Archive for the ‘curiosities’ Category
The Case for Desire
Hint: your smartphone is symptom not cause
Advertisers bank on it. Ascetics deny it. Libertines fan it while most of us try to tame it. Desire always drives behavior. The question is training ourselves to desire the best things, which are often not the immediate things. Habit can work for or against us in training desire. But it is desire—that glowing reactor in my mind/heart/instinct—that pushes me toward some object that has just now become irresistible.
Beautiful things can grow from years of tending
But when desire fails—what then? That sounds perfect, right? Always in control.
Not so much: In talking with my depressed friend, desire seems suppressed and/or forgotten and nothing matters. Nothing is interesting. Tiredness, life-weariness, stress, maybe age—all of these seem to affect desire. Without desire, curiosity vanishes. Without curiosity, life’s luster languishes.
How to rekindle desire—and especially desire for things/people/relationships that will prove generative after five, ten, or 70 years?
My hunch is that my smartphone is not the secret to rekindling the right desire. Whatever is being sold there is likely not the direction that will sustain over the long haul. Gratitude seems a potential route to rekindled desire—on this point, both my atheist friend and the poet-king agree. A good conversation with a person full of life may rekindle desire.
Connection may rekindle desire. If your smartphone helps make connections with real humans, that’s good.
If not, focus.
Elsewhere.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
I completely disagree. Are we still friends?
How a small group helps you listen better
Say you are in a small group. Maybe you are part of a knitting guild. Maybe a book club. Maybe you meet every two weeks to study ancient texts together.
Your group comes together for some specific purpose, but along the way you make friends with these people. Sometimes these people agree with your opinion. Sometimes they disagree. But you listen to them anyway—even when you disagree. They listen/you listen because of friendship.
Tell me: how do you see it?
A few days back I wrote about a group we are part of where membership is shrinking. The take-away was that it only takes one or two people to have a conversation that is stimulating and even eye-opening, and possibly life-changing (if only incrementally). This has to do with the mechanism of hearing opinions and insights that are different from mine and stopping to consider them—because of friendship. Hearing from others is a beginning step away from the echo chambers we increasingly build for ourselves with media that says only what we want to hear.
Making friends who think and believe differently seems like a good idea. And engaging them in conversation about stuff that matters—that seems like a really good idea.
I wish we had a will to do more of that.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
Casket Arts: The Artist’s Palette
High in the Casket Arts Building
The artists in the Casket Arts Building are readying their spaces for Art-A-Whirl, next weekend.
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Image Credit: Kirk Livingston
Drunken Prophecy: The Tribe Who Didn’t Selfie
Boy 1: “Look at this old drunk guy”
Boy 2: “He’s not drunk. People call this guy a prophet—he’s just sleeping. Watch this.”
Pokes sleeping man with a stick.
Man wakes.
Boy 2: “Prophecy, Old Man!”
Man:
And there arose a tribe in the land of Commerce.
And these took not the selfies.
And they tended not their personal brand.
Neither did they Facebook.
And they came to be known as “Old.”
And the young did then flock to the Old
To hear stories of living without the desire for fame.
Boy 1: “Cool. But what a whack prophecy.”
Boy 2: “Crouch there. Let’s get a shot of us with this guy.”
Holds up phone.
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Image Credit: Kirk Livingston
“And the only one with access is me!”
Why you need this Dutch insurance company.
Privacy is something we are keen on giving away.
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Via Adfreak
Jargon: Just Say No. (DGtC #28)
Make a human happy—speak to be understood
No matter what organization you are in, there are choices to be made about how you talk with the people around you. No matter what gathering you attend, you speak to communicate or you speak to impress.
We’re never rid of rhetorical flourish and persuasive intent, but can we at least work at speaking to be understood?
You don’t have to be obscure, you know—choose your own space on the continuum.
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Dumb Sketch: Kirk Livingston
Note to self: Don’t be (so) boring.
Why do what we do? (Gotta keep asking)
Do something every day.
Do that something every day for 30 years.
Has that something lost its freshness?
Over on Dumb Sketch Daily—my ongoing project of learning to see—every once in a while I get caught up with trying to create art. It is almost always a mistake for me to try to create art. I am no artist and the impulse to create art results in weirdly earnest dumb sketches, sort of like a child putting on dad’s tie (do dad’s wear ties these days?) or mom’s high heels.
Still—one must experiment. And that experimentation is good because it draws the questions forward yet again.
Doing something every day, and somehow keeping it fresh, means asking the “Why am I doing this?” that drives the behavior. Yesterday I had to remember that my goal is not to create art. Making art is simply too high and too unrealistic a goal for me. It works for others, and many who comment on that blog and whom I follow are creating honest-to-goodness, bona fide, Grade A art.
Every single day.
But not me.
I’m just trying to see better. That’s a goal and purpose I can rally around. Trying to see how light shines on stuff. Trying to see what a face looks like, the creases, the asymmetry, the tractor beams that shine from eyeballs. Seeing what posture says. Seeing how shadow falls across a 100 year-old building. All of that happens as I try (and mostly fail) to capture real life on paper. The real life happening around me.
Something good and productive happens with revisiting the “Why?” question. My sense is that if I can be reengaged with the question, and with seeing how it was answered differently today, I may even be less boring. At least for a few moments.
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Dumb sketches: Kirk Livingston
Welcome to the Arden Hills Library
Despite online, people still gather in physical spaces
Library, reduced.
We are fans of the library. Specifically, the Ramsey County Library. We order constantly and compulsively. If the Ramsey County Library doesn’t have it, there is the MnLink Gateway, which has access to most everything printed, or so it seems (books printed in Australia are hard to get, but otherwise…).
A year ago, maybe two, the library moved to a more sustainable location and this old building (built in 1969) overlooking a wetland, was sold. It had been a low-slung structure with a 60’s vibe and lots of hard brick surfaces for our kids to bump into. It sort of resembled a mushroom from the outside, but the inside skylights brought in lots of light on sunny days. It was a cheery place where you came to know the librarians by name.
Library archives via Lillie News
Even though much of what I use the library for today is online (that is, ordering books), there is still the showing up to pick up books and the dropping off of (sometimes overdue) books. And the picking up of more books. And in this picking up and dropping off, we see the same librarians and many of the same patrons, again and again. The local library is an honest point of connection.
Though the Arden Hills branch has now been reduced to a pile of rubble, it is hard for me to imagine the local, physical library going away or even dropping in importance as a community meeting point.
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Images: Kirk Livingston, LillieNews.com
conversation is an engine 