Thinking about thinking: the best of the summer

Something I have enjoyed over the last few years is the chance to sit and think back over the experiences of the past, whether those are from the distant haze of my teenage years or from more recent days.  The fast pace of life, social media and the waning of the attention span sometimes makes me feel like all the birds I see and the wild days I spend are brief sparks of light in a vast and fast moving darkness.  We abandon the past as though it truly is a foreign country, a half remembered recollection dim with the fog of time and alternately shining with the patina of nostalgia.  The other half of Hartley's famous quote, "...they do things differently there" is a perfect description of our attitudes towards the sightings and the pictures of the past.  

We live in true tension between a voracious appetite for the new and the next and an almost painful nostalgia; a binge-consuming culture craving viewing calories but always keening for the simpler past.  The feedback loop grows tighter and tighter, with 80s fads bleeding into 90s fads and without pausing for breath back around to the fashions of the 00s.  There's a powerful and well-expressed desire for many people to return to before the smart phone took over our entire culture, thinking apparatus and every second of free time.  There's an urge to follow this spiral around the plug hole with our posts on social media.  I'm guilty of posting photographs and then forgetting about the encounter as soon as they no longer get clicks, swallowed by the race towards the new.  An overheard conversation about monetising birding (a conversation I hear repeated more and more often as people become desperate to make money as influencers in a crowded market of low-quality birding rubbish) suggested that one of the big internet companies would pay per click of a blog as long as there was a daily post.  It didn't seem to matter how good that blog was, only that there was a post there that was labelled for SEO (not Short-eared Owl, for once).  The Churn, folks.  Quantity is the quality we've settled for.

My little blog is rarely read.  Numbers wise, it barely registers.  I'll never get rich on a pay per click deal.  But then, my blog isn't for that.  It's not an influential media.  It's not full of scandal or quick tips, and I don't really care if nobody reads it, though obviously more readers is better.  My blog is a way of keeping track of the bright encounters of yesterday without letting them fade completely, saving them from sinking in the churn.  It's been heartening recently to see many of my earliest posts on the blog getting a renewed readership, which has led me to re-read a couple.  This has lifted some of my best days back into mind in a powerful way and there has been some nourishment for my soul in those experiences.

I was a teacher of philosophy, ethics and religion for a long time and taught a lengthy module on Buddhism for many years.  It was always interesting to see the attitudes of young people towards meditation, which ranged from feeling it was a pointless and empty activity, to finding silence so incredibly threatening that it could inspire tears and fear, to wishing they could master better discipline to be better at it.  I tend to think about a modern equivalent to the samatha meditation of Buddhism is simply to have time to think.  When do you do this?  When do you just think?  Unprompted, unstimulated time spent just chewing things over?  Perhaps you do it as you drive, but I assume most of us have music, radio, podcasts on.  Perhaps when you're walking, but most readers of this will be walking on full alert to search for birds and other wildlife.  Maybe when you're falling asleep, but I'd not be surprised to know that the majority of us have a headphone in listening to some podcast or YouTube white noise to help us come down from our overstimulated day.  If you never stop to think, how do you know what you think?

Time to tie this together, perhaps.  Why don't we use our own past experiences of the beauty and the breath-taking nature of the world as a way to help us think?  In that spirit, I went back over the things I've seen in the summer of this year, and when I stitch that together into a quilt of memory there's a powerful sense of the goodness of the world underneath all the horror of the news.  There is comfort in recent nostalgia, a reminder that good things happen even in the midst of the sense of doom.  There is a way of putting the brake on the race to find something novel.  You simply have to step aside and let the churn wash past.  Setting aside time for a brew and ten minutes' thought about the things you saw yesterday, last week, last year provides an anchor and a way of gathering to yourself the warmth of the past, that much craved feeling that we seek endlessly in the new.  When was the last time you looked back over the photos you took in the recent past, or the notes you wrote, or the art you created?  When did you last look back at the things you've experienced - and I don't mean comparing eBird lists and end of year wrap stats.  I mean thinking about the way the things you've seen and experienced made you feel.  

What was your best moment of the summer just gone?  Why?  What did you feel?