A short story with beaucoup de je ne sais quoi:
As midday struck on a spring morning in Paris about 100 years ago, a battered old truck broke down bang in the middle of the Place de l'Opéra.
The driver, a man called Horace De Vere Cole, jumped out, grabbed his tools, crawled under his truck and got to work.
Luckily for Horace, a nearby gendarme spotted the breakdown and started to herd the traffic around the conked out motor vehicle.
It took Horace half an hour to get the truck working again.
With a quick “merci” and a tip of his beret, Horace drove off to meet a bunch of pals who’d bet him that he couldn’t lie flat on his back for half an hour on one of Paris’s busiest streets.
Turns out Horace De Vere Cole was a famous Irish practical joker. His Parisian prank had just won him a few thousand francs.
So what can we learn from Horace’s hijinks?
Well, I’ve always craved quiet as a way to get things done. I know it helps me focus on the task in hand.
That’s why most of my writing takes place in a back-corner turret at Fort Grundy with just a few chirping birds and my silky smooth coffee for company.
Same thing at work. The quieter and more out of the way my desk is, the better.
But maybe I’ve been wrong about this.
Maybe the idea that hubbub
kills my focus isn’t true.
It’s dawned on me recently that it’s not the noise from the outside world which gets in the way when we want to get stuff done.
It’s the noise that comes from us instead.
Horace deliberately planted himself on the noisiest, most bustling spot in Paris, surrounded by blaring horns, cyclists ringing their bells and men & women cursing “zut alors!”. And in that chaos, Horace stayed cool as a cucumber, kept a level head and pulled off his performance with calmness and clarity.
So how do you find the inner peace beneath the external storm?
The answer to that is by seeing that it’s there.
And how do you see it’s
there?
By subtracting whatever stops you from seeing it.
This is where the Subtraction Method shines. All roads lead to Paris and all that…
If you’d like to find your own inner calm that doesn’t flinch when the horns start honking:
https://waitinglist.followingfulfilment.com