The Way Forward

The best thing about talking to world-class operators - apart from the fact that you get to talk to your heroes, people who inspired and motivated you; and the fact that you are talking to the people who have, quite literally, waited for the rest of the world to catch up to them - is that you realise that they are ordinary people who have gone on to do extraordinary things.

That idea flies in the face of our cultural reading of talent and genius - that talent is god-given and divine and that its flowering in certain individuals is preordained and inevitable.

Talking to people like Andy Hodge or Eric Murray or Jack Beaumont or Drew Ginn or Cath Bishop on Broken Oars Podcast helps you realise that a lot of what we call success or achievement in life comes from aligning what you to do who you are, turning up, working smart as much as hard and the journey rather than the destination.

Eric put it most succinctly when the microphones were off: it takes a second for them to hang an Olympic gold medal around your neck. It takes ten years to get one. If you don’t enjoy those ten years, mate, that one second won’t make up for it.

And it got me thinking.

Which is dangerous for me in these post-Covid brain fog times, when even spelling the word dangerous takes me three attempts.

And that might seem funny, I suppose, but I have a first-class mind and brain (the two are very different things), and my command of language and intellectual tools developed painstakingly after a lifetime of dyslexia are not only an important achievement for me personally but an essential part of my self-identity. To suddenly not have the ability to think or speak or concentrate; to suddenly not have physical and mental energy after a lifetime as a high-achieving person / athlete / academic / professional / person is terrifying.

Utterly terrifying.

And it also seems clear that the people I’ve just mentioned are known and lauded for their achievements and that those achievements linked to performing on a given day, at a given time, at a given moment.

No stoppee, no startee.

No second chances.

Now or never.

But the qualities that allowed them to perform on that day were honed and shaped and developed by years and years of dedicated day-in, day-out practice - and by practice I don’t just mean it in the context of rehearsing something, although there’s an element of that in it. I also mean it in the sense of performing habitually and making a custom of; to perform repeatedly in the polishing of a skill; and to drill.

Which means that the Olympic gold medal is not the reward.

The practice of a life lived when who you are aligns to what you do is the reward.

So many of us live lives that don’t do that.

We pretend they do.

We pretend that that the mid-level job on upper management is what we really wanted to do.

We tell ourselves that the hire purchase Range Rover and this year’s haircut and this year’s Barbour / Belstaff jacket and a house that looks the same as everyone else’s and a weekend Park Run and Netflix are who we are.

But we didn’t want that, back when we were young and thought anything was possible. We were Olympic athletes. We were gold medal winners. We scored the winning goal in the Cup Final. We went to the moon and back. We saved the planet. We were friends with bears and wolves. We dreamed a thousand impossible things before breakfast.

And none of those were middle-management, nine-to-five survival.

We lived.

And we wanted to live.

I’ve just been listening to the rock climber Johnny Dawes talk about setting standards in climbing in the 1980’s that the world is still catching up to.

For those who don’t know, Johnny not only set the world’s first 9a climb in Indian Face on Cloggy, but he revolutionised climbing, setting imaginative bold lines that required new approaches to moving up and along and through rock.

Johnny saw and felt and heard rock in a way that can only be described as synaesthetic - he described it as dancing to the vibrations he felt in the rock - and his lines reflected it. Indian Face, Gaia, The Bolton Wanderer, The Angel’s Share, The End of the Affair, Dawes of Perception, The Quarryman, The Very Big and the Very Small …

These lines are music set in rock, they really are.

I met Johnny a few times in Sheffield, and climbed with him too - and it was apparent to me that I was in the presence of a man who had been directly aligned who he was to what he did and who had achieved mastery. Anyway, a few times over coffee I listened to him talk about first ascents, and he said something really interesting.

He said (and I’m paraphrasing), that everyone sees first ascents of things like Indian Face as groundbreaking, which they are; but they make the mistake of seeing them as effortless soarings to the pinnacles of human achievement rather than the mad, desperate once-in-a-lifetime never-to-be-repeated scramble that they often really are.

And he’s right.

Indian Face wasn’t repeated for the best part of a decade, and has only seen seven repeat climbs in thirty-odd years now.

Often, the things that we see as landmarks in human achievement aren’t soaring, effortless triumphs.

Often, they’re desperate one-off moments because they are at the limits of what humanity can do - when humanity coalesces into the individual on any given day.

I have a set of melodic lines that developed during the Covid lockdown before I got so ill I nearly died that are imaginative responses to people and landscapes I / we were locked away from.

And I’ve been wondering how to record them - especially given that the joints in my hands are so destroyed by Covid that trying to play anything is incredibly painful.

And now I know.

I could sit in a studio and do endless takes, looking for perfection.

But the ideas above have told me that a better way to approach this music, to approach it with honesty and integrity, would be to travel to the people and places that inspired its creation and record it in situ.

So Charlotte the Brave and Larissa The Bold should be recorded at Mill Bay Beach, Devon, and Flatpicker should be recorded at The Eagle Pub in Salford and so on and so forth.

And in line with the example of the artists that I’ve talked about in this post, rather than give myself endless room and space to go again and again and again - as I might recording in a studio - I will give myself three takes. Now that I am no longer forced to shield, I will take a guitar, travel to each location, set up a microphone, get in tune with myself, with the emotions I felt at the time of writing and the emotions that I feel on my return, take a deep breath and follow each line with as much skill, grace and emotional honesty as I can all the way to its particular end. I will trust in my practice. I will trust in my abilities. However diminished I currently feel, I will connect who I am with what I am doing as closely and honestly as I can.

Although it might be a bad metaphor given the discussion about climbing above, whatever goes down, goes down.

Then I will go to the next place and repeat that process.

So, to tie myself to this promise, here is the track listing for the album, the locations that I will record in and the title:

Charlotte the Brave and Larissa The Bold (Mill Bay, Devon)

Flatpicker / Sam Bacon’s Blues (The Eagle, Salford)

Resolution (Not To Be Taken Away, Stanage, The Peak District)

Cascade (St. John’s Church, Sheffield)

Deep Sea Diver (Carrshields, Northumbria)

Will You Not Come Back? (St. Anne’s Church, Winlaton)

And the album title?

Test Pieces.

As these are my lines for others to try in the same way Johnny et al put up their lines for others to try.

I think that this is the right way to do this.

©℗ A. I. Jackson

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Origin(al) Stories was first launched to show some of the thoughts, decisions and processes that went into the writing, recording and release of the Northumbria album.

Following the launch of The Landing Stage, which brings together some of the things I do, I’ve continued adding to Origin(al) Stories.

Origin(al) Stories has none of the features beloved of self-help and influencers: how-to guides, lists, essential hacks.

Drawn from my personal diaries and journals, the posts might often seem unconnected, elliptical and fragmentary. Showing, as they do, my explorations of ideas and approaches and processes as I do things, they are best viewed as glimpses of my workings.

They show my mistakes, the false trails I’ve followed, and the blind alleys I’ve gone down - all of which are intrinsic parts of finding a path through to doing something.

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Thanks for reading. Have a great day. Tell the people you love that you love them. Be a positive force.