Gathering encouragement and inspiration

We all need some encouragement and ideas on how to proceed. From when I was in high school, I wanted to make people pause and see small beauty in the every day world. That sort of fit in with the environmental movement of the seventies, but it wasn’t exactly what forestry college was ready for so I spent a lot of time at college taking photos and keeping on.

Recently listened to a six hour or so audio book interview with Paul Simon about his long career and his work and his process – how he ‘follows his ear’ and isn’t too worried about what will be next. He said you need to have a problem to fix and the problem better be interesting so you want to keep working at fixing it. He had one colossal flop – a Broadway musical. He had no experience with that genre going into the project. Some people loved it. Critics hated it. It ran for sixty-eight shows. Then he had to think – what do you do after that?

After The Capeman, Simon’s career was again in an unexpected crisis. However, entering the new millennium, he maintained a respectable reputation, offering critically acclaimed new material and receiving commercial attention. Simon embarked on a North American tour with Bob Dylan in 1999, with each alternating as the headline act with a “middle section” where they performed together, starting on the first of June and ending September 18. The collaboration was generally well-received, with just one critic, Seth Rogovoy from the Berkshire Eagle, questioning the collaboration.

He went on to collaborate with others and kept recording and trying new things. Like working with Herbie Hancock in 2005, reimagining I Do It For Your Love.

And so when people, artists you admire, talk about their work and lives, take a moment and listen. And like Ted Kooser says – throw a lot of horseshoes.

Passing Through from Straw Hat Visuals on Vimeo.

Gathering encouragement and inspiration

Mom and I, Snow and Snow

Mom and I went to Lowell to visit the New England Quilt Museum and arrived just in time for a blizzard. The museum was closed on Thursday but we did get in on Friday due to the New England-ish work ethics of one of the employees. We of course had brought lots of stuff to keep us busy and we spent the blizzard day watching the snow and the snow clearing crew out the window and binging on Pokemon and political stuff.

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Came home, shoveled out my driveway, went to work the next day.

Spent Sunday snowed in again.

Rinse and repeat!

Making a choice, and remembering it.

Sometimes I have a moment. We all do. A little ‘eek’ or a big ‘ACK!’ – they’re part of everyone’s life.

There are things in life that are no-kidding, out of the blue, ambushing events. We’ve all experienced that. But sometimes, that twinge or that moment of panic comes to me and I feel it and then I remember – this is a choice I made.

Because we all make those choices, daily, weekly, monthly, or once in a lifetime. We decide to move somewhere, turn down something, accept something and move on. That’s how life works. And, while it’s human nature to look back occasionally and think ‘what if?’ – in reality there is (alternate universes and parallel time streams not withstanding) only one past and one current moment. The only thing that is not known is the future. We don’t control all of that future, pretty good odds on that too.

So on those days when the big ‘EEP!” hits me upside the head, the only thing I can control is how I react to it. That doesn’t banish reaction, mind you. There are still tears or a wave of disappointment or anger or frustration, whatever. Because we’re human. I’m human. But there are some things in my life that I can look at and say, honestly, to myself: this was a choice I made. That often puts a damper on the wild emotional rollercoaster and puts me in a mind frame of – what can be done about this now? Maybe it’s just the realization that this isn’t just a random, arbitrary thing that’s presenting itself to me but part of a chain of things that I’ve thought about before.

That’s wildly wordy and was stirred up by reading Brain Pickings posting of David Foster Wallace’s memorable commencement address, “This is water.” Read and listen to it over at Brain Pickings.

…I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about ‘the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.’ — David Foster Wallace

Maybe it gets easier as you get older to realize that you can’t hold onto and change everything so you can walk away from some things and choose to stick it out with others. It’s advice I give others more regularly these days – but it’s probably something you have to figure out yourself because in the end, it starts with that singular moment where you choose. You make the choice. You go from there.

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On a slightly different but weirdly related note (if only because it’s about flowing water), an image shared on facebook yesterday (Gregory Thielker’s Complete Stop 2008 – check out this and the rest of his work here)reminded me of this. You see this

from time to time over in the sidebar as a random pic. Down below is the non-square version.

Looks can be deceiving…

Little did the people who dealt with me today, for good or evil, suspect that underneath that mild-mannered work tshirt was this: