Thought-provoking quote from Steve Pavlina’s Development Blog:

Some people think it’s a good thing to tolerate the parts of life they don’t like. That’s dumb. Tolerance isn’t acceptance. Tolerance is resistance. To be more specific, tolerance is resistance to love.

Could he really mean that? He goes on to explain

When you quit something you’ve been tolerating, whether it be a job, a relationship, a bad habit, or an unhealthy diet, you raise your energy and your consciousness. This enables you to imagine, intend, attract, and receive what you really do want.

Do I have things I just tolerate? My new project at work fits me well, with some big challenges, some new technology, and should be satisfying to pull off. I can think of bits of this role and my voluntary roles I don’t enjoy, but I’m fortunate that the main thrust of all of them are enjoyable. I’ve also been tackling minor annoyances around me: decluttering the house a bit, selling some books, and replacing some broken things.

Steve finishes with a challenge:

Another word for tolerance is cowardice. I know that sounds harsh, but it’s fairly accurate. If you’re experiencing what you don’t want, it’s because you’re allowing it. You remain free to choose something else. The question is whether you’ll step up and claim it… or chicken out and tell yourself it’s too big or that you aren’t ready or that you can’t possibly make it happen. That’s cowardice.

Maybe I need to sense more carefully other things that could be tolerating without realising it.

One of the many archive boxes in the garage held old christian reference books that we were less likely to need in a hurry. Martha wanted some sketches for her placement, so this provided the incentive to dig it out and have a rummage through. We’ve kept half, and most of the rest I’m going to donate to the library at church (and see if I can interest them in using LibraryThing as a usefully public catalogue). But there a difficult few that I can’t imagine anyone being interested in any more, because they are too dated. For example the almost-non-PC title of “Sex and Young People”. It feels sacriligeous to throw a book away, but that’s what I had to with that and a few others. Please forgive me, bibliophiles of the world!

I’m definitely getting more into the philosophy of de-cluttering your life to de-stress. So, despite buying another dozen second-hand books 2 weeks ago, getting rid of this box means the number of books we have is shrinking. If you’re not scared of big numbers, then read on …

Our LibraryThing profile shows we have 823 books catalogued, though this reduces to 750 if you take out the ones we’ve only had recommended or have given away, and add the ones I’ve not yet catalogued.

I was reading in Third Way (Mar 2008) of John Davies who made a modern pilgrimage along the M62, wanting to learn to ‘read the ordinary’:

I have felt for some time that the everyday gets overlooked in society’s constant attentiveness to the new and the exotic, whilst all of us for most of the time are living ordinarily.

More and more I find myself agreeing with this. I can trace a few sources of this feeling:

• I’m annoyed that the news spends ever more time on the lives of celebrities;
• I realise I’m more keen on the newest gizmos, gadgets and software than can be good for my ability to just get things done;
• As I tend to everything slightly early in life, it’s probably about time I started my mid-life crisis. Or, at least, I’m concluding that I’m not going to be able to realise some of my ideas in life;
• I’m unlikely to go far out of my way to collect exotic experiences, and in many ways I’m content with the ordinary.

Unsurprising then, that I found his quote from Georges Perec powerful and provocative:

The daily newspapers talk of everything expect the daily. The papers annoy me, they teach me nothing. What they recount doesn’t concern me, doesn’t ask me questions and doesn’t answer the questions I would like to ask. What’s really going on, what we’re experiencing, the rest, all the rest, where is it? How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs everyday: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual? [From Approaches to What?]

I don’t think I’m likely to walk along the M62, but the challenge is there to find the ’subliminal amongst the liminal’ of life in ordinary. Obviously for Christians, this includes noticing God’s hand at work. Greenbelt had this theme once, and that year I was struck by the question of how we can find God in our towns and cities … most of us find him easier to see in what we long have held to be ‘the works of his creation’ - but what about in the local council, or (a real challenge) Tescos?