Episode #13: Start before you are ready, the scaffolding of meaning, and the existential habit of commoditising nature

In this episode I realise how important meaning is as a way of organising my attention, reflect on the value of starting before I am ready in any creative endeavour and try to understand why human beings seek out quiet and stillness in nature only to fill it with noise.

TL;DL
1:14 “The River Thames Project” and organising my attention to find flow
11:56 On humans and making noise in nature
19:15 A trip to Canada and the importance of starting before you are ready to start
29:04 The mysterious world of Connie Cyclonic

Links to things I mentioned
The paper on flow that I mention
Sound of Silence podcast
The imperfect portrait experiment
Two day Inner Critic Workshop
Mask Workshop
Solstice Festival at Samphire Hoe

The written substack version of this episode can be read on my Substack.

If you're wondering why this is an accidental podcast then listen to the first 5 minutes of episode one.
 
Comments, questions, requests and stuff to stevexoh@gmail.com
 
(Total listening time 30’ 44”) 

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Hello and welcome to episode thirteen of Creative Adventures, an accidental podcast. And episode thirteen, the podcast is a teenager, which maybe that's why I'm recording these so late the last couple of episodes. And by late I don't mean late at night. I mean at the start of this podcast I'd record an episode at least a week, maybe a week and a half in advance, and then we'd be really impatient about releasing it because I knew what it was about and want to get it out there. But the last couple I've recorded the day before they meant to go out, and I don't know why that is. I'm curious about that. And maybe it's something to do with the time of year as well, with it being lighter, later, and me just being out a bit more. And I guess I'm a bit busier than I was previously. And I still love doing this and recording it and writing it. But it seems that other things have got in the way. And not necessarily just like paid work, it's fascinations have got in the way. Because I decided back in May that I'm going to walk the entire length of the River Thames. And it's an idea that came to me. I mentioned a few episodes back about uh doing a couple of long Thames walks. It was in the episode called something like a Love Affair with the River Thames. And I realised how much I loved those walks, and so I thought, I only know a tiny part of the river. What would happen if I walked the entire length of it? In stages, not in one go. And I came up with this project imaginatively entitled The River Thames Project. And the river from Source to Sea is about 350 kilometres, so it's it's a long way. And I won't be able to walk from source to sea because I think once you get past Erith and a Dartford crossing and that, it you can't walk along the towpath anymore. Oh, there isn't a tow path. You're just walking through dockyards and factories that you probably can't even walk through. So I set myself the target of going from Thames Head, the source of the Thames, to Erith. And as soon as this idea came to me, I just felt so excited. And I started to nerdishly plan it. I I ordered a Thames Path ordinance survey map and thought, where's the first bit I'm going to officially do? Because I've done most of the the London part, I've walked from Serbiton to Greenwich on a couple of walks. So I thought heading to the source of the river is the obvious first thing to do. And I thought that would be a good opportunity for me and Poppy the Dog to have a little adventure. So we booked an Airbnb in the Cotswolds and spent three amazing days exploring the twenty-one kilometre stretch between the source at Thames Head and Castle Eaton. And the source was amazing. I just was fascinated by it. I mean it's just a stone and a pile of rocks because when the water table's low there's not much water there. But we followed the path where the river would be or where it flows underground. And then suddenly it just starts becoming like damp fields and then puddles, and then you've got this flowing little stream. And I was amazed by just witnessing and putting my feet in this flowing little stream that becomes this massive river that runs through London. And I've been on many little trips with Poppy before, as I've mentioned over the years, and it's always been lovely to spend time with her because I I don't live with her anymore and we don't get much chance to hang out. But despite it being lovely, I've always felt that there's something missing. And not just even trips with Poppy, I mean when I've gone away by myself, it's just felt like there's something missing. Like there's a restlessness lurking somewhere beneath the enjoyment of the trip or the beauty of the trip. But this trip to the source of the Thames felt completely different, and I loved every moment of it. I loved the journey, I loved nerdishly planning every aspect of the three day exploration, and become totally immersed in the experience from when we arrived. I mean I'd planned the time we'd leave London, when we'd arrive, the walk we'd do that day, the distance, where we'd park the car, how far we'd go. I booked the Airbnb to