My neglected blog

With a slight sense of guilt at having failed to put anything up on my still relatively fresh blog for almost two months, I'm finally sitting down to upload some nuggets of value that have accumulated in my mind... So here it goes...

I need to find a way of being less cryptic when I talk about my stuff because otherwise I might just risk exlcuding too many people from viewing my blog (not that I think I have many visitors right now, but the idea is important).

It is not that I have been doing nothing, thinking nothing or learning nothing since December that I have failed to post things on this blog. Locating the reasons, I think, is a very important endeavour because I feel that this blog is really important, both as an outlet and also as a way of documenting my experiences and consolidating what I am learning. So, in a way, failing to use this blog also represents a failure on my part to systematically strain the contents of my brain and seperate the sludge from the real essence... So, why this failure?

I think one reason has been my busy-ness... there has been a lot going on with my work - but this seems like an inadequate reason. A second reason is that I have been spending a lot of my time in Delwara where there is not a suitable access to the internet. How am I supposed to dump my thoughts onto a blog if I can't get to the internet? But then, its not like I don't come back to Udaipur from time to time. I could write down my thoughts there and type them up when back here... Another is that I have been very much 'in my head', churning over a lot of matter. The positive side of all this delaying is that right now I have a good deal of 'stuff' to write down.

This all emphasises for me the fact that learning is something that happens over time: the creation of knowledge is in some way an emergent process. Over time, a series of events, each individually significant (and each a learning experience no doubt) gradually converge to point to a bigger or deeper lesson or principle that challenges the way that I perceive things or the way that I want to prioritise.

This issue of prioritisation is something that has cropped up a fair bit recently. How do we prioritise? It is all very well to claim that priorities are sometimes imposed on us from above or from outside but this isn't really fair. It makes us seem like victims or passive subjects living lives that are out of our own control. This is not only a scary prospect (and possibly real for some) but also a kind of decision to shun responsibility; to deny the fact that we daily make choices about how we live our lives and that it is up to us to make the effort to define the principles by which we want to live our lives and to ensure that we really live by them. So what is important and why?

Our understanding of the world and our position in it (call it worldview if that helps) seems to be a key part of the puzzle of how we decide how to live our lives - but I also know that I have a good deal of 'knowledge' that backs up my world view and it is the accumulation of this knowledge that has helped me to build up this worldview. How do my values influence the 'knowledge' that I accumulate - and vice-versa? I imagine also that my background and academic training have conditioned me to certain forms of rigidity which some wild years while at university may have helped to temper - only by teaching me the importance of breaking boundaries and of realising that everything is connected to everything else. Discovering some of these barriers will really help me to get on the right track. How can this knowing be transferred to other people? This seems like the essential question.

This is my preamble. Now for some more down-to-earth thoughts....

One. Change has to start at the source. Whatever we hope to realise in Delwara needs to be happening as a microcosm within the project team. That means: (1) high quality, open communication - especially about our internal issues, feelings, conflicts - but also about what we believe in; (2) practicing what we preach (if we can't stop using polythene and end up hiding it in newspaper then how can we possibly expect anyone to take us seriously and how can we expect anyone else to give up polythene?). What we cannot do within the project we cannot achieve outside: the community that we create within the project will be a reflection of the community that we build outside the project. The mistrust, confusion, power-dynamics and way of living and being should be an example for the rest of the community. This does not mean trying to claim some degree of moral greatnesses over the rest of the comunity but it means that we should be integral to ourselves.

Two (which is a kind of extraction of one). I need to be more firm about my values and the way that the work is causing me to conflict with my values. I need to articulate how this makes my experience of working less satisfying and also that if we are not able to change these things, I will find myself unable to remain working on the project.

More will follow soon but now I have to hurry off...

Bye.