are not careful. At the very least, the mobile phone can be a distraction, stopping us from fully concentrating or focusing on the task in hand. In fact, the phone becomes the task in hand instead unless we have the personal discipline to switch it off for a while or at least switch it to silent mode. Then perhaps true personal fulfillment will come to us, instead of the empty promises of personal fulfillment pedaled by social media.

Dear me, Marcus will be upset. I had intended to share with you my recent visit to Rome. I will save it until my next meditation.

Ave atque Vale – until the next blog.

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Many thanks

Neilus Aurelius

MEDITATION 56

If I had begun to write this meditation yesterday afternoon, I would not have been able to see the candle beside me clearly. The screen of my iPad would have been cloudy too. Yesterday morning I went to the eye clinic at Kingston Hospital for an examination and consultation. The examination was very thorough and involved two different liquids being squirted into my eyes by a nurse so that photographs could be taken of each eye. I was told that the liquid would make my vision blurred for up to five hours afterwards. In addition to that, the final examination involved an extremely bright light being shone in each eye. So when I came out of the clinic into the hospital car park and bright daylight, I felt a little disorientated, almost as if the ground was going from under my feet. It was a momentary sensation making me tread slowly and carefully. The blurring in my eyes went on for some time.

However, this temporary change of vision did not stop me for getting on a bus and going into Kingston for a walk along the river Thames with a take-way coffee. I needed fresh air and a wider view after being in the clinic. To my eyes, the swans serenely skimming through the water had a white sheen around them as if they were photographed in soft focus. Indeed, everything I looked at had a softer edge to it. I had to avoid looking into the sunlight, however, as the glare, welcome though it is in these days of early Spring, made my eyes smart. I also had to really focus on my coffee in its paper cup in case I spilt it all over myself.

I moved over to the barrier and rested my cup on it while trying to focus on the traffic on the river. Several canoes and a rowing boat with eight rowers at the oars scudded past along with the swans, geese, seagulls and little terns bobbing about. They were all enhanced with that soft edge because of my slightly impaired vision. I began to think that as we are coming into Spring and the lockdown will be slowly opening up, our lives are beginning to take on that softer edge and maybe a brighter future is coming into focus.

When I got home, I did not feel like writing as the hospital examination left me a little exhausted. Medical tests and examinations, even though they may be straightforward, always upset our personal equilibrium, don’t they? They are invasive even though they are for our own benefit. The personal equilibrium of all of us has been severely upset this last year. We have been truly shaken up. The relentless restrictions have been a major intrusion to our everyday lives and plans and like medical tests, they have been invasive too though also ultimately for our own benefit. Perhaps we can consider ourselves fortunate, as I am able to do, that the virus itself has not been a major intrusion in our lives. As I sat in the clinic yesterda, waiting for my appointment, I was reminded of how very precious our eyesight is and I thought how difficult this last year must have been for those who are blind or whose sight is severely or even partially impaired. I have been very fortunate.

Now, this evening, as I sit here by my customary candle and write this, my eyesight is clear again. But I keep thing back to yesterday and that experience of walking around Kingston with slightly impaired vision. It reminds me of my childhood and youth, when I lived in Redcar, in Cleveland by the North Sea. Sometimes if the weather was cold and turning to rain, a very light, delicate drizzle would come in from the sea. It made the horizon indistinct, with a soft blur, almost like an Impressionist painting or one by J.M.W. Turner. Perhaps that delicate drizzle, which was like looking through an intricate veil, is what inspired his blurred seascapes. We used to call this opaque mist, ‘sea fret’. It was as if the sky was anxious and fretting before pouring out its tears of cold rain. Although it could be cooling and even refreshing, the arrival of sea fret was always the signal to leave the shore and go back into the High Street or home as rain was on its way.

At times, we have all been fretting in the last year and our anxieties may have blurred our vision too, making us get things out of proportion. Fretting was at the root of all that panic-buying in the supermarkets this time last year: all the trauma over toilet rolls and the intrepid pursuit of paracetamol. It all seems senseless now but was the result of that first shock of lockdown, which sharpened our instinct for survival. Just like myself in the hospital car park yesterday, we have felt disorientated at times. as if the ground were going from under our feet. It is as we have all been in a sea fret ourselves unable to see the horizon clearly, with the future just an indistinct blur.