be equidistant between the start points of each day. And each evening when Poppy and I got back and just exhausted fell asleep on the sofa together, I just felt such an immense sense of satisfaction that has been so absent in other trips. And on the drive home I realised that what had made this trip feel different was that it was part of something bigger. And looking back at those previous trips, I can see that simply heading somewhere beautiful doesn't quite meet an intrinsic need I seem to have for an experience to be meaningful. I mean I'd love to be the type of person that can just go somewhere and and relax, but I think I relax by having a meaningful experience, and that may be being inactive or it may be being active. But if it lacks meaning, it sort of feels unsatisfying for me. But this time every mile walked felt connected to a larger fascination, like my desire to walk the entire length of the Thames and get to know the river more intimately. And since then I've planned further trips, both solo and with friends who live near different parts of the river, to go and fill in those gaps. And I even got an inflatable kayak so that I can explore stretches where the path isn't navigable. Because some of the bits early on I found a bit frustrating because the path just deviates from the source of the river because either there's buildings there or it becomes inaccessible. And I don't mind that because it allows nature to thrive, but it was a bit frustrating. So I got a kayak and there's a few bits of the river that I've done on the kayak now because you can just stay in the path of the river doing that. And that's also spawned a whole fascination with this idea of river access and right to roam, another rabbit hole that I'm going down that will no doubt feature on a future episode. And whilst the excitement of the River Thames project isn't the only thing I'm thinking about at the moment, having it quietly in the background of my day-to-day life feels like it's contributed something significant to my overall sense of well-being. It's like now when I have big gaps in a diary, instead of wondering how to fill them, I am excited thinking, ah, I can plan another trip, I can fill in another bit of the route on the map. But more than anything, the experience of how this project has made me feel and how it transformed that little trip away has helped me realise just how much I need things to feel meaningful. And I spoke a few episodes back, I can't remember which one, about how I find the human obsession with purpose somewhat weird and nonsensical, and I suspect it may be connected to our struggle to make peace with uncertainty and mortality and other existential inconveniences. Because I've never been particularly excited or motivated by having a purpose or a goal or an objective. But at the same time I know I could feel restless in the face of pure leisure or experience a perfectly pleasant day as somehow incomplete. But what I realise now is that but what I realise now is it's less the activity itself that matters to me, and more whether I can find a deep sense of meaning within it. Edward Deckey and Richard Ryan wrote about what they called self-determination theory, and they suggested that human well being emerges when three psychological needs are met autonomy, competence and relatedness, which I think they mean by that feeling connected to others. And while I don't totally relate to that particular framing here, I've recently come to realise that I experience myself as thriving when my needs for freedom, agency and meaning are met. And that's a whole other podcast episode to explain why both freedom and agency are on the list. A few people I've told this to have said, what, are freedom and agency the same thing? It doesn't feel like they are to me, but I want to explore that more before I talk about it. But even though my needs are subtly different to what Deki and Ryan propose, what I love about their idea is the suggestion that wellbeing isn't dependent on a single thing. And for me, all three of those needs need to be met. And what I realised was missing from previous trips away with Poppy was that while I was experiencing the freedom to go where I wanted to, and a sense of agency through the choices I made, there was nothing holding the larger experience together. And whilst I'd like to be the sort of person that can go away and relax without an agenda, I've noticed that attempting this leaves my attention scattered, which in turn makes me feel restless and unsettled and sometimes anxious. But this time was different because the trip being part of a larger and deeply fascinating project somehow transformed the experience. And it was as though the concept of the project provided just enough scaffolding for me to organise my attention around. And instead of being scattered like on a previous strip, my attention and my focus was all around this being part of something bigger. Mihai's Chiksenmihai is known for his brilliant work around the human phenomena of flow. And he describes flow as a state in which attention becomes deeply absorbed and our self-consciousness disappears and time becomes distorted. And flow is like a state of total involvement with whatever is happening right now. And taking