My Band-width & Band-depth problem.

So I took a much needed break from blogging…….

What’s more I even pulled back all of my new posts that were scheduled for the next few weeks, had a read of those and promptly stowed many of those in the file marked delete folder, those that didn’t I had to rewrite large chunks of or add a significant postscript to explain how things had changed since I wrote the original post.

Here’s a little example. When I had my first stroke I took to using the line “not great,not terrible” to describe the way I felt then after the second event I was saying “all days are horrible but some days are more horribler than others” – sort of taken from Animal Farm. Recently I wrote an entire post on a slightly different and weirdly positive mental outcome where I used the unfortunate term “the great reset” but altered to “the not so great reset” to try to describe what seemed to be going on in my head. Well, there it is – the last surviving dregs of a post that is now in the delete folder.

This post is a long term survivor of several read and delete sessions, it only survived as it did because I never considered it good to go. Recent events have changed things, my strokes of course and the fact that I finally got to follow up on the one positive thing that came out of the original post : that of me enrolling in the online Peterson Academy and spending some time, most days of the week following one lecture series or another.

This post goes right back to the time just before I started blogging so that’s around 2016 which is when I first became aware of Dr Jordan Peterson and his work. I added this post, just as a title and a couple of paragraphs because there wasn’t much I could do with it then and since then a whole load of stuff has been and gone : JBP himself got very sick and ended up in a Russian ICU, at the same time I finished my peak years as a specialist nurse and ultimately retired. The immediate effect of Peterson’s life and lectures is that I started to write (in terms of being a blogger) and even traveled to go to the first of his public lectures in the UK.

At the time, this around 2016 remember, I had a sense of frustration that any intellectual or artistic/creative life had passed me by. My life wasn’t exactly limited as I was working in a high pressure job that needed a certain level of intellectual horsepower to get through the day and yet it seemed to me that every other thing that I did or had done was lived out at the same kind of level : be that my former climbing life, my sailing and bushcraft lives and anything that I followed on the internet. I called it then my bandwidth’ problem although a much better way of describing it would have been band-depth and band-height : it’s as if I was admitting that I do all of this stuff but none of it really has any depth and I first began to understand that when I first listened to Dr Peterson’s lectures on personality.

To keep it short and thus readable I’ll ignore most of what has happened in the intervening years except to say that I started to write (in the sense of being a blogger) a little later I started to understand trait psychology by taking a Big 5 model traits test myself. The standard model of my everyday life stayed about the same though and that didn’t change much until this year (2024)

This year, Dr Peterson announced and launched his online academy and I immediately enrolled on that without even knowing what the content of the lectures would be – knowing JBP’s work as I did I had a few shrewd guesses.

As I write iv’e been back in school for about a month and generally iv’e been having a useful time there, the first lecture series’s that I followed were first, an introduction to psychology delivered by another Ph.d professor and secondly a lecture series about God, the Bible and Man delivered by the Roman Catholic bishop – Robert Barron. I watched the first one all the way through but haven’t yet taken the quiz at the end of each lecture, right now i’m following Robert Barron for a second time only this time i’m having a go at the end quizzes to see how much i’m retaining : with the third lecture series – Peterson introducing Nietzsche iv’e chosen to put it aside for a while as my limited attention span was down to about 5 minutes and with that I couldn’t even remember what transpired in the previous short chunk that i’d watched.

My days are a bit different now, i’m working on the physical problem of getting exercise each day although I haven’t managed a whole week yet. I try to write but so far this week all iv’e done is read and deleted yet more posts. I spend some time at school as I put it and often try to test my memory a bit when i’m out walking. The big thing in the last 2 months is that i’m working on a potential book project and i’m up to about 38 or so sections that i’m reasonably happy with – they will all need a rewrite and edit but the whole project – it needs a boat of course – has a certain amount of momentum now and I can only hope that I haven’t hexed the whole idea by mentioning it in my first post in a new series.

Best wishes y’awl