Putting the first mark on the paper is a scary thing but I know once I get going it's not so bad. The psychological barrier we have to confront when we make a start can be very hard to overcome. I recently spent 6 or 7 weeks prevaricating over a
chapter I had to write that I knew was going to be hard. Sadly, when I eventually started it was hard and I find it very easy to put it to one side  and start (and finish)something else. Not a good habit I know but I have managed to convince myself its part of my creative process and that because it's at the back of my mind (actually playing on my mind!) I'm still working on the ideas. So my question is do other people suffer from this problem and if they do have they learnt any strategies for
dealing with it. Generally once I get going my attitude changes and I become more positive so something obviously happens in the mind once a start has been made. 


Saturday 15/09 - my mums birthday- 86 today

Today I have a good example of making a start. One of my goals in my current development plan is to create a memorial garden for my first wife Jill. Immediately after she died in 1999 I spent 3 or 4 months building a water garden. It gave me a lot of comfort and the physical toiling under a hot sun helped me work through my grief.. Since I moved house I have felt guilty that I have not created a physical space for her. But it's one thing saying you are going to do something and another to do it. Anyway its a lovely sunny day and I have been in the garden chopping down trees. I decided to move one of our
benches into the woods.. We have 3 acres of woodland and apart from the paths it just runs wild.. As I was carrying it down to the woods I decided I'd like to put it in the middle somewhere and as I started looking the idea of the memorial garden came into my head again.. There is a sort of drainage channel through the middle with lots of reeds and in spring there is a swathe of forgetmenots.. which flowers in early May - the time Jill died... I know my daughters also share my delight in the forgetmenots so I decided that the naturalistic 'garden' just had to be there.. so rather than prevaricate any more I worked out a route
from the existing path, cleared the bigger logs and drove the tractor in to make a start on the pathway.. Standing back from the particularities of the situation I think my goal is to create something that I, and my children will value. I had a vision of what it will be like- pretty and natural like she was and surrounded by wild woodland but in the more open spaces where the light comes shining through and the wild flowers grow in spring. While my vision and enthusiasm was still in my head (and ignoring the other jobs I was in the middle of) I began creating a pathway towards achieving the vision.. I know its just a start, and
there will be a lot of hard work ahead, but it feels already as if I am a significant way towards my goal. I took some photos before I started so I can see the changes I make. I feel quite positive about it having made a start.
Sunday 16/09

Knowing I had a busy day ahead of me I got up at 7am and went down to the woods and spent several hours laying out the pathway. It was laborious work cutting through fallen logs, lugging fallen trees to line the pathway and trying to dig through the chalky rubble to fill in some of the hollows. I fell over several times as my foot caught in the brambles and got stung by nettles. Altogether it was a sweaty exhausting process but I could see the progress I was making so that spurred me on. I could see that although I had a rough idea for the direction of the pathway and the detail was designed as I went in order to miss trees and stumps that I hadn't at first appreciated were there because they were overgrown. It made me feel bad when I realised that the 4' wide pathway was going to destroy a lot of plants in the middle part of the new pathway. After thinking about if for a while I decided that I would only use the lawn mower in the middle part and have a narrow pathway through the reeds and bracken. I recognised that this was a better solution.

Monday 17/09

I should have been doing other things but I spent a couple of hours in the woods. It was hard work filling in valleys and fissures in the path and there is a lot of this to do before I have anything like a proper footpath. When I'm walking in some out of the way place I often think of the people who must have made the path originally. Making paths for future generations of people to follow seems to me to be a special task in life and it can be used as a metaphor for leading others. Today my woodland work was inspected by my mother and father in law who are visiting us. They love walking and they could see what I was trying to do and they recognised it as a good thing. We talked about how gardeners don't just make things for themselves they are creating something that other people can enjoy in the future. My insight today was to do with design - now that I have done what I have done I can see much more the potential in what I'm doing. Its only after you have got someway into a project that this potential can be appreciated.
Tuesday 18/09

Well I think I have found a solution to my bumpy path problem. I went for a walk around the garden and behind some fir trees I found a pile of builders rubble which I had put there 4 years ago when we had a garage conversion done. The only snag is it's a long way to hump it down to the woods. So I have to convince myself the exercise will do me good. I spent a couple of hours humping the rubble down - altogether I made 4 trips with a full barrow.. fortunately its downhill and the last one I got a puncture and ended up having to pull the barrow. This is the slogging part of the process with little joy. It took me two hours to grade 2 meters so I can estimate that there is a couple of weeks work if I try to stick to my two hours a day. It was sunny though and paused to imagine several times what I could do when I start to create the woodland garden.. The results are good and I covered up the rubble with woodland soil so it looks fairly natural. Today's reflection is on the role of 'sustained slog' in trying to accomplish anything of significance. Once the initial enthusiasm of starting is over there is usually a lot of labour which is not very rewarding emotionally. I'm going to use John Cowan's idea of finding two hours a day to keep chipping away at the 'problem'. I probably won't make any more entries until I get to the next stage.

