The Pleasure of Concentration
- the pleasure of concentration
- the harmony of communication
- the gratification of good work achieved
This morning, another relaxed, family- and work-free morning, I pottered about getting up, making breakfast and checking the weather. Finally, the rain was due - but only later in the afternoon.
So, I packed my bag, plopped in my contact lenses, had a cup of tea, read more of “Teach us to sit still” by Tim Parks - an amazing account of his battle to find his balance, in order to alleviate his pain - and then finally hopped on my bike to the Tiergarten swimming pool.
It was the perfect time to go. I was ready to swim at 11:45 and there were three people in the play pool (the readout showed that was 22 °C - and it really took my breath away when I plunged in), though there was a flurry of wet-suited triathletes taking up a third of the olympic pool (which was a balmy 24 °C). The rest of the place was practically deserted, and I had a lane to myself.
Without the stress of having to watch out for other swimmers, I realised what really stresses me about swimming - it’s bloody noisy! Whether swimming breast stroke or crawl, breathing out under water creates a barrage of bubbles streaming past my face and my ears. It’s not a dainty little “bubble bubble” - goodness me, no - it’s a cacophony of cavitation, each bubble shrieking and shouting as loudly as possible “BANG! BLUB! BUBBLE!” as each CO2-filled echo chamber flops and gloops its way on by.
Once I realised that the noise was a key contributor to my emfrazzlement, I couldn’t ignore it, but I could work around it. I started to swim more slowly, more efficiently. I started to glide with each kick, only sweeping with my arms when I felt the legs float up in the stream behind me. Finally, I felt that I had arrived at an acceptable breast stroke style.
Hopefully this will mean that I’ll be able to move on from the second perennial stress-factor of swimming, which is that I think about it too much, from an engineering perspective: which angle should my hands have? Where is the most effective point to impart the largest impulse with either hands or feet? How’s my streamline angle in the water? And so on ad infinitum, for each swimming style that I try to take on.
After about half an hour, it started raining. The triathletes all left (to give them credit, I think that was more for lunch than to escape the rain), and slowly and surely the pool emptied. Finally, for a glorious couple of lengths, I was the only person in the pool.
I finished off with a victorious fast crawl - then topped that by finally trying out the water slide into the play pool.
The other night I was reading my 3 year-old a bed-time story from one of our favourite series of childrens' stories, Arnold Lobel’s “Frog and Toad” collection, when this little exchange between the two got me thinking:
{Frog’s List has blown away in the wind}
“Hurry!” said Frog. “We will run and catch it."
“No!” shouted Toad. “I cannot do that.!
“Why not?” asked Frog.
“Because,” wailed Toad, “running after my list is not one of the things that I wrote on my list of things to do!"
This resonates with so much of business life; procedures, workflows, instructions, audits, filling out forms. We all have lists of things to do, from our (largely ignored and occasionally conscious-pricking) task lists, to those procedures. We need to realise that we can make the choice between “merely” following the procedures to the letter, and rehumanising them.
Naturally, this all applies to the bureaucracy of life, too (I recently married and had a child, so I know all about filling out forms and chasing the right administrator at the right time…) but since I have been thinking has been about business life lately, that’s where the brain cells decided to resonate with interest.
At work, I have a great collegiate friendship with a quality manager who is also a trained auditor. He is (it sounds strange to write this), a human being. By this I mean that he treats the audit procedures as a frame within which he must operate, but not as a constraint. He is a detective who understands that humans have created these constructs around them to force themselves into doing the right thing, in the sense of doing the best for the company and (by extension) the best for society in general. He also knows that humans tend to cut corners, in order to maximise leisure time. He understands that rigidly following an audit checklist is the surest way of ruining a day and of missing the real issues that a list can paper over. Yet without this list, even he is lost.
We need to force ourselves to get things done properly. These constructs, sets of instructions, whatever we call them, that we have placed for ourselves - in business, bureaucracy, religion and in every walk of life - do not necessarily stifle or strangle creativity. They can postpone the effort of thinking to more important tasks. Yes, they take time to complete and yes, they require an effort of willpower; but no, it is often not really time or energy wasted. And if there is waste involved, then it is a business benefit to eliminate this waste.
(If there is waste involved, then it is a religious necessity. If there is waste involved, then it is a bureaucracy…)
With all of our lists, we must ensure that the free thinkers - the frogs - amongst us have room to breathe, to innovate, to dream; and we must ensure that the petty list-followers - the toads - do not exceed their remits or relish their “powers” excessively.