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February 09, 2010
Like a whale..
We are going from strength to strength, Michel de Montaigne and I.
It has been only two weeks since I met him (blog 31 Jan), but something tells me that we might be 'lifers'.
I don't know if sharing an Enneagram number with your loved one is a good thing or not, but as fate would have it, we are both number Seven.
Below is rather long extract from Sarah Bakewell's wonderful biography of Montaigne "How to live".
I hope the author won't object to being quoted here. I also hope that if the following isn't a brilliant description of a typical Seven's behaviours and attitudes, S.P. will correct me pronto.
" What he loved above all about his travels was the feeling of going with the flow. He avoided all fixed plans [..] He travelled as he read and wrote: by following the promptings of pleasure. Leonard Woolf, roaming Europe with his wife over three centures later, would describe how she too cruised along like a whale sieving the ocean for plankton, cultivating a 'passive alertness' which brought her a strange mingling of 'exhilaration and relaxation'. Montaigne was the same. It was an extention of his everyday pleasure in letting himself 'roll relaxedly with the rolling of the heavens', as he luxuriously put it, but with the added delight that came from seeing everything afresh and with full attention, like a child.
He didn't like to plan, but he did not like to miss things either. His secretary, [...] , remarked that people in the party complained about Montaigne's habit of straying from the path whenever he heard of extra things he wanted to see. But Montaigne would say it was impossible to stray from the path: there was no path. The only plan he had ever commited himself to was that of travelling in unknown places. So long as he did not repeat the route, he was following this plan to the letter."
All that sounds rather attractive to me, but clearly underneath all that 'going with the flow' was an uncontrollable compulsion.
I remarked, by a way of small talk, to a colleague at work today that all my so called failures in life stem from lack of focus. "That's rather ironic", the wit responded... "In a photographer!".
And it is both ironic and wasteful. And yet, to paraphrase St Augustine (quite a habit of mine lately), I pray:
Lord give me focus, but not yet..
Posted by Marzena at February 9, 2010 07:16 PM