Where does joy feature in lifewide, lifedeep and lifelong learning?

It's a glorious Sunday morning one of those amazing, bright sunny spring mornings with a heavy dew on the grass that is so uplifting. I was reading the latest draft of the summer issue of Lifewide Magazine. Each of the articles seemed to be expressing in some way the  joy of what I was feeling and when I started to look more deeply it seemed to me that all the pieces were connected by this theme of joy but in what way is it related to lifewide learning? So where do our community members find joy?

For Anna Vartapetiance, joy was found in tackling the challenge of coming to live in the UK from another country and the joy of learning and adapting to enjoy another culture and the opportunities that living on a multicultural campus brings.

For Nick Jackson  -who 'always tries to look on the bright side of life', joy is to be found in discovering that his commitment to developing and continually trying to improve a broad range of skills and interests, is his secret of success and personal fulfilment.

For school teacher Peter Rhodes joy was in discovering a new way of engaging his pupils so that they discovered the joy in their own learning and personal achievement. Joy was also found  in the accomplishment of pupils in a primary school who created and performed a magical mystery tour assembly for their fellow pupils and teachers.

For Joevas Asare, an ambassador for lifewide education, joy comes from pursuing his passion to be a successful rap singer (called J Peace) and working with talented people in the music business to learn from them and become a better musician.

And for Harvard Professors Joe Blatt and Chris Dede joy is realised by helping to change the way education utilises the diverse range of communication  technologies  so that more students experience the rich pleasure of learning and what they call the 'joygap' is closed.

While for our featured artist, Kiboko HachiYon, his joy is realised in turning abstract ideas into images that help people recognise and celebrate the deeper meanings in life.

I began to appreciate that joy was an important part of the lives of all the people in our community who were contributing stories from their life. By contributing to the Magazine they were really sharing some of the joy in their lives and in doing so they are encouraging other people to recognise the joy in their own lives

It seems to me that joy is within us as we experience the everyday incidents of life but that it originates in achieving or trying to accomplish the things we value ....It involves feelings of happiness but happiness can be related to a transient pleasurable experience. Joy is deeper, more profound and sustained than happiness because it affects the spirit of who we are. And because it's a state of mind rather than a state of body it has the potential to continue to affect what we do because it is part of who we are and who we want to become. The sense of exuberance and empowerment that fills us seems to infect everything - as the young people in the photo are doing (a photo I love so much that I used it on the cover of my book) we literally jump for joy because the emotion affects us physically 
So perhaps joy is an achievement, an achieved state of mind that helps us see and interpret and enact our everyday experiences as we interact with the world around us. This is the lifedeep side of learning- the deeper spiritual meanings of living and being aware. I was curious to know what other people felt joy was and both my children saw it as being something deeper than mere happiness.

I googled and I was struck by how many of the websites I found that discussed joy had a religious or spiritual context. Here is one the explanations I liked.
Trying to define joy is like drinking water from one hand.  You can only capture a bit at a time.  It is more than happiness, more than contentment, more than gratitude, though they all are certainly components of joy.  Joy is a feeling, but it is also an attitude toward life. Abraham Lincoln said “most people are just as happy as they make up their minds to be.”  The same could be said of joy.  Most of us are just as joyful as we decide we are going to be.

It is hard to always, and in every circumstance,  find things to appreciate, to enjoy and, even sometimes,  to find hope for the future.  There can be crushing experiences in health, employment or relationships.  What brings us through them?  It is the splashes of joy that cross our lives....In joy we find gratitude, happiness and hope for the future.  Sometimes those splashes seem random, sometimes they come from others but they lift us up.  And then we can lift others.

So I'm convinced that joy is something that relates to the lifedeep dimension of lifewide and lifelong learning

A Pinch of Joy website
http://www.apinchofjoy.com/2011/08/what-is-joy/