Almost Composed

Meditation and curiosity

The importance of wholesome structures

June 12, 2019

Matthew Crawford’s book, The World Beyond Your Head, has some important lessons for maintaining clarity and sanity in a world of proliferating distractions. In meditation circles, it’s common knowledge that prolonged stability of attention can create the conditions for deep insights to arise. However, we live in societies where attention is being monetised and manipulated by […]

categories: philosophy, reflections

Failure

July 20, 2016

The ship’s design pictured is the Titanic. The cross-section is drawn at full scale and the length at quarter scale. I visited the Titanic exhibition in Belfast recently. The timing couldn’t have been better as I’ve been reading Matthew Syed’s Black Box Thinking, about how we learn from failures both catastrophic and small. The ‘unsinkable’ […]

categories: essays, reflections

Downshifting: balancing your job, life, and your art

November 27, 2015

I stumbled on this old productivity post which, ironically, I never did anything with. I wrote it a while ago when I was preoccupied with getting it all done: work, writing, music, life: the full catastrophe. I’m not sure in all honesty how good I am at implementing these strategies. I have a more relaxed attitude […]

categories: reflections

Alternative productivity tips

October 14, 2015

Keep flowers on your desk. Do things when you feel like it. Open the window to feel the breeze and hear life going on outside. Try a ‘to do’ list of things you can do for others. Cut away the trivial but pay attention to the small.

categories: reflections

The New Default

September 1, 2015

Our gadgets come out of the box ready to bombard us with emails, distract with SMS messages, snare us with headlines, and amuse us with status updates. In our technocratic culture, the expectation is that we are always ready to respond. Yet the pace of information grows ever more frantic. We could create a new default. […]

categories: reflections