036 - E is for the End of Creation

036 - E is for the End of Creation, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

There are two ways of looking at life - from the small bits up or the big bit down. Imagine that you defined a car as being a three-box sedan - engine part, passenger part and trunk. If you made a car without a separate trunk, a fastback or hatchback say, then this would not be a true car but a derivative of a car, not a true car. This is the small-bits-up view of life - define a single element as the ideal and then anything that does not match must be some other element.

The big bits down would say that a car is something that is self-powered and primarily carries small numbers of people around - three-box, two-box, truck and the rest would all be 'car'.

Many people consider language to have an ideal model, and anything slightly different is dialect, emotional speaking, corruption and the rest, not true language. This is small-bit thinking. The problem with small-bit thinking is that it excludes original thought, although many would argue that excluding the attendant change is a good thing.

Polish linguistics is caught in a small-bit thinking trap, where many of the practitioners vehemently reject ideas from outside Poland under the very weak argument that "Polish is different'. Polish is not that different, but the result of this thinking is millions of wasted pupil-teaching hours every year in the teaching of language in Poland while at universities the lecturers and professors every day walk past opportunity of greater and deeper understanding, instead enmeshing the next generation in the same trap.

The same thinking traps millions of people around the world into narrow worlds where you cannot even be adventurous in the home you live in without heavy criticism - the question of whether your home is a good design or suits the environment is secondary as to the question of how well your home matches the three-box-sedan model of a house. You must have lots of tiny rooms to ensure that your family spends time apart, houses must be separate from the garden, and vast quantities of rarely used items must fill in the space. The rooms must be featureless boxes that you have to fill with decor and furniture merely to take away the mind-numbing boredom of it all - rather than designing spaces to fit us.

To me a car is a loose concept to describe a whole bucket full of personal transport concepts that has no hope of being filled completely. I am a big-bit thinker - I see humanity first and try to ensure that life and the world is a happy place by meeting our needs.

033 - T is for Trust

033 - T is for Trust, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

I believe that trust is one of the many keys to life as we know it. For many long years I never could decide whether God existed or not, but eventually I came to understand that it is not a matter of belief but trust.

From where I am sitting I could hit half a dozen believers with a stone, should I be so careless to toss one, but I would be hard put to find one who would trust God enough to argue the toss with him and still come out with both of you winning.

Whatever form your God or god takes, trust him or her enough that they are there to help you find you, rather than a causer of trouble when things go wrong or bonuses when things go right.

032-E is for Experience Trap

032-E is for Experience Trap, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

We know people who have had summer cottages for decades, and it seems to us that rather than just being a benefit, they have twice as much cleaning to do and they spend a significant amount of time travelling to and fro almost every weekend during the summer.

We all have balconies, but they only use theirs for drying the washing, while we have an awning, a small herb garden and a place to eat, read and generally relax. It also means that we have total access to all our facilities, unlike in a summer cottage.

So, is it better to have a summer cottage or to choose a house or apartment location in the city that gives a relaxing dual purpose life?

Interestingly enough, when I first moved to Poland over a decade ago when I expressed the idea of living in a village or small town outside the city I was given some very odd looks; they thought I was crazy - you had to live in the city if you worked there. When the company I worked for changed locations to the other side of the city, everyone was worried how I was going to get there, and this is a small city of 400,000, where the bus ride would now take me a whole 30 minutes instead of 15!

However, now that more people are buying cars and getting some experience with travel they are beginning to take on board the idea that you can build a house just outside the city to live in and commute in. The next step is for people to build/buy houses in established villages and towns to live there, especially since so many Poles have recently been working for extended periods in the UK and Ireland and can see how many more living choices there are. Nowadays I get less strange looks and more wistful ones!

031-R is for Responsibility

031-R is for Responsibility, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

All countries have their problems, just as all people have theirs, but what happens when you meet someone who always blames someone else for their troubles?

This year sees the 20th anniversary of Poland leaving behind it's Communist era, and perhaps it is time for a change, to turn its back on a whole sum of other problems of the past and try to create a better future for its citizens.

Some people say that a nation recreates itself every decade, and since 1989 we have had two periods - the intital struggle to transform a socialist system into a functional democratic one, and then a decade of expansion of the demcratic system. Companies, for example, transformed from State owned enterprises in the early 1990s, have spent the past decade expanding, remodelling their management process and often making remarkable amounts of money. Middle class people have absorbed this windfall and outfitted themselves with new clothes, cars, vacations, educations for their children and the like, much as one would expect.

What has not changed are the basic attitudes and life at the bottom of the pile. One would not expect rapid change in either area, but perhaps their time has come. However, we are still at the stage where the middleclasses still tell the world and themselves that they are poor - as they drive their high spec cars home from their comfortable job to their new high spec home in the new suburbs and recently absorbed villages of their city.

Smug in their comfort, they allow the nation to be ruled by the mini-dictators, also known as priests, professors, lawyers, doctors and politicians. These people look to the West for their model of a comfortable life, and then to the East for the service they give, smugly boasting of the high Christianity of their nation while at the same time attempting to ensure that the people who could make a difference remain in ignorance of their power.

Poland does not need pity, financial help, it needs some plain speaking from the international community.

030-Depression: someone else's problem

030-Depression: someone else's problem, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Depression is not something that is particularly visible in someone until it is far advanced, and the trip there can be jagged with intermittent highs and lows.

