Archive for the ‘The Human Condition’ Category
Plot with a View
Humans: Industrious. Resilient. Fragile.
Every once in a while I am reminded.
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Dumb Sketch: Kirk Livingston
Seeing may be the trickiest part of drawing
Instinct and childhood definitions make poor interpreters of everyday life
Take this dumb sketch (Exhibit A). I made it while sitting in the lobby at the Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis. Those green trees? Utter fiction. Apart from a few pine trees, there is very little green in Minnesota right now. Green won’t even think about appearing for weeks.
Exhibit A
Yet here we have green trees. I threw a dash of green there because trees are green. Except they weren’t green. They were brown. And scratchy and barren-looking. I commented to a drawing friend that my instinct said “green” from long use of my childhood definition of “tree.” And that slap of green was on before I even thought about it.
The gap between seeing and responding is the troublesome bit. If instinct drives my seeing, I miss pylons and electrical wires and gasoline tank farms and wireless telephone towers. All that industrial accretion I’ve seen one million times—all of it invisible. Even though it is really odd-looking stuff, jutting up into the sky at bizarre angles, like nothing in nature.
I don’t see people too: the clerk behind the counter. The janitor with the broom there, off to the side. I try to become practiced at not seeing the homeless man with his cardboard blessing at the end of the ramp. But that never works.
Mrs. Kirkistan and I volunteer at the Children’s Theater Company. It is simple duty: handing out programs. I was surprised this time by how invisible I became to children. Despite being squarely in their way so they must actively move around me to get into the theater. And when I verbally offer them a program, they twitch, suddenly surprised to see a human directly in front of them.
It’s not that I’m diminutive (I’m not). It’s because the entrance to the theater is awesome, like nothing a kid sees anywhere else. Walking through those double-doors into the dark red cavern with hundreds of seats stretching down and up into space and very strange objects akimbo on the stage—it’s hard for anyone to look away. All of that is purposeful on the part of the theater and adds to the experience.
It’s odd being invisible. And that makes me wonder how many people I miss in the course of ordinary life, simply because I have acted on instinct rather than actually believing the data from my eyes.
Instinct and childhood definitions are poor interpreters of everyday life.
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Dumb Sketch: Kirk Livingston
Can 78 bad sketches change your life?
Don’t stunt your growth by reaching for fame
It’s funny we gauge personal success by numbers of followers. It’s as if we’ve adopted the business transaction as a model for every area of our lives.
Business wants more eyeballs for more attention for more revenue for more profit. And that makes perfect sense for our business goals.
What’s problematic is when we confuse business with what humans need to move forward: Doing what attracts attention and gathers “Likes” is often very different from the stuff our souls need to grow.
Your business factory is not a solid model for personal growth
One thing I’m learning from the artists and photographers I’ve been interacting with at Dumb Sketch Daily (currently at bad drawing #78) is that while today’s drawing is (clearly) imperfect, there is always tomorrow’s drawing. And I know what I’ll do different in that drawing. I know I’ll try this technique, or that view, or this topic. I’ll do it again and create yet another imperfect representation of the world.
And that’s OK.
Because the pursuit is about learning to see, learning how to draw, learning how to write. Learning how to tell the truth. Learning how to interact with each other. Learning how to be human. Perhaps even learning how to interact with God.
The goal is not fame, unless you really want to turn this pursuit into a business. But learning itself—whether crowds acknowledge you or whether you plod silently and alone—learning is its own reward.
But I still argue your growth is also a benefit to the humans around you.
And while I don’t think 78 bad sketches have changed my life, I can say with certainty that I see things differently than I did 78 days ago.
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Dumb Sketch: Kirk Livingston
“Thou Art a Cad, Sir.”
May You Have Interesting Colleagues
This is the time of year when people refer to that old Irish blessing (about the road rising up and so on). But here—stuck in the middle of the work week—I want to offer you a more contextual blessing: the people around you.
Well, maybe not everyone.
But often there is someone you come in contact with who is, well, delightful. Their sense of humor, the wacko things they say over the cubicle wall, the inappropriate things they do in department meetings. The fact that they will trim your hair in the back room when the director is out of the office or dump Vaseline in the bigshot’s duffle bag or instigate rebellion at the slightest provocation. [Am I sounding like a bad employee?]