Of course, the future is always an indistinct blur, despite all our plans for going here and going there. We do not know what the future holds and we are certainly not masters or mistresses of the future, though, with all our plans and projects we may think that we are in control. I seem to recall I made this comment in one of my meditations last Spring. I have come to see that perhaps I over-planned the early months of my retirement, with several trips abroad and various theatre visits with dear friends. As those early months coincided with the early months of lockdown, those plans have come to nothing or are hopefully being put on hold. I have been left with copious travel and theatre ticket vouchers to use when lockdown is over. But I shall be pacing myself and the travelling and performances will no doubt seem so much more precious to me, having been deprived of them for a little while.

But not as precious as my eyesight.

Ave atque Vale – Hail and Farewell – until the next blog!

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Many thanks

The days stretch so far into the evening at present that there is little need for a candle beside me as I write this meditation. Or perhaps I should wait till much later and the dead of night to get into true Marcus mode. I should switch off the lights and let my I pad keyboard be lit by candles or oil lamps or both as Marcus’ own tablet would have been. Indeed, I should not be using an I pad at all, but parchment or vellum and a stylus or quill. Then an army of scribes could copy these words onto individual scrolls and my trusty horsemen cold gallop away into the night to deliver them personally to each of you.

Perhaps it would mean more to you, to receive a scroll personally than to have this meditation pop up in your inbox or on Facebook. Dare I say it, perhaps you would read it more carefully if it were a scroll in your hands. But I am sure, dear readers, that you do read these meditations as reflectively as I write them. I trust that you do and I am honoured that you read them at all.

Isn’t it true though, that our reading skills have declined since digital communication has taken over our daily lives? We are forever skim-reading rather than digesting the information properly. I have noticed this when reading a book. I read too quickly because of my digital reading. Moreover, I do not recall things I have read as well as I used to. You may say, ‘Be realistic: it’s your age!’ That may to some extent be true, but as a medieval monk prophetically observed ‘Whatever finds an easy entrance into the mind is as easily lost.’ Our medieval monk, (William by name) could be referring to skim reading when he writes ‘easy entrance to the mind’ and so the information is ‘easily lost’ because it is not read slowly and therefore understood properly.

But before you could read the scroll with my mediation written on it, you would have to wait for its arrival by horseman. I suppose you have to wait anyway as I do not write these meditations every day. I think it is almost three weeks since the last one.

In these days of texts and e mails, we do not want to wait. We want an instant reply. We are grown so impatient. We expect an almost immediate response to our message or e mail. I certainly do: but then as I am retired I have little else to think about. Perhaps we sometimes mix up texts and e mails in our minds, because an e mail reply usually takes longer to compose than a text. Although it has been pointed out to me that some of my texts are as long as a paragraph in a Victorian novel. I of course make no apology for that. I would rather express myself rather than be compressed.

In these last months of lockdown, our patience has been severely tried. We have had to wait. We have had to wait until we are told it is safe to go out and return to some kind of normality. Whatever we have thought about the government’s decisions, day by day, we have had to go along with them.

Hopefully this waiting game has made us a little more patient, gentle and appreciative of others. Therefore, hopefully we will not be as impatient as we used to be for a reply to our e mail or text! Perhaps we will be more reflective and meditative even. Hopefully it has made us more grateful for our health and for our loved ones and friends and more aware of others in the community and in the world at large. Hopefully, as a nation, we will not forget the lessons we have learnt through experience as we ease ourselves out of lockdown and emerge into the future. This is the fear that several friends have shared with me. I sincerely hope it will not be so.

Then the waiting will have been worthwhile!

Ave atque Vale – Hail and Farewell – until the next blog!

If you are enjoying my blog, and have not already done so, please sign up below to receive notification of each new blog by e mail. Just add your e mail to ‘Follow’ as it pops up!

And please do pass on the blog address to others who may be interested.

A selection of previous meditations is also available in audio form as ‘Meditations of Neiulus Aurelius’ ASMR on YouTube.

I would also value any feedback on nzolad53@gmail.com or my Facebook page or Twitter.

Many thanks
Neilus Aurelius