Living For The Art

Despite being kind of fabulous in plenty of ways, my life has looked kind of like this for too long. 

In some ways I've just been too much in transition. A multi-client consultant's mental juggling, red-lining my vespa all over the place in heels and chandelier earrings just to teach myself to believe that the sweet breezes still blow. Living more in reflection and history than creatively and presently.

With the few hours of truly blank-slate time that my first days off following moving into a new house (still covered in piles of unorganized stuff), then going on a sweet little vacation and returning to discover myself on the edge of some possible shifts in job structure, I'm drawing something a little less pragmatic and a little more glorious than normal in this new space.

I've written before about the crucial value of how one uses their attention, but most of us have to address the past before we can really move forward. We need to get out of the red before we can really start to invest and create value. To move forward and create value with grace and poise - from a place of love and strength, not fear and protectionism - takes focus, courage and consistency. Transitory chaos easily overwhelms. 

Lines and Triangles, Guido Brandt.

In my experience, more often than not, the key to traction that allows for real, grounded value-creation is a combination of the help of good friends and especially the transcendence of praise. By this, I mean letting what is truly beautiful and good loom large. No weapon that's fashioned against it can stand. It tends to disarm common bitterness and strife that divides and kill us too often. To notice, give praise to, and feed the glory divides and shrinks the chaos. The chaos must be directly addressed by the minute, but it is much more easily defeated with this means of what is almost mis-direction, or maybe starvation. Centralize and praise what is good and glorious, especially verbally in wide company. You might call it living for the art.

Beyond the piles of shoes, electronics, beauty products, and growing belief in the sweet breeze, I'm painting some beautiful, vibrant shapes using pieces of the very chaos that encroaches. I'm beating my swords into plowshares, and maybe some kickass installation art. The void that surrounds us is immense, and constantly threatens to confuse, steal and destroy. Ironically, victory is only sure with a deep smile and an aesthetic eye. 

Value is created in living for the art.

Medicinal Love

This is the second in a series of posts about love. Read the first post, "Poison Love" here.

Love is, perhaps, the most remedial thing in the world. Most of us are quite confident that love is probably the answer to all of our pain and incompleteness. Love is strong medicine. It is a powerful substance. But, like any potent chemical compound the medicine of love can act as poison perhaps more easily than it can act as an antidote. It is a dynamic, volatile solution that - like dynamite or wet cement - left for too long in the wrong state, becomes obstructive, harmful or both. 

Love's natural state is active. It has to be applied to be restorative. It has to be given and received over and over to act as the remedy. 

The dilemma and the miracle of love both arise from the same characteristics: we cannot survive without love, love is more powerful than anything, and love is everywhere - it cannot be removed. 

We cannot survive without love. We were born incomplete. Individually, and collectively - we find ourselves taking the shape of simple, elegant equations, missing one key variable. We are symmetrical creatures, eternally searching for the piece that would complete our symmetry to make us as whole and beautiful as we sense we should be, but currently are not. Love is exactly what we need. In this need, most of us spend our whole lives. Children need to find belonging and provision. Women need to find value and beauty. Men need to find honor and respect. In this need for love, manifested in what I will not, here, attempt to list in it's potentially innumerable ways, we almost always try to use love for the sake of and solely unto ourselves. That will never work, because love is necessarily relational. It cannot be gained or kept. It must be given to be received, and it must be received to be given. For love to bring healing - both must hold hold true and constantly return to reciprocate. 

Better Me, Ilja Hackman

Love is more powerful than anything. Alone, we are weak - naturally moving towards death. Love is the thing that we can take up - we can wield it, but only for the sake of each other - to move each other towards life. Love is necessarily humble and sacrificial. Those you love are the ones you return back to serve consistently, whether in your mind or in the flesh. Love is to directly engage them, to come alongside and join them, to relentlessly vote with your attention and affection. Those you love are the only ones in a position to give you the love that can heal you, if they are able to rightly make use of it's power. Think about what fits the above description in your life. Really everyone is in love with something or someone, even if only in their minds. They are the ones you are in a continually revolving servant-master, master-servant relationship with. They are the ones that can love you - but how will they treat your trust? Love implies risk for the lover and the beloved. For the lover it is in fear of rejection - fear of what you will become if the love and service you give is not reciprocated, and risk that you will begin to wield love as poison on yourself or your beloved in your weakness. For the beloved it is in fear of mistreatment - fear of the lack of sufficiency and grace in your lover's wisdom for how to wield love to heal your ugly and delicate wounds. In these fears, love has more often been used to do harm than to heal, but even so, love is the only medicine. Like only diamonds can cut diamonds, even the wounds caused by mis-applied love must be healed by love, although it may best be done by a more wisely chosen lover. 

Love is everywhere - it cannot be removed. For most, "love" evokes sunset romance, and "medicine" evokes salve or antibiotics, but medicine and love are really much more broad than that. Either might more completely be defined as "what will do you good," or "precisely what will restore you to more complete wholeness." Both are necessarily subjective, and most commonly non-physical and non-erotic. This kind of love permeates and infiltrates every part of the universe. No one can escape it. No one can escape the need for it. No one can escape the desire for it. It is an implied, inescapable risk of danger - which would be horrible were it not the only exit from a worse fate. To approach love is to face fear, but to remain in love is to continually cast it out. Deep consistent healing love always results in the expansion or creation of families, whether biological or not. Love can rarely be sustained as an applied healing force outside of family.