Chiksentmihai's work a step further, there's a recent academic paper that I'll put a link to in the podcast notes that suggests for some people, and in particular those who are neurodiverse, flow may be more than simply an enjoyable state of immersion. And this fascinating research suggests that flow may play an important role in emotional regulation and well being. And as I reflect on my own experience, I begin to wonder whether part of what the Thames Project had given me was not simply a sense of meaning, but a meaningful way to organise my attention and provide focus and invite me into a place of flow. And this helps me understand how I could hypothetically travel to the same place and walk the same stretch of river, and yet experience it completely different depending on how focused or fragmented my attention was. And it seems that the scaffolding of a seemingly pointless but deeply fascinating project gave my attention somewhere to gather. And that was enough to transform a pleasant walk over three days with Poppy into an experience of flow, meaning, and wonder. And realizing all of this has helped me so much in other parts of my life. It's like why sometimes am I totally immersed in making art and other times I just can't be bothered? Or it feels like work. Or even as I've spoken about the difference between loneliness and solitude before, how come sometimes I experience a beautiful, meaningful solitude, and other times it feels there isn't? And I wonder if it is this fragmentation of my attention and maybe I need a bit more scaffolding to connect it with being part of something bigger. And of course the other accidental thing that the Thames Project has given me is a kayak. It's an inflatable kayak because I've got a tiny flat, so I need to keep it in here. But I've loved being able to get out on the river and not only explore the river, it's to get somewhere that's sort of far away from human beings. I mean the river's not that wide where I live, but to be out on the river means I'm away from the banks. And I kayaked from Surbiton down to Teddington the other week, and it was crazy. It was on a Saturday evening, and so I was in the middle of the river, and the noise from the banks of people out playing music and drinking and shouting and I mean they were enjoying themselves. Was just so amazing to witness from the tranquility of the middle of the river, just these walls of noise uh along the banks. And that's the thing with this time of year is the warmer weather's brought more people to the places where I normally find stillness and silence and solitude. Not only by the river but in in the woods, in the parks. And whilst there's a selfish part of me that would love these places to be exclusively my own to escape from humanity, I also accept that they are important to many other people too. And so the thing I find difficult about this time of year is not so much that other people go to these places, but the way in which they choose to be there. Because I've got a real sensitivity to noise, or to be more accurate, I've got a real sensitivity to human generated noise. And if it's a natural noise like a loud thunderstorm or the jackdaws going crazy on the windowsill like they did in the last podcast episode, that's fine for me. But a TikTok video played on a phone 300 meters away can trigger an almost primal response in me. And it doesn't have to be TikTok, it could be someone on a video call or just playing a video. And when I hear these sounds, it can trigger me in such a way that I feel that I either need to run away as fast as I can, or grab the phone and throw it in the river or stamp on it or something. And clearly neither of those things are a healthy adult response. So instead of just avoiding these places during the spring and summer, I've decided to simply become curious as to why when human beings encounter the beauty and stillness of nature, the human beings often seem compelled to fill the space with noise and distraction. And many hundred years before the invention of our modern devices and distractions, the seventeenth century French philosopher Blaise Pascal said I have often said that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber. And Pascal was interested in understanding what he referred to as diversion, because he believed that human beings are haunted by a number of uncomfortable realities like our mortality, our insignificance, suffering, loneliness, and the fact that when we think about it for long enough, we realise that ultimately we control very little in our experience. So he suggested that a diversion wasn't necessarily valuable because of the activity itself, but because it distracted us from confronting these realities. And this perspective helps me find a bit more compassion when confronted with a boat full of noisy people drifting past with a ridiculously loud Bluetooth speaker as I'm trying to sit quietly with my crow friends. Because perhaps these people aren't being inconsiderate, but simply doing their best to avoid spending too much time alone with their existential dread. But while I like this hypothesis, I still feel like a kind of broken and dysfunctional creature by not being able to control my visceral reaction to noise, particularly noise