ABOUT THIS EPISODE
One of the things I’ve been reflecting on lately is that I’ve been making things on the web for at least 20 years now. It’s been almost 20 years since I started this blog, and that got me thinking about why I called it “Perfect Path.” That’s a question nobody ever actually asks. People always say, “Hmm, yeah, I get it.” I think for a long time, I was waiting for someone to ask, but nobody did. And this goes for a lot of the work I’ve done – I’ve been itching for someone to ask me what it means, but nobody does because they just get it. Or they don’t get it at all and it seems no amount of explanation helps them.
So, the story behind the name: I was in a bit of an odd place in 2004. By the autumn of that year, I was approaching the end of my 30s. I had been sober for less than three years, though it didn’t feel like I was new to it anymore. When you’ve struggled with drinking for most of your adult life, and then you manage to stop for two or three years, it feels incredible. You think you’ve got it under control, and everyone else tells you it’s still early days. But you think (I thought), “Yeah, I know, but not me.”
But it did mean that for the first time, I had some form of spiritual life. I was, I suppose, wrestling with the first three steps of recovery. Although I didn’t realise it at the time, I kept going over those first three steps, particularly the third one, about turning your will and life over to the care of a power greater than yourself, or God as you understand it. I came up with a prayer that included the words, “I am willing to follow God’s perfect path for me, wherever it may lead,” which is very much in the spirit of Step Three. And I really liked that image. So, that’s one version of where the words came from.
Another source of inspiration for the name came around the turn of the millennium when I working on improving public services and expanding my organisational thinking, especially as the internet was becoming more prevalent. I was drawn to complexity theory, and in 2000, I took a course on managing complexity. One idea from that stood out: the concept of a creative boundary between stagnation and chaos. It’s a very simplistic model of complexity theory, but I found the idea compelling—that there’s a perfect path between those two extremes, you don’t want to fall either side of it because it’s hard to get out. So that became a more secular interpretation of “Perfect Path.”
Both ideas were very much alive in me at the time, and they fed off each other. And then by the summer of 2004, I had stopped doing an interim management job that had run its course, and I’d already been trying to blog for three or four years but always gave up after a few posts. That summer, I decided I was just going to go for it and see what happened. I knew by then that blogging wasn’t as scary or dangerous as I once thought, and I was already confidently telling people that it was OK to blog. Around the same time, podcasting was starting to emerge, and I knew I needed to do this thing—to write stuff on the internet and see where it led, both in terms of my personal work and my consulting.
I had already called my company Perfect Path Consulting. I think that was actually in 2002, when I left the Audit Commission and needed to start billing people. It became a brand for me, so I used it for my blog too. I used a typeface from Neuland, the facilitation company which had a distinctive way of writing with a chisel-tipped marker. That became my blog’s logo, in a green that felt fertile, and I dove into it all.
This is a kind of preamble to me reminding myself that I’ve been doing this stuff for 20 years now. Sometimes I’m tempted to think I still don’t know what I’m doing and that I have no idea “how to do the internet”. But then I look back and realise it’s been two decades. I’ve definitely put in a few “10,000 hours”—probably on multiple aspects of creating social media. And by “social media” I just mean media that is social, not just the microblogging, photo-sharing, social network platforms that people think of now. I’ve been doing this for twenty years, man. If I have to point to something I can’t stop doing, it’s writing silly stories on the internet.
That’s my thing, and this blog is the place for it. For a while, it got a bit lost because the dominant popular format of storytelling shifted, and a lot of my stories don’t fit into those neat little boxes. Which sounds a bit like Norma Desmond but I’ve also come to understand a lot more about how I work particularly how my brain works and what is realistic to expect from it.
Another thought: when I’m feeling exhausted, when I feel like I’ve done too much but it’s only half way through the day, I’m finding more suitable ways of dealing with it.. Yesterday, I found myself cutting up bits of magazines to make letters for titles of an video series I’m planning. And that’s the way to move forward while resting. Mindless art-making. Not even art, really—just mindless action that is also towards a goal. I wrote a lot in my journal yesterday about getting organised and about the tasks I need to complete, but those tasks can sometimes be too stimulating. They don’t replenish my energy in the way mindless activity does. So, I sat there, cutting out letters to use in a collage-y kind of a thing that isn’t totally defined yet. That was exactly what I needed—no decision-making involved, just: are these letters big enough? Yes. I’ll cut them out and use them.
The other option is putting a record on (no, not flicking to spotify, putting a record on a turntable and hearing the hiss of the needle in the groove). Chopin’s Nocturnes are the most magical to me. They transform me. I don’t care why—maybe it’s something deep, but I don’t need to know.
Speaking of something deep, I had an interesting (to me!) dream last night. In the dream, I was with someone I know, although I couldn’t tell you who they were – a kind of amalgam of wise, kind, brave men in my life. We were talking about the inner work I still need to do, and they asked me what else I needed to let go of. I described some of my fears—that boiled down to fear of being out in the world, being seen, being misunderstood (haha – see the opening paragraph of this post!). It’s hard to explain exactly because it’s more of a feeling inside me. If I had to name it, it would be the fear of being out in the world. The person in my dream said, “Well, let’s get rid of that, then.” They had me open my mouth and tip my head back, and then they pulled something out of me—a long, black, gooey thing that looked like a fish skeleton without a head or tail, just a long spine with ribs (is that what fish have?). It was covered in black sludge and had obviously been inside me for a long time, rotten, but strong and coherent. The guy just pulled it all the way out and it was much longer and blacker and more gooey than I’d expected. Very David Lynch.
Now, this morning, I’m wondering: am I free of that fear now? Is it gone? How will I know? How will I know if I’m free of it? Part of me says, “Let’s just trust that it’s done, that the magic worked.” That it’s been removed and I don’t have to live with it anymore. It was prickly and uncomfortable, so it’s good to have it gone. Who cares what it means? It sounds like a good symbol. It feels like a good thing to be rid of. So, let’s be rid of it.
Onwards.
