The point is, you need to focus all this swirling, intense, imaginative mind-fuckery into something bold and bright and useful. You must figure out where to put this! You must make something with your big, clumsy imagination! You must learn to focus really hard and work really hard, even if at first you only make shitty-looking, stupid, pointless things ...
Hope is healthy
“Eventually all things fall into place. Until then, laugh at the confusion, live for the moments, and know everything happens for a reason.”
Albert Schweitzer
Technology and things
How is your self-discipline doing these days?
Sometime’s I wear down 15% of my phone’s battery before I even get out of bed.
I’m thinking about installing a phone dropbox outside of my front door. I won't even bring it inside the house anymore. Maybe I’ll rig it so that I’m notified inside the house when I get a text message or, god forbid, a phone call. Just in case.
I remember the first time we got internet at home. I was in elementary school and the first website I went to was BonneBell.com. In middle and high school, I was squarely plugged into instant messages and emails. In high school, I would stay up late on Friday and Saturday nights ... building geocites websites and listening to pirated music. I had a cell phone by the time I went to college. Smart phones rolled into town in a big way right around graduation. Network connectedness is in my DNA.
I had to ask what people did when they got in car accidents before cell phones. Apparently good samaritans would stop and help? I still have so many questions about this.
Author Sy Montgomery says by the year 2050 there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish.
Norman Rockwell learned to draw by listening to his father read Charles Dickens to his boys after they finished their homework. Rockwell sketched the characters of the novels as he listened.
My mom worked night shifts at my dad’s company for a little while when we were kids. She was in the middle of reading the Anne of Green Gables series to my sister and me. Instead of making us wait until she had a night off, she would tape record herself reading the next chapter while we were at school so we could keep going while she was away at work.
Speaking of my sister ... here's us in the back yard. Wild and free.
Savoring the Tiny Struggles
"As long as you imagine that the outside world will one day deliver to you the external rewards you need to feel happy, you will always perceive your survival as exhausting and perceive your life as a long slog to nowhere. Instead, you have to savor the tiny struggles of the day: The cold glass of water after a long run. The hot bath after hours of digging through the dirt. The satisfaction of writing a good sentence, a good paragraph. You MUST feel these things, because these aren't small rewards on the path to some big reward; these tiny things are everything."
"When you worked hard in the past, you were doing it to GET SOMETHING, to END UP SOMEWHERE. This time, I want you to work hard just to enjoy the work and to breathe and sometimes just to sweat and suffer. I want you to be right here for a change. Not focused on some moment in the future when everything turns to gold or turns to dust. I want you to look around you as you work, and see that it is brilliant and glistening and you are at the center of everything right here, right now, all alone."
Heather Havrileski (is a genius)
But beauty?
Everything we make in this world follows the same process. We must think it, imagine it, dream it, then we make it. As the artist Elle Luna said: “I dream my painting, then I paint my dream.” Everything is designed. And if everything is designed then we have the opportunity to make it beautiful, restorative, engaging, valuable and meaningful. We all need something to believe in so why not make it with beauty and grace.
Alan Moore via