in nature. And I want to understand more about this so I can take more responsibility for my part in it, because it's not gonna change. And the most obvious explanation to me is that my poor sensory gaiting makes what others experience as a mild irritation a total invasion of my attention and maybe fragment my attention in a way that causes me distress and anxiety and disorientation. Sensory gaiting is our ability to tune out background sensations, so background sensory input. Like with all of our senses, background sounds, background sights in our peripheral vision, etc etc. And for most people that happens naturally. But for me, I find it really hard, particularly with sound, like I can be sitting in a cafe talking to someone and I can hear everyone else as clearly as the person I'm talking to, which probably explains why I find social situations so draining. So that means when I hear noise in nature or those places that I normally go to to have some quiet, it feels like I lose a sense of agency over my experience. Like where am I going to place my focus? And that triggers this fight or flight response. But also wonder if there's something else going on beyond just poor sensory gating and sensitivity to sound. The philosopher Albert Borgman wrote about the difference between experiences that invite our full participation and attention versus those that simply provide us with a commodity to consume. And he distinguished between what he called focal things and practices, which are things that draw us into participation and relationship with our here and our experience, and what he called devices, which deliver a desired experience with as little effort or involvement as possible. And an example he used to differentiate between the two is that of building a fire versus using central heating. So historically as hunter-gatherers, and right up, I guess, until the invention of central heating, keeping warm involved ceremony and practice and focus. It would involve gathering wood and then building and tending a fire and then sitting around it with others. So the fire becomes the focal thing, and that act of gathering and tending and sharing its warmth becomes a practice. But the invention of central heating transformed this relationship. So the outcome is the same, we we stay warm, but the activity itself has been outsourced to a device. So what was once a focal thing and a practice is now largely hidden from view, with warmth arriving at the touch of a button or regulated by a thermostat. And the process of generating warmth which was once foreground in our experience now fades into the background. And Borgman's definition makes me wonder if part of my reaction to loud music in nature is that nature is a focal thing for me. It's like a place of quiet solitude that feels sacred or like a sanctuary and essential for my self-regulation. So the music feels so jarring because it redirects my attention away from the natural world and towards somebody else's chosen experience. And even though I'd like to say I was right and everyone else was wrong, this doesn't mean that one approach is better than the other. It's probably just a clash of values and different strategies for meeting our needs. I seek immersion and stillness and a sense of encounter to self-regulate, but others seek connection, celebration and stimulation, or maybe even escape to achieve the same outcome. And I'm left wondering whether modernity has resulted in nature becoming a device in many of the situations that I'm describing. It becomes a backdrop to our experience that operates slightly out of our awareness rather than the focus of it. And perhaps stillness and solitude have become commodities, like blank canvases that feel too irresistible to leave unfilled, so we reach for noise and distraction and stimulation to fill them. And maybe part of this relationship between noise and nature is that we don't necessarily want to encounter the world around us, but to escape ourselves in some way. And I don't know if any of this is going to help the next time I'm down by the river or I'm in the forest and I hear someone playing a video on their phone. But hopefully it will. Hopefully I won't just want to destroy their phone or run away screaming. Hopefully I think, ah, this is a clash of values. These people are distracting from their existential angst. And for them, nature is a backdrop rather than a practice. But who knows? And I've recently had some amazing natural encounters in Canada, and I'd never been to Canada before, it was the first time I went. And I went to Niagara and explored the wonders of Niagara Falls, which the falls themselves were incredibly impressive. But Niagara as a town was bizarre. I've never been to Las Vegas, but I imagined it being somewhere between Las Vegas and Disneyland. I mean there was one street that just had loads of haunted houses on it. Or you could go to a 3D cinema and watch Niagara Falls in a 3D cinema, whereas you could just walk around the corner and actually look at it in real 3D. But yeah, it seemed popular, but it wasn't for me. But the bit that I loved was exploring Niagara Glen and the nature reserves around there. And I was the only person there. And I saw snakes and I saw vultures and all sorts of