Further experimentation with the field recording yesterday. Given I wake up early at this time of year I have been planning to try to get better recordings of the dawn chorus. With sunrise occurring around 5 am, the birds start singing at around 3:45. So, up at 3-ish, a snack and a coffee, and then the almighty trek round the corner to the churchyard. All was silent bird-wise, which was what I had planned for. But literally as I set up the tripod, a robin started to sing. Quickly checking the levels I hit record and took a seat inside the church porch. We are located a kilometre or so south of the A303 and as a consequence traffic noise, while not intrusive, is always there in the background. If the wind is coming from the northern half of the compass it is generally more noticeable. From the southern half it recedes considerably, so by positioning the recorder on the south side of the church, this has a further diminishing effect on traffic noise. I knew the wind direction was due to be WNW, and although at that time in the morning it was the lightest of breezes, what traffic there was could be heard fairly clearly. The recording I made is ok. I think I can clean it up a little. But it was a good learning process.Wot I learned;- arrive in *plenty* of time so that set up can be done properly and you are ready to record with time to spare.- arriving early allows you to find the ideal location to record from. Had I moved the recorder even just a meter I could have further reduced the level of traffic noise.- be aware of the length of your headphones cable! In the near dark I didn’t realise that I had sat far enough from the recorder that the cable was not quite resting on the ground. Any movement of my head meant the cable would swing and and bump and the noise would travel along said cable right to the mic.
Author: Stephen James
Mmmm, still can’t quite work out what is happening with block quotes not showing correctly on at least one post, but it seems that somewhere in my workflow the .md file is reverting to an earlier version. All I can identify so far is that if I manually edit the .md file in question on the Raspberry, after a while it seems to have changed back to a pre-edit post. In theory a change should only occur there if I edit the file in Dropbox from where it is synced to the Pi. And the logs indicate that hasn’t happened *and* the file in Dropbox is the correct edit. *scratches head*
I can’t work out why block quotes are not displaying correctly on the blog. The markdown is correct, so….
Coming at Stoicism from the CBT and mental health angle, I quickly came up against some pretty startling ideas. Visualising negative outcomes [(*premeditatio malorum*)](https://medium.com/stoicism-philosophy-as-a-way-of-life/lets-talk-about-the-premeditation-of-adversity-2f7d40fbb7d0) and considering ones own death or that of a loved one. Ideas that, on the face of it, could send anyone prone to catastrophizing into the very existential crisis they would like to avoid. However, dig a little deeper and I find that these ideas have a much more positive basis. In the context of the philosophy as a whole they make more sense and differ from the negative thoughts the anxious mind is prone to. For me, catastrophizing is ‘all these bad things could happen, probably will happen, are happening, oh shit, I am going to die or, at the very least, publicly make a complete arse of myself’. I came across this in Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations;> it is folly to ruminate on evils to come, or such as, perhaps, never may come: every evil is disagreeable enough when it does come; but he who is constantly considering that some evil may befall him is loading himself with a perpetual evil; and even should such evil never light on him, he voluntarily takes upon himself unnecessary misery, so that he is under constant uneasiness, whether he actually suffers any evil, or only thinks of it.I think that sums up catastrophizing perfectly, ‘ruminate’ and ‘constantly considering’ being the key to what makes it a destructive process. On the other hand, my understanding of negative visualisation is that it is the rational process of considering the possible adverse outcomes, with the emphasis firmly on rational, so that we can be mentally prepared *should* a bad thing happen. The idea then is one of ‘how do I respond should that scenario happen?’This is in direct opposition to the avoidant behaviour of those of us with anxiety. The anxious habit of running over and over terrible scenarios is all about avoiding them, a negative feedback loop that you can never escape, that always ends in ‘but what if…?’ Negative visualisation is about facing reality head on, accepting possibilities and considering what the rational and [‘virtuous’](https://donaldrobertson.name/2018/01/18/what-do-the-stoic-virtues-mean/) response is. It is about learning to value what we have in the here and now. I still have questions about the apparent bias towards the negative. It is very easy to see it as pessimism. But this might be as much about how the idea is portrayed as the concept itself, given it is antithetic to modern positive thinking. To my mind, a life philosophy cannot be reduced to a quotable axiom or two, otherwise it is not worth the paper it’s written on; it is only within its context that I think a principal can be fully understood. I will continue to read and learn more, particularly around how *premeditatio malorum* fits within the wider Stoic philosophy.
