Hamster Ball

When my children were young they had a hamster they called Hammy; he was our family pet. Hammy lived a restricted life, but a comparatively generous one for a hamster. He had a big cage, regular fresh bedding, several toys, constant food and the obligatory wheel. He climbed into it and set it spinning every evening for exercise. Hammy was a docile, domesticated and, so far as we knew, happy caged animal. One day we found a perspex ball that would allow our hamster to explore a bigger world; Hammy loved it. When we put him in it he took off around the living room floor, hid behind furniture and bumped into things. The children squealed with delight, it was highly entertaining. With hindsight, this terrified animal was using the ball to try to escape. He might not have lasted ten minutes in the urban outdoors but he desperately wanted to try it. Today Hammy’s ball is a metaphor for growth. Instead of scheming his escape plan from within his cage and then promptly failing, the ball gave him the opportunity to experiment in real time. We too can make faster progress learning as we go. Our personal development needs our active engagement. As per David Kolb’s Learning Cycle we need to follow action with emotional experience and cognitive reflection before planning our next activity and engaging with it. We will similarly experience both freedom and terror when we strike out in new directions but even when our plans don’t work out we’ll be very glad we tried and we’ll be richer for the experience. Who knows, there may even be a group of benevolent admirers delighting in our efforts.

Near Life Experience

It now feels commonplace to hear of someone’s Near Death Experience (NDA) telling of great calm, peace and love, of being drawn toward a great light, sometimes meeting old friends or loved ones gone before us, and then in some way being returned to this earthly manifestation to fulfil some mission, some remaining task, from a position of greater awareness. For many this return brings a sense of urgency to their life as though the experience jolted them from their humdrum existence into a higher gear. Perhaps for the first time they know their true role in the world and they set about it with vigour, totally confident in the outcome. From this perspective of true purpose their earlier existence feels less real. We might now think of it as a ‘Near Life Experience’. Now at the start of 2018 it is timely to ask what we need to do to live life to the full. What personal mission is ours to fulfil? What ‘bigger picture’ do we relate to? How can we each make our best contributions to this wonderful experience of life for ourselves, our communities and our planet? Or are we in danger of feeling, on our deathbed, that we had a near life experience?