Joyride!

During these busier days of the year I am enjoying the organic silence in the blogosphere. This should not be misinterpreted: I like the company of fellow bloggers. I learn from those whom I choose to follow, and at the very worst those who I do not but turn up on my radar anyway helpfully convey that much needed quality which I, for one, lack: the ability to rank order and prioritise. What? Anything, it seems. Listing is now a literary genre. A useful one in my book.

It is perhaps funny and even suspicious that the great polemic threads of our professional times seem to go to sleep when everyone is snowed under with work, but the world of politics has taught us the use of the silly season, so it is certainly not a novelty. But the axiom "the more I work the less I take an interest in the profession" seems to be that very idea under a topsy-turvy guise. Luckily, it is not the object of this post.

What I have set out to explore here is the qualities of the information we decide to dwell on as professionals in our exchanges. Terse, practical, well thought out and clinically proven.
In one of my other lives I had the opportunity to teach, in a range of settings. The list above smacks of that experience. And yet, I could not help feeling at the time and all the time that the schedule was not complete. I tried hard to transmit that impalpable extra to my learners. Results were good, but I did not have the ability nor the tools to systematize such knowledge. Criticism ensued. I was not getting it wrong, they told me, but somehow there was danger in supplying unexpected and maybe unreplicable content. What if it was later required of colleagues? What if an inspection demanded a break-down of the rationale? Lastly, what if the outcome was damaging or at best untraceable in students' minds? I put down my guns, more than once, and not so light-heartedly as I would have done had it been a mere ideological dispute - my income and family welfare were at stake. I walked into the sunset not even becoming that genial martyr it would have been cool to become.

Now, as I broadcast from the underbelly of the establishment at safety deph, I have finally put my finger on it. I don't really care if it sounds trivial. And may not worry about whether it is right, as I know it works for me, I can feel it in my bones. It is the long neglected, academically besmirched concept of muscle memory. Drills. Mindless mechanical repetition, seducing information and logic into a controlled sleep, so that the state of mind we (I, at least ) best operate in can be elicited. Not an absence, but a suspended presence. Right behind our speaker, right on top of our technology, feeling every move of the machine, anticipating every turn of someone else's neurons. The long hours of preparation make sense, the meditation, the diet, the wheeling and dealing, the vision...it all comes together, yet never as we had pictured it in our finely tuned minds clouded by well-tempered claviers...

All this will I fear remain unteachable to student-clients. This is the stuff of an apprentice - and I know at least one is reading. It is not perhaps the product of universities, but hopefully for one person on these pages it is the matter of life - and now stands a chance of keeping them going - and me too. Everything else is respectfully complementary, and still as necessary as air and breathing. Which however cannot, as we have said elsewhere, be the object of life. Breathing is but a background, albeit a crucial one. A condition on which stage our true persona is enacted.

Back to darkness now, into the night. Words build houses, some beliefs recite, but meaning is more than the summation of the words. Forget the bricks and mortar for a moment. Train so as to build, not to dissect. Walk onto your stage, a bundle of muscle memory. What will you be?
This one's for you.