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Eat your vegetables... Make a difference

A while back, I like many others ran the Bristol 10k... Ok ok, ran might be a bit of an overstatement. Perhaps ran, walked, ran, walked, ran a little less than before, walk a bit, thought about my good intentions, then ran a bit more... repeat etc for 10k.

Did I or do I 'love running'? Well not really. There I've said it... we all thought it but were too afraid to - it's out in the open now!!!

You see I wouldn't necessarily consider myself a natural athlete (I think I'm more of a 'lover than a fighter')... its certainly not one of my natural giftings. And I'm ok with that. Running in public for any distance with lots of other people whilst lots of other people watch you, take photographs which is fine but at some point they catch up with you and you actually see what you looked like... yah, I'm ok with not 'loving' that.

Would I do something like that again? yeah...

Why? Cos it reminds me that the world is bigger than me and that the edges of 'my world' need to be stretched, pushed and pulled - not only when there's an opportunity to raise some money for a good cause but as a daily way of life. That there are things outside of my world that are important as well. I need reminding of that from time to time…

And this stretching is not only good for the cause as such… but good for me. It's good for you.

When I close down and my world is literally just 'my world' it lacks the much needed positive influence of those around me and I don't think we were never meant to live that way. I'm supposed to be connected with you and others, you are supposed to be connected to others and so on and so forth... (don't start humming 'Circle of life' by Elton, that's not where I'm going). 

Being an individual doesn't have to mean being selfish ("I need me time") but being an individual can mean you've got stuff to bring along that is not only important but vital. That we all have our part and we are all invited to play.

Without getting all mid-afternoon-family-feel-good-movie about it. You can make a difference and its good for you to make a difference.

Recent events have shown the power of the group in a negative way but out of that I've also heard great stories of individuals wanting to go against that particular grain and prove that positive enlightened individuals gathered together in a group can make a difference.

See that it's possible to make a difference. See that you can make a difference. 

Love Running supports a World Vision development programme in Hurungwe, a rural district in northern Zimbabwe. In August 2011 a team to visit and report back.

http://www.woodlandschurch.net/woodiestv/love-running-in-zimbabwe

i want one

Lunch with the Family

passing Tesco's/Stokes Croft: they have bouncers

I forget but kinda a rabbit burger at Deco Lounge

Deformed Hula Hoop

Chinese Pork Blackbean Sauce & Rice - Dragon Fountain

Well when you consider that a sandwich these days is roughly between £2-3 and a bag of crisps on average around 50-70p this cheeky little Chinese (not me) is a nice little surprise at £3.30 - yes £3.30!!

Perfect for that little lunchtime treat as well as the student markets, it's what your average Asian would expect for a lunch (we don't really go for the sandwich thing over there). In fact my Dad used to do a similar lunchtime deal way back when.

Real happy to go back and try the rest of the range (inc duck dishes at £4! Duck! £4! Lunch!) 9.5/10

Go to www.dragonfountain.co.uk

spam is getting more and more accurate these days...

Hogroast at a friends wedding

Best hog roast I've had. Great crackling too 9/10

Talk to the hand

That's not her hand

beef carpaccio

Italian place down by the arches on glos rd, forget what its called but it has that funny fibreglass statue outside it. Not bad, probs 7/10

Chicken & Mushroom Soup from Phillpotts

Grillstock

I made this...

Chicken, garlic, ginger, soy & oyster sauce + 2 types of broccoli

harddrives...

Home trialing new glasses... eventually went for the top two...

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colse.leung@gmail.com / www.colse.co.uk / www.colseworld.co.uk

Acoustic Goodness / Setup

Let's TORQ about it ....

Mussels & Blackpeppered Chips @ The Harbourside

Had lunch here ages ago but forgot to post but I can still taste the creamy goodness of the sauce the mussels came in. Loved the chips, lovely simple idea. And let's not forget the feeling of smugness when you get your free bowl of soup. Great value at £5, taste great. Can't wait for another excuse to have lunch there 9/10

Lunch with the 'Rents & Fam

Scampi, chips & mushy peas - The White Lion (Avon Gorge)

Chips were colder than the mushy peas when it arrived. Miffed that I had to get my own cutlery. £8.95. Not worth it. 5.5/10

Happy

Cats make better astronauts

Tom Jones has essentially become his own negative

Not sure what I think about this one

http://www.picturesonwalls.com/

Easter Saturday... if you are into these sort of things...