birds and bugs that I'd never seen before. And it was a wonderful immersion. And I guess similarly to the trip to the Thames source with Poppy, I found it just a brilliant trip. And normally I I I really don't like business travelling because I don't get much time to explore anything and I just wander around aimlessly. But I think because I'd set these objectives of seeing these different parts of the natural world, it really worked for me. And the reason I was invited to go to Niagara was to bring my weird talk, nine wonky projects, interspersed with thoughts on creativity and the human condition, featuring a bingo machine, to a conference. And this talk is one that I deliberately constructed so that A, I can simply tell stories about weird projects that I've done and invite the audience to make their own sense of them. And B, it can never be delivered the same way twice because my little bingo machine decides what I'm going to talk about. So it's different every time for me and for the audience. And not only has this become my favourite talk to give, it's also turned out to be one that people seem to really enjoy. And over the last few years I've delivered it in a number of different countries and to companies or at festivals or for institutions or charities. And if that's the one talk that I could just carry on doing to earn a living, then I'd happily do that. And I change the projects every now and then, so it's always going to be different to me. And I'd love to say that the origins of this talk involved like months of robust academic research and planning. But the reality is I came up with a title before I had any idea of what it would be about. And this was in the summer of 2020 when we were still in lockdown. And a company I was really interested in working with got in touch and asked whether I could do an online keynote. And I really wanted to work with them but felt a bit despondent at trotting out a talk that I've done before. Or the effort of writing another one. And I think lockdown did something to my internal sensor and maybe my sense of sanity. You look at some of the Instagram videos I produced during then, something was going on for me. And I wanted to work with this company, so I replied to their email saying, Yep, I will do a 60-minute talk entitled Nine Wonky Projects Interspersed with Thoughts on Creativity in the Human Condition featuring a bingo machine. And they replied almost immediately saying it sounded brilliantly weird, and we set a date. And then I sat back and thought, oh, I've no idea how to do this. And I had to work out what it was going to be. And the mantra of leap then look has become really important in my work because I know I can easily fall into the trap of overthinking or overdesigning something, to the point that I drift away from that messy, intuitive idea that sparked it in the first place. And I also know that many of my spontaneous ideas are usually nonsensical, and if I spend too long scrutinizing them, I will talk myself out of it. I'll conclude that they're ridiculous and abandon them before they've had a chance to become something more interesting. So over time I've realized that if I want to nurture this more spontaneous part of my creativity, I need to act before I have time to talk myself out of it. And the Sound of Silence podcast is a good example of this. And it was on a run one day, I followed a chain of thought that somehow ended up with me deciding to host the world's first silent podcast featuring special guests. And the first thing I did when I got home was register the domain, soandofsilence.org.uk, and announced via social media that I'd be launching it a month later. And I also said in that initial message that there would be a total of a hundred episodes, all recorded face to face and released every Tuesday morning. It was only after I'd registered the domain and announced this that I sat back and thought, that's a bit of a stupid idea. How on earth is a silent podcast going to work? And I had absolutely no idea about how to go about doing it. But having made a public declaration and told people I know about it and financially committed by buying the domain, even though it wasn't a huge amount, it became harder to back out of. And then over the next two years I've recorded and broadcast hundred episodes of silence that was listened to by thousands of people around the world. And many other projects have started in a similar way. The imperfect portrait experiment happened because I wanted to feel more confident drawing portraits and less anxious about doing them. So whilst one part of me was thinking, do some online courses, do some practice, instead I went to Trafalgar Square with a big sign that said free portraits and spent the day drawing strangers. And even some of the bigger projects in my life began in a similar fashion. Like leaving a normal job started with handing in my notice just because that was my gut feel, and I had no particular plan other than it felt like the right thing to do, and I'm sure something would work out. And it sounds calm now and that I was in control and knew what I was doing, but it was really terrifying. Having worked for companies right from leaving school, it felt like a terrifying leap into the