In fact, it is typically the people around (the fun and interesting ones, anyway) who make work enjoyable.
Martin Buber made a point of differentiating between how we treat objects (“I-it”) versus the way we treat people (“I-thou”). One of his points was that we should never treat people as objects: ordering them about as if they had no will of their own. Instead we should engage with each other. That’s what humans do.
Of course that very object-treatment is one of the primary sins in many of our corporations, where people become known as “human capital.” Churches are not so different when they refer to congregants as “giving units.” Hey—we even take cues from our cultural bosses and call ourselves “consumers.” Our language makes no attempt to mask this object-laden perspective.
But no so with interesting colleagues, because of our connection with them. Because of conversations you’ve had with them (some even soul-baring), because you’ve talked shop and lamented death and rejoiced in birth together, you get to know each other as fully-human. Trust and connection fit in here. And the ability to say anything.
The ability to say anything and still be heard and respected, that is the fullness of connection with another Thou.
May the “Thous” rise up to meet you today and this week.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
How to step into a conversation. And when to step out.
Can presence and distance live in peace?
The philosopher, the writer, the journalist—and many others—work at cultivating distance in relationship even as they stand in the present.
Why do that?
The work of analysis, of illustrating via story and reportage all require distance for the facts to sort themselves. Just like the passage of time has a way of revealing what was important ten, twenty and two hundred years ago. Just like the artist learns to imagine a two-dimensional plane to begin to make marks with/on their media.
Distance starts to open a way forward by helping us see differently. Presence demands attention—that’s the human piece of empathy and mercy. Sometimes we need to slip from present to distant and back again. All the while avoiding absence.
My conversation with the hospice chaplain reminded me of the help a bit of distance brings to sufferers and those in grief. The person slightly distant brings a perspective the sufferer may need to hear, though that perspective may not be immediately welcome. Best if that slightly distant perspective comes wrapped in empathy and mercy.
But even at work we can cultivate a bit of distance for the sake of clarity. When the boss pontificates it doesn’t hurt to ask why she does so and what rhetorical goals her sermon serves.
And even at home we can mingle distance and presence: staying present with family (versus attaching to whatever screen or podcast holds our attention) is the first order of business. But we bring perspective when we step back.
We need presence and distance to move forward.
Absence rarely aids progress.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
What if everyone were as conscious as you?
We See Outside. We Guess at Inside.
This is also a leap of faith: To think the person in the crowd or the car next to you, or the cube next to you is experiencing life in much the same way you do.
The person in line at Dunn Bros, the person who shares your house or apartment. These people are thinking about all the experiences of life just as deeply as you are. These people are processing the latest first-century brutalities from the so-called Islamic State, they are responding to sunlight, to a spring breeze, to awkward comments and thinking about all sorts of things.
Just like you.
The difficulty with this line of thinking is that I mostly leave it at “idiot driver” without wondering what’s behind the tailgating. I see people acting and I judge them. Rarely do I follow a behavior back to wonder at what might be driving their driving. It simply doesn’t occur to me.
A recent talk with a hospice chaplain made me start to wonder at the complex reactions and consciousness in the people I meet. My friend was talking about how his goal is simply to be present at the bedside of the dying. Often a family can all be there. Sometimes there is only one or two. Sometimes he is alone with the person. What often happens is that he simply listens—because people need to talk. They may talk on and on about nothing, but the talking clears the air somehow. The talking makes way for…something. Even if the content is meaningless, it is still signifying something. If only, “I am still here.”
Not dead yet. Breath is the proof. And maybe a word–a window to inside–with those last exhalations.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
Walker Percy: Small disconnected facts have a way of becoming connected.
Cultivate a low-grade curiosity
Two years in the clink have taught me a thing or two.
I don’t have to be in a demonic hurry as I used to be.
I don’t have to plumb the depths of “modern man” as I used think I had to. Nor worry about “the human condition” and suchlike. My scale is smaller.
