structure and scaffolding

Wednesday, 26 April 2017

Structure and Scaffolding

Structure and Scaffolding ©

By Michael Casey

I just caught up with Elementary on the Sky Q box and I was wondering should I try and write another piece today, its only ten to five in the afternoon, I’ve just looked up at the clock, so I have plenty of time. I have a structure in my day, I get up and have breakfast and heart meds then I go on the computer and see who in the world is reading my stuff. Today Antigua and Barbuda, I had to double check on the map to see where it was exactly. Then I go shopping and take some exercise, before returning and going back on the computer to read the Press, then the girls arrive from school and I give them some food.

So I have an ordered life, a structured life, and I feel confident that my self-prediction of only 10 years left can be extended to who knows but more, thanks to yesterday’s doctors intervention, and next month’s doctor’s intervention. I’ll still be boring you all about my pain, but thank God for Movelat and Paracetamol.

So I was thinking about Elementary and the plot structure and that made me ask myself about structure in life. My daughter is thinking of doing Philosophy at A level, as well as Maths, Biology and Chemistry. Yes, the hard stuff, well she wants to be a Doctor after all. So I told her that Philosophy was just Religion, but without the Religion. Then I added that Philosophy was the mental structure or scaffolding that held our minds in place in our heads. Go write your essay now I finished with.

Which makes us all wonder what is so important in any structure. Well in a house the walls hold up the building and make the inside warm, and subdivide it into our private little spaces. Mom’s room, dad’s study, our room, the boys’ room, or the rubbish room, and the space under the kitchen table where the Rottweiler lives.

When you look at a house, and I’ve looked at 100s online and in real life, you are looking at the weaknesses, when you are house hunting you are looking for weaknesses, because they are the thing that’ll cost you money. So the Structure is very important, and that’s why you’ll have a structural survey especially if it has been altered dramatically, because its buyer beware and you don’t want the thing to fall down, or for you to run out of money after you have bought it as a doer upper.

In our lives we have structures and safety nets. You might ring a friend or have facetime with a friend where you just curse each other, you might even be priests and this is your routine, but in Latin, so nobody can understand, except Lech the altar boy. This curseathon is so important as it’s a safety valve to let the tensions of life escape.

You may ring your sister and have 2 simultaneous conversations at cross purposes, like hair being platted, but the net result is beautiful hair, or rather more brother/sister bonding, and yes that sums up 30 years of talking to my own sister.

You may go to a bar and sit all alone in a corner, or next to another lone drinker, you never speak to each other. But without him being there it would be horrible, he is your drinking buddy even though you are strangers sitting next to each other. If one day somebody wants to sit in the spare chair they will be told its not vacant your buddy will be here soon.

And it will go for years even, until one day your drinking buddy will ask for your name. Then a couple of weeks will go by and then one week a man in a suit will arrive and sit beside you and buy you a pint and a whisky chaser. It’s a lawyer, your drinking buddy has died and left you 1,000,000 dollars, you were the only soul he knew for ten years, so now he’s left you his money. And a house and his old Mustang.

This kind of thing is rare, but it has happened, without knowing it you became part of this man’s life. Your loneliness buttressed his loneliness, so he didn’t feel so alone, he felt he had a buddy. The phycology of collectiveness even though there was no real connection, go ask your own PhD student.

 Or the Tribal Collectiveness of team sport supporters, when you feel part of a group you feel less alone, and you feel stronger, or so they will tell you.

Having a routine makes you stronger, randomness makes you weaker, because just as muscles get stronger through repeated use and exercise then Structure in Life brings order and health and wellbeing. 

For me writing is part of my structure, if I didn’t write what else would I do? Watch Soaps on tv, teach table manners, me with tooth paste stains down the front of my jumper. Be a Political Commentator, or a writing coach. I could never be a writing coach, I can talk about my own stuff and how I write my own stuff, but reading other peoples’ stuff is the most boring idea in the world, being a mental proof reader for others would just be horrible.

If anybody really wants me to teach them to write the price would be too high for them, that way I’d never have to do it. Though I could prepare a one hour chat I could deliver as an after-dinner speech, Obama gets 400,000 for a speech I’d charge 1,000,000. Just as Elizabeth Taylor  asked for a million,  as a way of not doing it, but they paid her. If there is anybody out there with more money that sense, just get in touch.

That’s all I have to say on Structure for today, I have to eat and have a banana, it’s part of my dietary structure, as is reading all the labels on food these past 2 years and forevermore. Food without phones is my final “advice” because a Family should be able to talk to each other when they are eating and not playing with toys. Family conversations with food build and strengthen a family just as much as the food itself. And even if you have double and triple conversations simultaneously while you eat this is great, just ask me and my sister.