unknown, but something that I'm so glad that I did. The concept of rapid prototyping emerged in the late 80s and early nineties, I think, as a way to approach design and product development that would nurture more creativity and innovation. And organizations such as IDEO popularized the practice of rapid prototyping and the idea of starting with something that's crude and imperfect just to test and learn and improve. And I like to think of rapid prototyping as the practice of starting before you're ready with the sole objective of failing cheap, fast and happy. So not spending loads of time and money and effort perfecting an idea only to discover that it doesn't work or you don't like it. Failing cheap, fast and happy. So in many ways, my practice of leap and look is grounded in this same philosophy as rapid prototyping. It's the practice of responding to an idea or opportunity quickly and simply before I have the time to overthink it, just to discover what happens next. And this feels like a really important part of any creative practice. And many of the creatives that I work with seem to get stuck in this planning and strategizing phase of their work. Like they're waiting for that elusive moment when something feels ready or they feel ready to launch into the world. But the reality is that if we're doing something we've never done before, it will probably never feel ready. Or even worse, we end up spending so long making an idea feel familiar and safe and less scary that we round off the unique brilliance that made it compelling in the first place. The American philosopher Donald Schoen wrote about the importance of what he called reflection in action. And that's the process of learning in the very moment we find ourselves in, or a situation that we find ourselves in that we could never have fully anticipated. And he argued that it's difficult to understand a situation in the abstract and that understanding develops through our interaction with it. He famously said the situation talks back. But if we spend all of our time planning and getting ready for the situation, either the situation itself will change because of that or it never arrives because we're avoiding it. And even though I still find it anxiety provoking, I adore discovering what a project is through doing it, rather than knowing exactly what it's going to be before I begin. As Soren Kierkegaard once famously said, life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. And I once again turned to the natural world for inspiration and guidance in this idea of leap then look. Nature is a perpetual rapid prototype, like is constantly responding and adapting to what it encounters, and at the same time becoming something new and evolved. And nature is never in a rush. Nature is never aiming to be ready, but at the same time everything is always exactly as it needs to be. I can't help but think that this concept of readiness is a largely human obsession. We're never ready and we're always ready. So I think I'll stop there for this episode. That felt that felt like a strange episode. Now this is the this is the thing. That normally I'd listen back when I do the edits and if there's bits that I didn't like or there's bits I want to change or rewrite, I would. But the fact that I've left it to the last minute again means I'm not going to have time to do it. So maybe that's part of the experiment. Maybe this first teenage episode, you're getting the uncensored chains of thought of me. And I'd be interested to know what sense you make of it. Couple of things you might be interested before I go. Workshops, I've got a mask workshop coming up and a two-day inner critic workshop with me and Gestalt Psychotherapist Simon Kovicha. I'll put links to those in the podcast notes. And on the 20th and 21st of June, I'll be heading back to the brilliantly weird and naturally beautiful Samphire Ho for the summer solstice festival. And I've made a mask out of a water bottle for that. And this whole thing came about because I was just walking past this discarded water bottle, like one of those things that goes on a water cooler, and I thought that'll probably fit on my head. And then that's turned into a mask of a character called Connie Cyclonic. And Connie Cyclonic is going to be at the festival, and Connie Cyclonic will be answering your questions without words, using her mystical box of wonder. And Connie Cyclonic is another piece of work that just fascinated me and has consumed so much of my time. So come down to Sampaiho, it's a beautiful place, even if you don't interact with Connie Cyclonic. There's a load of other artists there doing stuff. And it's just a lovely, strange part of the world to visit. So the next episode, episode 14, will be out on the 10th of July. And I almost wasn't going to say a date because I thought, oh, as I'm leaving these so late, maybe I shouldn't commit to a date. But I'm going to stick with that for the moment and just see what happens. Thank you for all of your support for the podcast. Thank you for the feedback. Thank you for the questions. Thank you for particularly on the last one saying you enjoyed the Jack Doors showing up and sounding like a pack of monkeys. Take care, I will speak to you again in a month. Bye for now.