16 posts tagged “life”
Lakshmi has tagged me. The challenge is to define my life in 6 words, and then to tag 6 others.
Unaccustomed as I am to following directions as given, I will describe my life in 4 words (reserving two for future use) and tag two others.
OK...I pass this meme on to The Educated Fool and Hurricane Hetta.
From the foreword to The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
"Douglas Adams did not enjoy writing, and he enjoyed it less as time went on. He was a bestselling, acclaimed, and much-loved novelist who had not set out to be a novelist, and who took little joy in the process of crafting novels."
From Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, regarding Robert Towne (who wrote classics such as Chinatown):
"Towne had two weaknesses. He was poor at structure, a serious problem for a writer who would become notorious for his windy, 250-page scripts. And for all his facility with words, he was not a born storyteller. He had difficulty imagining the simplest plots, the most rudimentary sequence of events. He was anguished over what he felt was his poverty of imagination."
You know, one of the ways I stop myself on some of my side projects is by thinking I don't have a grip on what I'm doing yet. I imagine other successful people as knowing exactly what they're doing, not as people who are struggling.
However, as artists, as creators, we must all be on the edge of human experience, right? Working in the unknown. Creating something nobody has seen. It's going to be a struggle. Only later might others look and go, yeah, that makes sense.
As always, it takes a ton of persistence, which is another word for being stubborn.
When you complain about a situation, you ensure your victim position with each utterance. The instinctual goal--which I've engaged in many many times--is to take a vote; to surround yourself with so many people who agree that you have been wronged that, just maybe, you might start to believe it yourself.
My new approach is more proactive, and it applies both to situations that are working and those that are not. For every relationship I'm involved in, every project I'm working on, I ask myself two questions:
- What do I want?
- How am I going to get it?
The second question is where the reality of the situation comes in. The world doesn't just hand you every thing you want on a silver platter (and I wanted a platinum platter anyway). So: I know where I am. I know where I want to be. What steps do I take to get me one step closer to the goal?
Abraham Lincoln was a master of this. You may think that, as President of the United States, that he would finally be in a position where everybody would just go ahead and do what he said. But of course that is not the reality of it. He had to work even harder to maintain the trust and loyalty of those working for him. He had to continually find new ways to motivate and align his staff and his generals.
He could have continually maligned a lot of these people, and be justified in doing so. Instead he encourages those who failed to carry out his orders, and even those who worked against him.
I'm listening to his letters and speeches through books on tape as I commute. As I listen to each track, I ask myself: what did he want? How was he going about getting it?
I find that he wants more than just having people do the jobs he needed completed. He wanted to build working relationships with people, and to maximize the productivity that comes from walking together down that portion of the two life paths that overlap.
Abraham Lincoln on the Civil War:
"The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be--and one must be--wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party--and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect his purpose.
"I am almost ready to say this is probably true: that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By His mere quiet power, on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And having begun He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds."
I am learning something new this week. Sometimes it's about the contest. Sometimes the best way to work out a situation is to work it out.
In the recent years of my life I've tried to avoid conflict. But now I think it's not helping anything. The conflict gets internalized and battles its way inside my head, until I'm frustrated with the whole thing. What is this fear I have? Of letting people down. Of upsetting people. Of hurting people. Yet it can still all happen. You can't avoid this.
It's best to be honest. To be direct. If I'm going to let people down, then let them down by being myself. Upset them when they understand my true intent. Hurt as part of the contest that must exist. I can't keep hurting myself, putting my dreams and desires in the back to avoid the pain others might feel. That's part of their contest as well.
"What would you do if you had a million dollars?"
Good question.
A better question:
"What does you heart tell you you MUST do, regardless of your circumstances?"
I am alive.
Every day is a gift.
My guide is my heart, which burns with passion. Resolutions recoil before it and commitments collapse.
Life is gooooooooood.
For the last few days I've been suffering from a cold. One of the symptoms is that I am very tired. I spent most of yesterday afternoon on the couch, alternating between watching a movie and dozing.
And I noticed something interesting.
About the whole time I was laying on the couch, I had a voice inside my head saying: "You should be doing something."
"You should be doing something"
"You should be doing something"
"You should be doing something"
I'm starting to notice this voice more and more as I cut down on my commitments and find myself with free time here and there (a new situation for me...).
I do really enjoy working on projects and side projects but I'm determined to ignore this voice until I feel that I want to work on a particular project. I'm not thrilled about this word "should" and I'd kind of like to know in whose opinion I "should" be doing this "something." I think it is far from this calm center that I am convinced I have deep down in there somewhere.
And actually, I was doing something. I was soaking in a very beautiful movie (Michelangelo Antonioni's L'avventura). There was a time that I didn't need to justify to myself the enjoyment of art and beauty. I wonder what's changed....
People tell you to "find yourself" and "be yourself" and that is a sort of freedom. But I think [Bob Dylan's] life and his work and the pressures that he lived under kept forcing that into question, and that the ultimate freedom is really in being able to escape that and in being able to continually reinvent yourself.
-- Todd Haynes while talking about using 6 different actors (including women) to play Bob Dylan in his biopic "I'm Not There" (View on YouTube)
The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.
But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day. In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity: yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance (read it here)
Quotes of Igor Stravinsky:
"I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge."
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"Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning. "
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"The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution."
After my weekend on the beach (in my mind...), I've had a few thoughts come to me....
1. I would like to be in more contact with my family.
It takes a lot of work to meet up with extended family. If I just "let it happen," it doesn't tend to happen. I love seeing my brothers and sisters (on both my side and my wife's side) and I just don't do it enough. I want to plan my life around that more. Plan out a year by who we're going to visit.
2. My relaxing activity: cooking
I like to cook. I'm not particularly good at it, and I don't have any aspirations of being an amazing cook. Maybe that's one reason this popped into my head this weekend: it's an activity that I can just enjoy without getting into my (typical habit of) critical thinking. It's so much fun to find some fresh ingredients and cook them up into something tasty. I haven't really cooked much over the last year. I love sampling different olive oils, types of rice, breads, spices, cheeses, chocolate...I want to learn how to cook tapas.
3. Music is my hobby
I've been putting too much pressure on my music, and that's led me to lose direction. I play and compose because I like it. I don't need any other reason. When I get too many ideas about what I'm trying to accomplish, I lose out on the artistic side, and the self-expression side. I have other parts of my life that are governed by goals, deadlines, and accomplishments; and in those areas, that's fine. Music is fun.
4. Time to launch the art festival
Quite a while back I had an idea of holding a Christian art festival at our church. The idea is this: order a hundred pizzas, set up the stage for bands to play, for open mic, and for poetry readings. Have the projector showing paintings, movies, and any other visual arts. Maybe some workshops.... And just invite everybody who loves art to come and eat pizza, mingle, and enjoy the show.
The pastor is all for it; I've talked to people at church that I think would like to be involved and they are very excited about it. I'm going to call a meeting and begin planning.