Had my second jab yesterday. No obvious side effects this time. đź‘Ť
Liked: [Your Autistic Year](https://bix.blog/2021/05/31/your-autistic-year/) from [Bix Frankonis.](https://bix.blog/)>In the rush to get back to “normal”, neurotypicals could do worse than to take stock of how the disruptions of the pandemic affected them, and consider the ways in which the day-to-day of what they consider normal itself can be a daily disruption to those of us burdened with very different brains.
Liked: Marina Hyde on Naomi Osaka and the French Open [Sport loves athletes with mental health issues – if they just shut up and play](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/01/sport-athletes-mental-health-tennis-naomi-osaka?)
I’ve been playing with the field recorder that I [bought last month](https://strandlines.blog/2021/04/29/sound_recorder/).It is certainly a step up from using a phone or compact camera. Here’s a 10 minute recording of rain and birdsong from my garden.
Last week, a woodpecker attacked the nest box in which the great tits were nesting. It pecked two large holes but seems to have not touched the eggs. Still, the great tit pair have abandoned it. Nature does seem harsh at times. On Friday my wife spotted the woodpecker having a crack at the blue tit box. I left work a little early so I could come home and add fortifications. I attached more wood to the outside of the box and then used chicken wire to add a further deterrent. All the while the parents were coming and going with food for the six chicks. They told me off, I would move out the way and they just got in with it. The things we do! So far, there has been no more woodpecker vandalism.
Sometimes blogging seems to be about *not* hitting the publish button.I frequently have ideas for posts related to mental health, make notes and write drafts, only to decide when it comes to it, not to publish. So I’ve made myself reflect on why. Confidence is one issue; it goes without saying that you make yourself vulnerable blogging about this stuff. Couple that with the way anxiety saps your confidence anyway and, well, you’re already up against it before you’ve even started!Then there is the matter of authenticity. A few weeks ago, a brief exchange with a friend on the topic got me thinking about how it relates to writing about mental health/illness. When I decided to write about my experiences I felt it was important to try to be authentic. It didn’t go through my mind in so many words, but that was the idea. I wanted to be honest. If I was going through a crap phase, I’d write about that. If things were going well, then I’d write about that. Despite those symptoms that are common to an anxiety disorder, dealing with mental illness is a very individual experience. To try and hide behind cliches would be both disingenuous and pointless. All of this feeds into the question of how much to write about.Over the winter there have been times where things were pants. Not as bad as in the past but I was aware I was slipping into some very unhelpful thought patterns. Those pesky cognitive distortions getting the upper hand again. I would try and write about them. But I would get so far only to then question why I was doing so. Partly it was the confidence thing. But also, no one wants to read about every time things are a bit shit. This is not a teenage diary. Rather, I see blogging as a kind of marginalia to day to day experience. Authenticity does not equate to an unfiltered mind dump; it is not about writing everything. It can be selective without sacrificing honesty. The final factor (at least, of those I can think of right now) which can stop me from posting is striving for the perfect edit. I imagine this is a trap that many fall into, whether it is about grammar or putting a point across well. Given that life is a work in progress, and therefore so is blogging, I have to allow for the fact that a thought process does not need to have come to a tidy resolution in order for it to be written about. An unfinished thought, if that is as far as I have currently reached, is as authentic as a fully fledged idea.So if you take a lack of confidence, perfectionism and the questions around the meaning of authenticity, it’s no surprise that many ideas never get anywhere near the blog. I think I am too hard on myself.