In prison I learned a certain detachment and cultivated a mild, low-grade curiosity. At one time I thought the world was going mad and that it was up to me to diagnose the madness and treat it. I became grandiose, even Faustian.
Prison does wonder for megalomania. Instead of striking pacts with the Devil to save the world—yes, I was nuts—I spent two years driving a tractor pulling a gang mower over sunny fairways and at night chatting with my fellow con men and watching reruns of Barnaby Jones.
Living a small life gave me leave to notice small things—like certain off-color spots in the St. Augustine grass which I correctly diagnosed as an early sign of chinch-bug infestation. Instead of saving the world, I saved the eighteen holes at Fort Pelham and felt surprisingly good about it.
Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.
–Walker Percy, The Thanatos Syndrome (NY: Picador, 1987) 67
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
Where Can I Buy a Fine-Art Mode?
The Beauty of Knowing Nothing
I don’t have a fine-tuning mode that tinkers with physical detail. I draw and it is mostly crude. I cut plywood and pine shelves and they are rough enough to make my craftsman-father scoff into his hand. I make dinner and it is mostly broad-stroke stuff that requires very little finessing. I will confess my popcorn is a work of art, combining yellow and white kernels, salted and buttered and mixed to a sensuous, savory smack of flavor. And I am learning how words interact on a page—though it is slow going.
How does someone get to the point of crafting from rough cuts to fine finished detail? It is possible that in this age of ordering clothes, pizza and romance from a button on our mobile devices, that some things still take time. Some things require beginning at the beginning. The question for each of us: do I have the courage to begin at the beginning? To know nothing for a time and do things badly?
The beauty about not having been taught drawing is that you are in a position of the acquirer: the process of figuring it out might take a while, and you will most likely continue to figure stuff out as you go, but that process is yours. There are no shortcuts and no tricks. Just the plain practice of drawing, screwing up, and drawing some more.
–France Belleville-Van Stone in Sketch! (NY: Watson-Guptill, 2014)
You cannot buy personal processes. Not really. You have to make them from scratch—those processes that help you make meaning in the world. And you have to begin at the beginning.
Mistake will be made.
You will make those mistakes.
And that’s OK.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
We’re Bigger Than This
Helping Colleagues See the Larger Story
Bad manners and ill-treatment make headlines in personal conversations at most of the companies I’ve worked for. Just like in our newspaper or aggregated news sources online. People often say they wish the newspaper published good news, but they would not read it if it did. Good news—things going right for a change—few have time or interest for that.
Naturally this is so: stories of the people around us always take top billing in our conversations. Family, colleagues, neighbors, we love hearing what each other did and we love to relate a story about someone else, especially if funny or it has some emotional content that will get a reaction. It is the emotional content, whether funny, sad or repugnant that we really want to get across to each other.
It is our way of connecting: we want to stir a reaction.
It takes a concerted effort not to talk about the people who are not there. Leaders see personal interactions as an opportunity to steer interest toward something larger. But that larger thing is not the mission statement produced by the top brass or Human Resource, which is typically a lifeless bit of plastic. The real stories, the ones that make leaders out of ordinary citizens, are those stories where something of the corporate or group mission has made its way into and through an ordinary life.
One boss related a conversation she had with a far-away department. The department director praised specific people on the team and told of specific details that helped their group move forward. When our boss told this to the team in casual conversation, people blossomed.
We need more connection with larger mission—even if it seems hoky at the time. And we need less stories about how bad/abnormal/demonic are the people not present.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
Someone Died and Everything is Different
Times Change Us.
A gentleman acquaintance—someone I barely knew.
Mrs. Kirkistan and I were in a meeting with him not two weeks ago, and now he is absent. It’s a shock—but our shock is minor compared to that of the grieving widow and children. They have our sympathies and prayers. I cannot imagine the shift in outlook this change has wrought for them.
Even for me, who did not know him, there is a clear hole where he once existed. A big nothing–a memory–where, moments ago, a person stood.
And so. Mourning.
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”
–Jesus the Christ
We usually want to stick those holy old, churchy words in a pew to visit on Sunday or Easter. But today, even from the distance where I stand, they hold a glimmer.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
conversation is an engine 