Grasshopper leaps of faith and foolhardiness..

turn it on!

Hi this is my blog – for random thoughts and doings (well those that are repeatable…).  The BAD (or is it GOOD?) stuff is on my OTHER blog – no one gets the keys to THAT one!

Have you ever been sitting at your computer with tasks windmilling inside your brain so fast that you just can’t catch hold of them.. and when you do catch a fragment of the big idea, it seems to become instantly detached from that elusive brainwave scheme you had in mind, and you just can’t get any further forward?  In fact you can’t even remember why you wanted to do the task in the first place…

This is often a consequence of throwing far too much at your poor limited self  all at once.  You might have seen the demonstration where you are thrown a tennis ball, which you catch, then 2 tennis balls.. bit more difficult, then a whole SACK of tennis balls – no chance!  This is what you are trying to do to your brain when you try to try to get to grips with that latest  “Speed your way to instant success in 24 hours”  formula on top of all the other things. It’s no surprise at all, that in excess of 95% of people who sign up to “definitely” do it will fail.

I have been in complete overwhelm all my life.. no I’m not saying how many YEARS!  Some well known gurus tell me to FOCUS.  Easier said than done, and when you’re focussing madly then for one or other reason you just get STUCK, the frustration is very bad for a person with a grasshopper mind.  I leap from idea to idea, this is a natural process for me and it’s not necessarily a bad thing.  The downside of this leapfrog approach to life is the “start many things, but struggle to finish any” syndrome.

However with a bit of modification, this approach can be great – one positive is, if  I become stuck with a particular project or I’m finding things getting confused / struggling to make a decision / don’t understand an  essential process / become really annoyed with some idiot or other, then I can hop to the next water lily leaf and get to work on that.  This gives my brain a rest, so that when I hop back again I just might see things MUCH more clearly and speed past the roadblock which seemed so solid before.  And if not.. hey I probably forgot all about it anyway – pass the southern comfort someone…

This is just to link to a Posterous space that I’m creating. The Space is to honour my much loved and missed Grandfather Thomas Moody.  It will have excerpts from the detailed diaries which he kept all his life and which created an amazing family legacy of 23 volumes, all hand written and hand bound.

My Grandfather was a polymath and a man of boundless energy with wide interests, including teaching, painting water-colours, draughtsmanship, research, linguistics, singing, playing the euphonium amongst other instruments, bookbinding, calligraphy, coaching sports, mathematics and arachnology.

In his public life, as well as teaching and coaching young people, he sang in and conducted prize-winning choirs and played in a brass band. He took pupils rambling and cycling and managed football and cricket teams.

He was recognised as a world expert on spiders and devoted 16 years of his life to recording all that he could on the dialect and language of his native Mid-Northumbrian area.

He was born in Amble, Northumberland in 1901 and moved to Wivenhoe, Essex during the second world war where he resided with his family until his death in 1970, (hence the title of this post).

Anyone who would like to read or look at the diary excerpts can do so by contacting me.  I have not made the space public so I need to add individuals to the list before the diaries can be read.

The space will be:  thomasmoody.posterous.com.

Here are a couple of examples of interesting excerpts:

Page 25 Volume 4 Reminiscor

The Great Flood-1953

Clippings - The Great East Coast Flood 1953

Cliipings-The Great Flood at Jaywick 1953

The Great Flood at Wivenhoe 1953