Task #4: Meaning in Life

Friday night, and I have one more task on my to-do list for today: Baseline Task #4 from Todd’s book, Curious? (I hope first name terms are acceptable now we’re Twitter followers). This one is the Meaning in Life Questionnaire.
It measures how much you find your existence to be significant. Below [...]

“But we are flux” – Muriel Spark

How are we to articulate emotion? Here’s one way, from novelist Muriel Spark via quantum physics.
For the theorist David Bohm, an understanding of life as “the law of the whole movement” is central to all emotion, to the act of creativity and to the renewal of a fragmented person or fragmented culture.
He [...]

David Bohm on creative curiosity

I came across the work of David Bohm last week, and took his collection of essays On Creativity away camping for the weekend.
Bohm was a physicist and theorist, and the book is a weaving of both science and philosophy. While working with the prevailing views of Quantum mechanics, Bohm also took a lateral [...]

Task #3 Acceptance and Action

The Acceptance and Action Questionnaire-II (or AAQ-2 – sounds like a gun) measures psychological flexibility. I hope it’s more than my physical flexibility – I’ve just taken up meditation, and sitting on the floor comfortably is tougher than a ten mile run. In Curious?, psychological flexibility is also described as “the [...]

A less justified walking

The walk from Bay Ness Farm, where I was camping for the weekend, and into Robin Hood’s Bay follows an old railway line that has been mapped out as a ‘permissive path’ – not a public right of way, but one that is signposted nonetheless.
The line was part of the Scarborough & [...]

Task #2: Wants, Needs, Addictions

A more audience friendly blog post coming tomorrow, but for tonight I just completed the second of the Baselines tasks from Curious? – the Basic Psychological Needs Scale.
It measures, well, what it says on the tin: are my basic pyschological needs being met? While typing up the form to be able to [...]

Task #1: ‘curious explorers’

As I’ve written about in The Tasks, I’m going through all the exercises in Todd Kashdan’s book Curious? to see how much of a ‘curious explorer’ I can become in my challenge to be a full-time writer and overcome anxiety disorder.
The first six exercises are all ‘baseline’ exercises to evaluate where [...]

Curiosity and the icon

Michael Jackson. Roger Federer. Martina Navratilova. Vandana Shiva. Each of these icons have had a moment in my mind in the past two weeks. MJ, of course. Roger’s 15th grand slam. Martina at the National Portrait Gallery’s Gay Icons exhibiton. Vandana Shiva as the subject of debate on the Lit & [...]