Xanadu Thinking Processes.....

What I want. What I really really want is a Curriculum, a Reading List, a Prospectus which will direct my thinking and my reading for the rest of my life. It would obviously allow space for digressions or illogical rampages into alien territory or more esoteric tangents. It would supply direction and justification and would allow me to feel I was moving towards an indefinable purpose that someone or something had designed.

It is not as if my social life intrudes. Partying has never really appealed (even to my baser instincts). I think I was born old and I was born unsociable and my partial deafness has not made that any easier. I am not a joiner of clubs. I am a loner but a contented loner with a partner and a family (as opposed to the serial killer loner with a fridge full of body parts). Therefore when I tinkered with the idea of starting a running club (unofficially), just Colin (my brother) and I, in order to formalise our training I hit upon the name Xanadu. Since this was in essence a pretend club, a fantasy running club, Xanadu struck me as just the right name. This was probably based on a gentle admiration for the poem but also for the weird combination of letters in some bizarre scrabblesque thinking process. It did not inspire me to break into the elite fields of international athletics but I do still like the name. It denoted creativity and imagination and romanticism the upside of sweat and blisters. Now in my slovenly dotage the name has developed farther.
Indeed to the extent that if I ever developed a company (which I wouldn't want to) and they were marketing something or indeed anything then I imagine it would most likely be for a service or an educational use - a teaching process to enable a different style of learning or to empower an individual to comprehend a more varied set of experiences. It would be a kind of Creative Project management - a self help fix-it guide with a zenlike attitude to results and profit margins.
I see it all, life probably too, as a game.

With Xanadu thinking the world is in front of us we simply need to see it differently. To see it, according to Alan Fletcher - sideways.

Xanadu Thinking might be a range of tools, meditation or analytic tools which will help the individual towards the art of seeing Sideways. In 2008 this is the year that the magic number 50 will finally be reached. The half century. Halfway there or halfway gone. Glass half empty Glass half full. You pays your money and you makes your choice. Mortality first rings my doorbell. The first footstep is heard above.

Bookshops are filled with books listing 1001 films, books, gardens, paintings, places, natural wonders, to see before you die. As if living is merely observation or worse; a kind of metaphysical twitching where you tick the birds off in the cosmic birdbook before that great Ornithologist in the sky points his pigeon-shitted digit in your direction.

I am left again with the search for a reason. For a protocol to be governed by - for a posterity in which a memory may survive. For an inheritance that would be deemed worthwhile. For a rebirth, a renaissance of what makes living worthwhile and fulfilling. For Zanadu thinking. Incorporated.