Blog for 20th February…

It’s the year of the fire horse – so Gong Xi Fa Cai to all friends who are celebrating!

The fire horse has not appeared since 1966, a year of worldwide shifts in politics, science and culture. However, 1967 was worse in terms of global conflict, perhaps… and perhaps every year has similar challenges.

This is the thing – as we get older, do we perceive the world as getting worse – or better? Or is it in fact exactly the same as it was yesterday – full of unnecessary conflict, lacks in human relations, terrible films, terrible music and generally poor conduct in leadership, globally?

I think it’s almost impossible to tell, given what I’ve lived through so far. I was born into the end of the Cold War, grew up through the fear of the atom bomb, graduated with Live Aid and Gorbachev as a new style of Soviet leader. But every year since has brought its own challenges – be they existential threats to humanity, learning to live with new technology (I remember the advent of colour TV, let alone the internet!) and learning how to adapt, function and survive in a rapidly changing world.

I wonder if we as the human race consciously think about that, and if it would make any difference to our leadership if they knew how hard it is to adapt and thrive. And there are fallow periods and times of growth, pauses for rest and then space for action.

Where am I going with this? I wonder for how much of life we’re slaves of time. I’ve had quite a lot of fun recently trying to pose difficult questions to AI, mostly involving the thinking of Gilles Deleuze. It can’t really do it, but the struggle seems real.

One of the interesting issues that arises is the relationship of the past to the present. For the Deleuze, the present is the contracted past. The past persists alongside the present. It acts as a virtual dimension from where things may be actualised. It’s so interesting. In his first synthesis of three, he suggests that the past yields the present. Because this doesn’t explain how the present passes, in the second synthesis, the past exists simultaneously with the present creating a pure past (like a massive computer chip holding everything) from which memory selects what it wants. This is the way a computer works.

I’ll leave the third synthesis for my next offering – but it’s important because it opens up the future.

My present is therefore everything that has past and is passing. This can’t help but influence how I think about world events. The question for me is how to create a positive field and perhaps train myself to pull the positive into the present.

I’ll let you know how I get on…