Monthly Archives: July 2014

Work Opportunity

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For the past several days I have been chasing a work opportunity. I am not sure that it will come to fruition but it has been interesting to make the attempt.

In conducting an examination of my marketable skills, I have come to the conclusion that I am unlikely to perform well in my prior role as a technical support engineer. The key drawback is my inability to quickly master new information. If IT has a core skill, that core skill is the ability to learn, to engage in constant upgrading, the continual need to gain knowledge of new techniques and technologies, to turn on a dime in respond to customer needs and demands. I understand these parameters in a conceptual sense. I am less certain of my ability to make a positive response in a real world setting. My attempts at learning have not proved fruitful.

The one thing that I do appear to be good at is writing. I do not fully understand the reason for this. My 12 years in IT did not require great skill in writing. The majority of all interaction was oral, direct to the customer, to peers, to management. There was a need to log technical notes, and maintain a record of all customer interaction, but this was a mundane form of documentation and did not truly reflect the creative gestalt of expressing complex thought in words.

I have no idea where that last phrase  –  the creative gestalt of expressing complex thought in words  –  came from. This is part of the mystery. The incomprehensibility of my life at the moment.

When I try and isolate why I appear able to write, I am forced to acknowledge the contribution made by this blog. The blog project has imposed a constant demand. There have been numerous days on which creating a post has been an inordinate struggle. Each sentence began a new battle. And, as is true of any battlefield, at the end of the day the sight was not pretty. I returned again and again to the same content, constantly reshaping and honing it.

But there were also those rare days on which the text seemed to flow unbidden across the page. I have no explanation for this, no understanding of the responsible mechanism.

Dr H has spoken of my actions acting to reprogram my neural circuits. It is very strange to contemplate that fact. I have difficulty programming in ordinary js and html. But I have no problem at all with reprogramming my own mind.

 

 

 

 

Shamatha

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My failure to follow through on blogging has had some interesting effects. One of these concerns the practice of Shamatha meditation and the application of mindfulness techniques.

In a much earlier time, I practised Shamatha meditation. This is a standard zazen practice as taught by Shunryu Suzuki. The practice involves being seated quietly in lotus position and meditating on the out breath as it disappears into surrounding space.

Outside of the periods of sitting practice, various techniques were employed to encourage mindfulness, the means of maintaining an awareness of how one engages with all aspects of external phenomena. During the past months of May and June, I made a concentrated effort to try and maintain situational awareness in addition to working to regain other skills. This included working diligently to enter an unbroken string of daily posts. In addition to posting, I also undertook on-line course work in an attempt to regain my prior technical skills. I found this attempt at learning extremely frustrating. My ability to learn appears to be considerably reduced from what it once was.

When I stopped this sequence of posts and the associated learning, I quickly entered a very different phase. An entry in my Accident Log describes this change:

Back from a copy run and post office submission.
Note that I am not following my prior routines.
I am preoccupied with the challenge of finding employment.
I am going ahead blindly.
Before this I was engaged in a very conscientious attempt to monitor my behavior and grow my awareness of deficit patterns and identify the means to mitigate those issues.
Now I blindly forge ahead, I forget my routines, drift off to other concerns and then return to the present and realize I am not following my discipline, that I am more or less out there. In driving this is unsafe. In other areas of my life I am moving from a stage in which I was learning to enforce discipline and achieve rehab goals to a sort of blind rush forward. I am not sure this achieves much, or if it is fruitful.

Since I have come to the conclusion that making any further submission to the insurance company is a loosing proposition, I have turned to try and locate employment. The injury gives me one advantage. I can look at my diminished bank balance and my poor economic prospects and I have no sense of anxiety over my predicament. No anxiety at all. I continue to find this to be very strange.

I am also very aware of the fact that in the past I undertook projects and woefully overestimated my capabilities. This resulted in the inevitable crash and burn. I have come to the realization that the recent period of a concentrated focus on posts and on-line learning may have given me a false sense of accomplishment.That I may once again be over estimating my capabilities.

I am making the attempt to map out and plan for a return to work, even if this work is nothing more than cleaning offices (Dr H thinks I may not have the physical strength for this type of work due to post accident atrophy of my left side).

The other critical aspect of my current endeavours is the need to maintain my self confidence. I need to believe in myself and my competence, my ability to perform to an acceptable standard. I feel as if I am walking a tightrope of competing interests. Attempting to be mindful in all that I do, attempting to maintain practical routine, while at the same time preparing to throw myself out of the plane without a single parachute and trusting that I can learn to fly before I meet the up-rushing terrain.

I really have no idea if such a thing is possible. What I do know is that I have no choice. I have already exited the plane. It is now little more than a tiny dot in the distance. And the ground is getting ever so much closer.

 

 

 

 

A Very Stupid Thing

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Yesterday, I did a very stupid thing. I arrived home with a bag of groceries which included perishables such as milk. I put the bag down, and went to get out of my street clothes. One thing led to another, and an hour later I rediscovered the groceries.

In May of this year, I had an experience of stomach cramps in regard to my meeting with Dr D. I assumed that this cramping, and associated signs, were due to eating a foodstuff that was “off.” Since then I have had other experiences of similar cramping.

Dr D has confirmed that it is possible for a person to experience physiologic signs of stress without experiencing psychological sense of stress. She had a name for this phenomenon which I do not now remember. There have been times when I have reviewed my financial situation with utter equanimity when a rational assessment should result in a strong stress response. I have no observed stress response.

What I think is happening is that some neurological stress circuit is attempting to restart. The problem is that it is not fully functional in some way and only operates irregularly. I know this doesn’t make any sense but it is the only explanation I can come up with.

When I made the post prior to this one, I also realized that: A) it had been a long time since I communicated with Colin; and B) that I had allowed an unintended major gap between posts. There appears to be a disconnect between my remembered sense of time, and the actual passage of time. I assume that an event took place within the past two or three days, or within the past week, but then discover the interval has been considerably longer.

I also realize the value of the blog in forcing me to investigate, and gain an awareness of, my various foibles and deficits. The blog activity results in a forced mindfulness. Or perhaps it is the other way around. When I engage in a conscious effort to monitor and record my behaviour, this results in insights which then form the basis of blog posts.

When I fail to engage in this self-monitoring, I cease to generate source material for blog posts. Because I am paying less attention to my behaviours, I also fail to correctly note the passage of time.