I often wonder how many people end up there simply because most people never learn the importance of taking notice of all the people around them, it's just to easy to become wrapped up in one's own life. Worse, though, are those people who are focussed on their success, who pay attention to the handsome, the beautiful, the people and things that will advance them at work or sociually. These people are always full of excuses - they are too busy, they are too shy, they didn't realize.

In the working environment I am always working to integrate the lonely and the ignored into the team until hopefully they feel confident enough to make their own way.

Me? I am allowed to free fall by most. and as a consequence the workplace for me is mainly a very lonely place, but if I can save someone else some pain, then I have no choice, I must help that person.

Depression is hard to deal with, but it doesn't get better if you ignore it in yourself or in others. Make someone's day today, say hello to someone today, tomorrow and the day after who is unlikely to ever have an impact on your career!

If you want to know one way to view this image, try to take in everything at once while at the same time understand that none of it has any meaning and what you are doing is essentially pointless, but the very action of trying to absorb it all leaves you fully absorbed. What do all those pictures on the wall contain? Our brains have the capacity to contain a functional memory of each and all of them, but when they are all presented at equal depth, none take presedence - your brain has no way of making choices. In the end even the people end up at the same level, at the present with the past. You have probably been here before, and how many times more must you return?

029-Love is Living

029-Love is Living, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

This is a conjunction of some song comparing love as a fact to another fact of nine million bicycles in Beijing, with the table-culture of Poland - and elsewhere.

It's Easter, say, and the family come together and spend the whole day sitting around a table, eating non-stop throughout the day, ignoring the children in a huge adult-fest that at some point includes some discussion on why some family members currently sitting around a different table in someone else's house or flat are failing to bring up their children properly. You know the kind of thing. The problem I can see is that the children present are not being brought up particularly well either - they are bored, desperate for attention and not being encouraged to discover their own thing. They are being trained by boredom into eventually taking part in the same custom in the future.

Why won't they play with the children, why is it only I that can make paper aeroplanes, take them for walks, teach them how to step from sawn log to sawn log, or be invited to inspect theit toys or drawings.

Because I notice them. Because I respect them. Because I have not become a boring fart adult who desires only gossip, porking, look-what-I-own and aren't-I-hard-done-by.

Love is not saying 'i love you' or simply being there, you have to move and hold them, follow them, take them by the hand, and notice them when things are going wrong. I asked Ania when she last hugged her sister, and she couldn't remember, whereas I could.

Love survives in contact, and since we are always moving, contact is a changing action.

028-Wearing your bank account

028-Wearing your bank account, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Ania is currently attending a slimming club, which partly involves sitting on a fitness bike for an hour several times a week, along with a number of other people. What is interesting is that many of these people are more financially well off than we are, and they are boasting that they will soon be able to get clothes out of the attic that they have not worn in over a decade, since the last time that they fitted.

Proud of keeping clothes for a decade? How many clothes were they buying that so much did not get worn enough that they were worth storing? How good would one look in fashion a decade old? Is this really a bonus? Ania and I regularly get rid of clothes as they become worn, buying enough to wear and not too many that we cannot dispose of them to charity at a suitable stage of wear. Our parents and grandparents kept clothes for much longer, but pride in storage?

One might drag in that over used excuse here in Poland, and blame it on the shortages of the 1980s, but that was twenty years ago and we are talking about educated people, often very well educated people. Where did the programming in their heads come from, what is keeping it going?

Interestingly enough, these same people say that when they cook for their family they have to have something of everything. But these people are on a diet and proud of their ability to keep things for a decade in a wardrobe in their attic, how can you be proud of not wearing clothes that don't fit and wasting wardrobe room when you cannot do the task that is before you - stay on a diet. What about being proud of not eating what you should not be eating?

Here in Poland there is a lot of very expensive, rubbish quality, designer label clothing - which you can purchase from what the local middle classes believe are exclusive boutiques. You have a job which pays well - forget any stories about Poles being poor, by the way, the middle classes are rolling in cash, propery and cars - and so you spend a significant portion on clothes which only look good to other locals, buy more and then store the excess in a wardrobe. Poland, like anywhere, has a lot of good design talent, little of which seems to leak out into the stores, but the middle classes lap it up and then strut around like they were something special. do you remember the story of the king's new clothes, this is a bit like that, where people are duped into parting for cash for no quality.

The oohs, the aahs, when one of them arrives in a shawl, mocassin style shoes, black concealer trousers and bum-covering jecket or coat and a hairstyle that grandma had back in the 1940s, cut to the length that has been deemed suitable for one's age.

When women are young, they cut their hair short to make them look older and more worldly, and buy clothes for work more typical of a forty-year-old who has lost whatever grip they once had on style. The clothing is often cheap, replicas of the mature styles. Later, asa they grow older, they can buy more expensive versions, and they wear them more often, until eventually they wear them most of the time, desperately hanging onto something that they never really had. Men are not immune, the suit eventually producing someone who believes that shorts and short-sleeved shirts are acceptable beachwear.

Style, on the other hand, is something that has to be worked at, but once you allow other things to dominate in your life, the confidence for style just all too easily slips away. Ania has been working hard over the past couple of years to learn confidence in style, and as a consequence is breaking free of the clothing tradition. the clothes she wears do not cost much, and the greatest variation she has is with the smallest items - having more scarves than coats takes less room and less money than the oh so common more coats than scarves we see so often.

Any fool can spend their money on clothes, buying fashion and fashionable cuts and colours, while spending the right money on clothes that suit one's figure, colouring and needs takes nothing but the commitment to continue making conscious decisions throughout one's life.