"Holy Saturday is the Saturday after Good Friday which is often, but wrongly, called Easter Saturday" (BBC) and if you look at Wikipedia they even say that its just called "Saturday in Easter Week".

Saturday doesn't get much of a look in really. 

I mean you've got Maundy Thursday, Good Friday... um... Saturday... then of course Easter Sunday! Even in the Gospels you don't find any real reference to it and in a way we don't know much about the Saturday between Good Friday & Easter Sunday.

It could almost be a non-day. Maybe the disciples had a bit of a lie in? I mean it had been a hectic week and all... ?! I dunno, maybe 'at this point' they would have found it difficult to get out of bed, a little confused and lost, unsure and deflated... Whilst some where in their brains the words of Jesus (Matt 17v23) were mixed in with seeing Jesus' torture and death the day before.

It was Friday... and here they found themselves on the Saturday... did they really know Sunday was coming? 

My badly written point is this: a lot of the time there is a gap between the questions and the answers in life - our 'Good Fridays' & our 'Easter Sundays', between the situations we find ourselves in and the answer to the prayers that we hope for - there's a tension there. There's a gap.

Couldn't we just skip the Saturdays of our lives and go from Good Friday straight to Easter Sunday? It would be a lot easier wouldn't it??!! Life has many tensions and gaps. Places where things are unresolved, hanging in the air, some times even stuck.

But 'Easter Saturday' or the 'Saturday in Easter Week' represents the toil and the tension, the gap between things and has its place not only in Holy Week but as a signpost and analogy for our lives.

Hold on... Sunday's coming...

In case your conversation gets heated...

Nigel Marsh: How to make work-life balance work (Transcript of the TED Talk)

by MyJobs Macau HR Consultancy on Wednesday, February 16, 2011 at 11:19pm

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/nigel_marsh_how_to_make_work_life_balance_work.html

 What I thought I would do is I would start with a simple request. I'd like all of you to pause for a moment, you wretched weaklings, and take stock of your miserable existence. 

 Now that was the advice that St. Benedict gave his rather startled followers in the Fifth century. It was the advice that I decided to follow myself when I turned 40. Up until that moment, I had been that classic corporate warrior -- I was eating too much, I was drinking too much, I was working too hard, and I was neglecting the family. And I decided that I would try and turn my life around. In particular, I decided I would try to address the thorny issue of work-life balance. So I stepped back from the workforce, and I spent a year at home with my wife and four young children. But all I learned about work-life balance from that year was that I found it quite easy to balance work and life when I didn't have any work. Not a very useful skill, especially when the money runs out.

So I went back to work, and I've spent these seven years since struggling with, studying and writing about work-life balance. And I have four observations I'd like to share with you today. The first is, if society's to make any progress on this issue, we need an honest debate. But the trouble is so many people talk so much rubbish about work-life balance. All the discussions about flexi-time or dress-down Fridays or paternity leave only serve to mask the core issue, which is that certain job and career choices are fundamentally incompatible with being meaningfully engaged on a day-to-day basis with a young family. Now the first step in solving any problem is acknowledging the reality of the situation you're in. And the reality of the society that we're in is there are thousands and thousands of people out there leading lives of quiet, screaming desperation, where they work long, hard hours at jobs they hate to enable them to buy things they don't need to impress people they don't like. (Laughter) (Applause) It's my contention that going to work on Friday in jeans and T-shirt isn't really getting to the nub of the issue.

The second observation I'd like to make is we need to face the truth that governments and corporations aren't going to solve this issue for us. We should stop looking outside; it's up to us as individuals to take control and responsibility for the type of lives that we want to lead. If you don't design your life, someone else will design it for you, and you may just not like their idea of balance. It's particularly important -- this isn't on the World Wide Web is it, I'm about to get fired -- it's particularly important that you never put the quality of your life in the hands of a commercial corporation. Now I'm not talking here just about the bad companies -- the abattoirs of the human soul as I call them. (Laughter) I'm talking about all companies. Because commercial companies are inherently designed to get as much out of you they can get away with. It's in their nature, it's in their DNA, it's what they do -- even the good, well-intentioned companies. On the one hand, putting child care facilities in the workplace is wonderful and enlightened. On the other hand, it's a nightmare; it just means you spend more time at the bloody office. We have to be responsible for setting and enforcing the boundaries that we want in our life. 

