Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music

Sit on the floor, cross your legs, close your eyes, rest your forearms on your thighs with the palms of your hands facing up and... let the app on your smartphone do the rest.

Yes, you read that right. Let an application that you downloaded prior to your meditation session tell you when it is time for you to be calmer. Should it be before or after you go to see your boss to ask her/him for a payrise? Or will it be when you are asked to come to your child’s school to talk to his/her teacher on account of an “incident” in which your little Johnny spat on a classmate’s face and called him that word that begins with “c” and has four letters? It has been the third time this term, mind you, so you will need that app badly.

We are in the middle of a boom, apparently. No, not that type of boom, the economic one on which George Osborne so smugly keeps insisting despite a long queue of unemployed people making a racket outside Westminster. I’m talking about mindfulness boom, the next step up from meditation, which was a step up from yoga, which was a step up from... what? Sorry, I lost count.

Suit is optional

The irony of modern life is that in order to maintain the standards to which we have grown so used over the years we have to stress ourselves out in the process of achieving them. The only way to de-stress, it seems, is to cough up for courses that promise us inner peace. Because these sessions cost a fortune (as well as gurus and the like) we need to raise that money somehow. Which means we need to work harder and longer hours. Which means more stress. And so the cycle continues.

I am not slagging off yoga or Pilates or meditation or the new kid on the bloc, mindfulness. As I mentioned in my last post before going off on my summer blog-break, I teach Afro-Cuban dance and have incorporated yoga techniques in the last ten years or so to my practice. But I'd be the first one to confess that I have taken the bits from yoga that match my teaching and left the philosophy bits out. In doing this I have copied unintentionally the usual western approach to spiritual practices.

From the hug-a-stranger initiative to alternative relaxation techniques the message is the same: listen to your body, be at one with the world, leave judgments out and accept yourself, your emotions and sensations. Sometimes I find all this to be a lot of baloney, to be honest. Not the act of meditation per se but the marketing side of it. Once again, a discipline which is part of a bigger system whose aim is to live a full, rich spiritual life is diluted and sold piecemeal to an audience always on the lookout for the latest fad.

The downside of this is that people become more docile and “tuned out”. Whatever danger they might pose is cancelled out. For the government this is handy especially in times when the gap between rich and poor is widening up. First it was Mother’sLittle Helper (Valium), now it is meditation.  Either way the mantra is the same: you don’t need to change the system, just relax and switch off. It will be all right. Now, hand over the cash and go back to working harder for it, will you?

You know how much I love the UK and London specifically, my home for almost twenty years. But sometimes that love is tested. One of the first traits I learnt about the British personality is that they moan a lot. And that they enjoy doing it in a sort of love/hate way. Sometimes their complaints are justified (anything that involves slagging off Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, is welcomed) but many times my lovely British comrades do not really know how good they have it. Take queues, for instance. I have lost count of the number of times in which someone has said that they hate queuing or that the queue for the cinema was too long (about twenty yards long) or that they had to queue up for  a long time ( a quarter of an hour).

My fellow Brits, as a Cuban-born and bred person, I am telling you, you don’t know how lucky you are. Babies have been made in queues in Cuba, I kid you not. Fortunately we have never had a case where the future mother has spent her whole pregnancy in the same queue going from conception to labour and birth. Perhaps someone is already working on that. If only for the Guinness World Records. If it does happen, you will be the first ones to know. In the meantime, stop moaning, queues in the UK are quite well organised, with a system and everybody knows their place most of the time. Remember, if that queue makes you feel a bit tense and despondent, there's always mindfulness to help you out. Enjoy your week.



© 2014

Next Post: “Killer Opening Songs”, to be published on Wednesday 8^th October at 11:59pm (GMT)

Urban Dictionary

Staycation: (n) a vacation spent at home or near home, doing enjoyable activities or visiting local attractions.

Or what you do when you are skint. A little bit of honesty sometimes will not go amiss. Of course there’s more to “staycation” than finances and luckily, nowadays it’s a choice most of us can make. It’s even been recognised as an official word by the Oxford English Dictionary. So, all those holidays in the Wirral finally paid off.

But going back to choices for a second, I have often been told by people born and raised here in Blighty that many years ago low-income or working class families didn’t have many (choices, that is). Therefore, it was always a few days away in Blackpool in the summer every year. Or a day trip to Frinton- or Southend-on-Sea. Or whatever money allowed. Sometimes not even that. Two or three years would go by before a trip in the old banger was arranged hastily the night before for the morning after.

Blackpool, UK. But would you not rather be in Minorca?

But in recent years, low budget holidays abroad have changed that. Cheap flights, all-inclusive accommodation and a more moneyed (and money-minded) working class have contributed to the exploration of boundaries beyond Dover. Even if this still means some stereotypical British tourists trying to make themselves understood using the old method of SPEAKING IN A VERY LOUD VOICE, PRONOUNCING EACH WORD VERY CAREFULLY. Mind you, at least you lot are better than my lot. Cubans can’t even travel freely. And what to say of the pioneers of staycation, the denizens of the old socialist bloc? Yes, some were allowed to travel from the former Soviet Union to East Germany, for instance (as long as they toed the party line and they were considered to be model citizens), but the landscape in both Moscow and Berlin was coloured by the KGB and the Stasi respectively. Bearing in mind that most eastern European socialist countries were thought as extensions of the Kremlin’s back garden; staycation is an appropriate term to use. So, my dear Brits, please, do carry on ASKING WHERE THE EIFFEL TOWER IS. Clue: it’s right behind you!

This boom in short- and long-haul holidays left the UK tourist industry depending more on tourists trying to catch a glimpse of the Queen or castle-hopping. Suddenly Ayia Napa was far more interesting than Lyme Regis. Until 2008.

With the financial crisis of 2008 many habits changed. Holidays were amongst those activities that underwent a makeover. Because when you think of it, no matter how cheap your flight to Rome is, you still have to find accommodation. Maybe you want to incorporate car-hire, and how about the insurance? Suddenly that hundred quid holiday turns into a thousand –pound one. Compare that to £299 for a two-bedroom cottage in Devon that sleeps four. That’s the annual family summer holiday sorted. Yes, of course, there’s still the petrol to factor in and the catering, but does anyone really include petrol costs in their vacation planning?

Staycation is here to stay, pardon the tautology. I have always been of the opinion that one should (must, even) know one’s country like the back of one’s hand first before venturing out to explore other lands. I, unfortunately, have never been to eastern Cuba and that’s been in my to-do list for many years now for when we go back. As the saying goes, every cloud has a silver lining. Perhaps the economic collapse of 2008 will have inadvertently a positive effect on the younger generation and will awaken their desire to discover the wealth of culture, history and nature the UK has to offer. Who knows? Maybe it will be French-speakers they will come across, asking: OÙ EST LE CHÂTEAU ACTON, S’IL VOUS PLAÎT? Clue: it’s right behind you!

© 2014

Next Post: “Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music”, to be published on Sunday 5^th October at 10am (GMT)