🐥The Paradox of Now #21

The Thought Takes Longer!

Hi people!

Not much to report this week but one thing stood out to me.

The quicker you get back into routine, the better.

Reduce the post-holiday lag. Skip the overthinking. Just get on with it.

As Hazel Mayo wisely says:

For me, that meant getting back to the gym on Friday instead of waiting for Monday.

Thanks Hazel.

Now let’s give you a taste of what’s coming:

🐥 The TV show that inspires some of the slightly unusual headings
🐥 The fastest external movement in the body
🐥 My dream job

🥚Eggstra News🥚

Your weekly dose of some fascinating and fun finds:

🍾 Mike Boyd – How I Learnt to sabre a champagne bottle at my brother’s wedding. So cool.

📺 Taskmaster – The chaos. The creativity. Alex Horne is a genius. Massive influence on me.

🕌 Jaipur – My go-to card game when I’m bored of all the others. Tactical, quick, and addictive.

The Paradox of Now

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The Forgettable Hour

Note: This is a reminder that beauty doesn’t shout. It waits to be noticed.

A saccade is the rapid, jerky movement of the eye.

The fastest movement of an external part of a human body.

An evolutionary design to help us detect change in our environment.

Our ancestors are still coursing through our bones, deciding if it is a lion ready to eat us, or just a mouse that is rustling in the bushes.

I first came across saccade in The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr.

He explains how good storytelling mirrors these eye movements. They jolt and swerve to hold our attention.

I try my best to capture this in my main body of work. I once described it as writing the way Tame Impala makes me feel.

But I want to stretch that idea. Take it a bit further.

Because saccades aren’t just neurological.

They’re philosophical too.

They’re about what we choose to see.

Most of your vision, at any given moment, is blurred.

Only what you focus on becomes sharp.

Even as you read this sentence, everything else fades into the background.

And yet, with a little practice, I think we can train our eyes to seek out and focus on the beauty.

What if we used our saccades not just to survive, but to see?

A modern-day natural selection, done off our own accord.

Because our eyes are the lens.

Our brain is the darkroom.

And we need to peg positive images up of this world to see how to survive.

So I tried it… I was the guinea pig of my own experiment.

And here’s just a few images that hung in my own darkroom during a single hour of a day:

None of these things are particularly special.

None of them are headline-worthy.

None of them make me want to unpeg them and show off their beauty to the people around me.

And yet, I noticed them. I wrote them down.

Not on a special day. Not on a birthday.

Just in a forgettable hour.

And now that hour?

It has become the focal point of this piece of work.

It made it out of my chaos-filled notes app.

It made it into The Paradox of Now.

Surely that means something?

But here’s the flip side.

That same hour could have been experienced by someone else who saw none of that.

Not only missed the details, but also the stories behind them.

Take the man carrying geraniums.

He wasn’t just carrying plants.

He was carrying hope.

He was carrying colour to a grey bench where someone will sit and grieve.

He was carrying a home for the bees and the insects.

He was carrying a forgotten memory of my own.

He reminded me that a geranium is my mum’s favourite flower. And how proud she was one year of the most beautiful geranium she ever planted and nurtured.

The most vibrant red I can recall.

But here’s the thing. I've looked through the other lens too.

The distorted lens.

I have hung up pictures in my dark room that do not deserve to see the light of day.

Where nothing feels beautiful and everything feels wrong.

I’ve been there. And that is not to say that I won’t be there again.

I know the pain. I know the numbness.

I know what it means to wake up and wish the day would end before it begins.

And if I could, I would trade lenses with those people experiencing that now. Even for a day.

I have served my time there.

These words. This newsletter. Is the trail I leave.

Breadcrumbs for those who might want to find their way out.

But I can’t save you. No one can.

Only you can do that.

And it starts small. Infinitesimally small.

You will feel numb.

The first act will feel pointless.

Meaningless.

Trivial.

Insignificant.

Worthless.

I know.

So why bother at all I hear you ask?

Because I’ve been there.

And this piece, the one you are reading right now, is proof that it is possible.

This piece of writing is the evidence.

It could not exist until I chose to see.

It came from noticing. From moving.

From choosing to keep searching in the trenches on my hands and knees.

I was useless at it.

Just imagine Will from Inbetweeners on the beach shouting:

But what is the alternative?

To stay in the suffering you already know?

Because at least that suffering feels familiar?

I get it. That feels safer.

Even pain can be comforting if you know its rhythm.

The devil and angel of familiarity and possibility weigh heavy on your shoulders.

As heavy as the choice you have to make.

Possibility and the unknown are just on the other side of the door. Even looking through the keyhole into the darkroom can feel too much.

But I’ve looked through the keyhole.

And slowly, I became the locksmith I was always searching for.

I made my own key.

I turned it.

I opened the door.

And what I found?

Was not as scary as I thought.

And once you see it, it’s hard to stop looking.

A darkroom of beauty.

A paradox in of itself.

🐥 Haiku’s Haiku 🐥

Expect a few pictures of Haiku’s experiences of Spain for the next few weeks.

This one was taken in the streets of Seville, outside the ‘Alley of Inquisition’.

Maybe this is some type of metaphor for all of is to have an introspective questioning of the self so that we can better understand the chaos around us.

Or maybe it was just another tourist attraction where a guy wearing a chavvy man-bag, looking like a proper tourist, took a photo of a Lego duck.

🌴 Palm Tree Euphoria 🌴

I don’t know whose job it is… but I want it.

The person who names paint colours.

Imagine just sitting in a room, staring at a shade of beige and thinking:

It’s basically Palm Tree Euphoria, but for colours.

That’s the dream.

Second choice? Tea-taster. Obviously.

Now you:

The weirder the better. Bonus points if you already do a weird job.

See you next week Dashing Ducks! 🐥

P.S. if this brought a splash of joy to your colourful brain palette, then pass it on to a fellow duckling you care about.

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