From - Monday Musings 2020


From  - Monday musing – thinking about thinking (meta Cognition) 

What you may not know is that (well given that catering was really my fist training – but that aside) my first academic work was in social science, psychology and child development.  Now I think back it was great training used practically in the time I was a social worker, but also leaving me both understanding social inequality and a sense of social injustice.  I grew up in the inner city of Birmingham, then much as now a multi-cultural centre.  I returned there to do my ministerial training. You may know that one of the things that happened whilst I was young was that my father took me to a traveller camp in Aston (part of the city centre), there I saw a young girl, about the same age as me (9 or 10 years) dressed in a threadbare dress playing by a brazier on what was by then a largely cleared site.  I remember quite clearly realising that it was only a quirk of fate that I had been born to my parents and she to hers.  This chance had brought about two different lifestyles.  I somehow knew that this was a profound thought.  I have thought over the years (50+) of the inequalities that I saw, this is of course very judgmental of me, she may be very happy, but for myself I thought of my largely supportive family, warm home and food on the table.  I have come to believe that this was one of the first signs of my Calling.

I have often wondered where such thought come from.  You will know that someone I knew and worked with 40 years ago has just contacted me through Facebook.  He is still in the catering business.  I knew him at a very different time of my life, different priorities, attitudes and lifestyle some of which I would probably not be proud of to think about now.  

I guess that we all have such things happen and similar thoughts around our own past.  Moments of time that lodge in our “memories”, staying with us.  For myself often they are triggered by music, smells or familiar places.  Some the trigger is pleasant others come as if our of nowhere and with surprising results.  

I have over the past 20 years been involved in various bits of study that have been around thinking about how we think, largely more today with how film influences the way we understand what is “real”.  Mostly how we conceive of things that are not yet “real” is through imagination.  It is something about this that gives us the ability to conceive of God and other things beyond ourselves. 




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