The third observation is we have to be careful with the time frame that we choose upon which to judge our balance. Before I went back to work after my year at home, I sat down and I wrote out a detailed, step-by-step description of the ideal balanced day that I aspired to. And it went like this: Wake up well-rested after a good night's sleep. Have sex. Walk the dog. Have breakfast with my wife and children. Have sex again. (Laughter) Drive the kids to school on the way to the office. Do three hours work. Play sport with a friend at lunch time. Do another three hours work. Meet some mates in the pub for an early evening drink. Drive home for dinner with my wife and kids. Meditate for half an hour. Have sex. Walk the dog. Have sex again. Go to bed. (Applause) How often do you think I have that day? (Laughter) We need to be realistic. You can't do it all in one day. We need to elongate the time frame upon which we judge the balance in our life, but we need to elongate it without falling into the trap of the "I'll have a life when I retire, when my kids have left home, when my wife has divorced me, my health is failing, I've got no mates or interests left." (Laughter) A day is too short, after I retire is too long. There's got to be a middle way.

A fourth observation: We need to approach balance in a balanced way. A friend came to see me last year -- and she doesn't mind me telling this story -- a friend came to see me last year and said, "Nigel, I've read your book. And I realize that my life is completely out of balance. It's totally dominated by work. I work 10 hours a day, I commute two hours a day. All of my relationships have failed. There's nothing in my life apart from my work. So I've decided to get a grip and sort it out. So I joined a gym." (Laughter) Now I don't mean to mock, but being a fit 10-hour a day office rat isn't more balanced, it's more fit. (Laughter) Lovely though physical exercise may be, there are other parts to life. There's the intellectual side, there's the emotional side, there's the spiritual side. And to be balanced, I believe we have to attend to all of those areas -- not just do 50 stomach crunches.

Now that can be daunting. Because people say, "Bloody hell mate, I haven't got time to get fit; you want me to go to church and call my mother." And I understand. I truly understand how that can be daunting. But an incident that happened a couple of years ago gave me a new perspective. My wife, who is somewhere in the audience today, called me up at the office and said, "Nigel, you need to pick our youngest son up," Harry "from school." Because she had to be somewhere else with the other three children for that evening. So I left work an hour early that afternoon and picked Harry up at the school gates. We walked down to the local park, messed around on the swings, played some silly games. I then walked him up the hill to the local cafe, and we shared pizza for tea, then walked down the hill to our home, and I gave him his bath and put him in his Batman pajamas. I then read him a chapter of Roald Dahl's "James and the Giant Peach." I then put him to bed, tucked him in, gave him a kiss on his forehead and said, "Goodnight, mate," and walked out of his bedroom. As I was walking out of his bedroom, he said, "Dad?" I went, "Yes, mate?" He went, "Dad, this has been the best day of my life, ever." I hadn't done anything, hadn't taken him to Disney World or bought him a Playstation.

Now my point is the small things matter. Being more balanced doesn't mean dramatic upheaval in your life. With the smallest investment in the right places, you can radically transform the quality of your relationships and the quality of your life. Moreover, I think, it can transform society. Because if enough people do it, we can change society's definition of success away from the moronically simplistic notion that the person with the most money when he dies wins, to a more thoughtful and balanced definition of what a life well-lived looks like. And that, I think, is an idea worth spreading.

Sweet times

Roasted butter/cannellini beans & new potatoes

Signs that lie

Songwriting & sunny

"real' transformers

Maybe its a 'cultural' thing but you thought I did random things with my time...

Homemade pizza. Yum!

Chinese supermarket bounty

Puppet storage fail

Pork Idol

Noel Edmonds meets Nemo

DIY

lunch sometime

Counting on nobody

When Obama Met Colse # 1

Tea tonight: oven baked ginger and garlic chicken, broccoli, runner beans & spring onions (on rice)

Evil Scrabble

Tony Tibbs - Terry Campolo?

Tax Return Day

Gunpowder