Just touch the Dial

The oven of Life heats up gradually. Tempers are tested with each travesty in the traffic and the city spits out its acerbic toxicity. Perhaps it is just coincidental that ‘toxic’ and ‘city’ find a cynical mix in toxicity, but in the February heat of Johannesburg, the pace sometimes feels rather poisonous. The political promises are padding up to pre-election propaganda, and each passing newspaper billboard uncovers another story of mismanagement and corruption.

To add no more light to these matters, we also have load shedding.

Already stretched businesses and families are asked to pay more taxes with less electricity. To feed more mouths with less fuel and to do more homework by fading torch light. What little light we may be seeing at the end of the tunnel is shut off for another tranche of time as we worry about frozen goods perishing. The buzzing inside our own heads is dulled and sometimes deafened by the incessant drone of the diesel generators which jump to life in the neighborhoods of the well prepared. We are not one of those households as yet, but at least one upside is that this lack of power supply also pushes the automatic pause button on the CNN news feeds which seem only to add to the venom of a volatile world. We are temporarily blissfully unaware of the surrounding uncertainty, we care less about complexity, and as for ambiguity, well, it seems arbitrary with a lack of options.

Being in the sparkless darkness of my own downward-spiralling demeanour, I had not yet begun to appreciate the simplicity of life with a Consol glass solar lamp, a warm family conversation and no arguments over the shutting down of two teenagers devices in time for bed. In our near addiction for digital connection, perhaps we were losing our Human one?

My temperament meter was still flickering dangerously close to tantrum level. It was another late school lift made later by the manual opening of garage doors and driveway gates, and even the car radio was crackling with distortion. This bloody load shedding has clearly even affected the broadcast of a half decent radio station in Hot 91.9 FM, and now I was going to miss the ‘Old School News’ by Simon Hill.

“FFS’s this place is a joke!”

“Just touch the dial Dad.”

With nothing to read on her own device, my fourteen year old daughter had noticed that the station reading was on 91.85. Not 91.9.

All it took was one touch. It did not need to be reprogrammed or twisted through a number of turns. I didn’t need to buy a new radio and it had nothing to do with load shedding.

I was back in the ‘Cool of Old School’ and we could giggle through another superb creation of the Old School News.

The drive to school was a joy, and we were not late. Someone even let me in to the busy lane of Oxford road with a smile and a wave, and I had time to enjoy a good coffee as the needle of own internal boiling levelled off to moderate and for a rare moment may even have touched on being calm.

I sit here and wonder with the same coffee, whether I just need to touch the dial of my own life sometimes? I don’t need a big fix, and my career doesn’t need a drastic change. I don’t need a total overhaul of my physical or mental states. Just a small nudge or a slight reminder.

We are tempted so often to work on the 91.85. To rebrand the business, to re-engineer the culture. Recapitalise the balance sheets, rebuild the Head Office and refurbish the work spaces. Most of those things are already there, and because they carry great strategic weight, the subtleties of fine tuning are mostly written off as soft skills and assigned to a largely toothless department which shouldn’t need teeth in the first place.

Yet fine tuning comes for free. It comes with a smile during a greeting. It is there in the half a minute of focused attention we give to the response to our own questions. It is present in the mindful breath we take, or the stretched limbs during a tea break. When we stop long enough to capture the rays of a setting sun, or help someone with their overhead compartment luggage, we make space for the moments which truly matter, and when we say Thank You from a full heart, we lubricate the flow of social cohesion. When we sit together during a funeral in pools of pure emotion, and we say nothing individual, but feel everything together, we are fine tuning relationships which have been built over years, and we are rebuilding them with the strength of our collective silence.

Pema Chödrön is an American Tibetan Buddhist. In a YouTube clip called ‘Lousy World’ she paints a beautiful analogy from the teachings of the Indian Buddhist monk Shantideva who talks of the discontent we all feel with the world at times. We walk through this harsh landscape with its discomfort and hurt our feet with its thorns, cut glass and hot sand. We are tempted to cover the whole path in leather so as to remove all irritations and walk pain free. We would not be upset by pesky ticks or corrupt politicians. We could get rid of all the things that bothered us and live a happy contended life.

Great idea, though really quite impractical and the question of wisdom comes with asking why we don’t just wrap that leather round our own feet. In so doing we carry our protection from within instead of trying to change the outside world. We can lean with some comfort into the discomfort, some certainty into the uncertainty, and we regulate our own temperature level through touching our own dial.

91.85 is covering the world with leather whilst 0.05 is making your own shoes, and that is so much more energy intelligent.

Just touching the dial for that extra 0.05 could make all the difference between clutter and clarity. Between distortion and direction.

It certainly turned my cynical smirk into a smile, and I let the next person through into the same busy lane of traffic.

Steve