Each of our lives - each of our families - are a history of love. Love desired. Love remembered. Love abandoned. Love grown out of. Love received. Love abused. Love restored. For each one to make sense of it, the history may be approached as an epic adventure or a tragedy. Many potential outcomes lay ahead of you, but you cannot survive or grow alone. To live in love, you must be a champion. You must continually risk pain and face fear. You must relentlessly serve, then allow yourself to be served. You must consider your resources, and wield them as agents of healing and strengthening. All of us interact with, and make use of love, but only those who take it up to heal, overcome and discover will be able to be healed, find victory, and be discovered.

This is the second in a series of posts about love. Read the next post, "Constitutional Love" here.

Remember- I'm a Person

Usually it happens when you're walking down the sidewalk. It's the thing I love and hate about being out in public. People don't really know who you are. I was doing just that-- walking back to the office from CVS & decided to grab a coffee across the street.

Walking Shadow. Oliver Raffy, from the walls of Dubrovnik, Croatia

My head was up, laughing to myself as I remembered some dumb joke one of my co-workers had told a few minutes earlier. It was warm and beautiful outside. There was a big truck right in front of the coffee shop with four construction workers leaning up against it facing the street in the sun. They were smirking and I felt them looking at me. I looked up to say hi as a courtesy and immediately shrunk back. Not because they weren't smiling, but because of the way they were doing it.

They were looking right at me, but their eyes said they saw something else. I could tell I was an impersonal invaluable thing to them. I tried not to react, just to dignify the situation, make eye contact, say hello and keep walking. Not all of them were necessarily even bad looking, or too old, or too construction worker-y, but they made us into foreigners by their demeanor. I passed by and continued toward the coffee shop's glass window front and saw them all whip around in the reflection as soon as I'd passed, gesturing crudely. I stopped, my arm halfway reaching for the door handle, then turned around to face them. I stood there, all of us staring nervously, and I was trying to think of what to say.

"Remember - I'm a person," was all I could manage.

We all do it to some degree. We treat each other like caricatures--ideas that meld themselves to what we think the world does or should look like. I don't know any of those men, but I hope that I can continue to treat them like human beings. The truth about that interaction, which is commonplace, is that they were attempting to express their manliness, but did just the opposite.

When a man objectifies or disgraces a woman, he innately dishonors himself --and vice versa. It is impossible to separate. It will always be to the glory of all people (but especially true between men & women) to treat each other with dignity. When a woman cuts a man down it is to their mutual shame, even if he doesn't treat her badly. But by the same token, when one treats the other with respect, it is to their mutual honor & glory.

Holding Back Accomplishment

Maybe it's this city. We value accomplishment. We praise proficient multi-taskers. We're high achievers. Friends my age are drafting federal policies, flying multiple times to multiple continents to do really revolutionary work in the developing world, spearheading really useful and creative local skill sharing forums, or just about singlehandedly lobbying congress to turn waste heat emission into pure energy. Seriously, we are knocking it out of the park. We're doing so much good. That's just who we are and we love it. It's really really fun to be good at your job.

Hopper. Nighthawks. 1942.

But with that, many of our identities are tethered tightly to our resume. And if not, then it's easy to get lost trying to relate to others within a culture of people flirting with the achievement trap (seriously, even the people working at fragers and peregrine have smart phones). I think I've often chosen to invest in my accomplishments and work over people often because I find it's easier to control. When I accomplish something substantial, I can step back, and say, "Here's something to put my weight on. Here's something measurable that shows my value."  Relationships are harder to predict. Even having truly great friends in this city, if I'm not super busy, then everyone else is, so we often miss each other. I literally have to schedule time with my super-close friends who live blocks away two weeks ahead of time. Apart from living in a culture of demanding jobs, maybe having saved the world a time or two makes us idolize that feeling. Even when we're not working on some heroic project, we act like we are, but really it holds us back. I'm there. I think I've forgotten how to really let go and rest. When I have spare time, I often don't know what to do with it, so I start another project. It's like voluntarily acting like a paraplegic. I might have really great arms if that's all I use, but it's pretty dumb not to use my legs just as often if they aren't actually impaired.

I have a beautiful community of friends. Really, it's life changing to belong to a local family that you love and respect. Show me your friends and I'll show you your future. However, I often think to myself that I'd enjoy the people in my life a lot more if we all lived somewhere else. When do we just linger and enjoy each other? Time together is joyful, but always neatly punctuated. I have long, lovely glimpses at their hearts, and it's enough to survive, but we lack consistency and depth in that. Why aren't we so resourceful in casting our nets wide for simple time spent on friendships, even if they may not represent any concrete gains for us other than the love and joy of the person themselves within those moments?

Hopper. The Sheridan Theatre. 1937. 

It's hard to do every day. For example, even just waiting in line for salad at lunchtime, I can barely stand to tear myself away from email or twitter on my phone for the 10 seconds it takes the girl behind the counter to ask me how much dressing I want, do I want bread, and is it for here or to go. It seems a small thing to give her my attention, so I skip over it. She has to raise her voice to get me to answer. I reply, not really looking up. What about courtesy? Why does it seem less significant to show patience and discipline in dignifying our interactions with other people as showing the same in our life's work?  In interactions like these, I make people an object to my goal, and innately reduce myself of dignity by not dignifying them. I sincerely love and am very proud of what I'm able to accomplish in my daily work and continuing education. It is good and right to expend oneself in such a way. But, for all the genius solutions, all the glorious essays & books, and all the huge, admirable accomplishments we all have made, loneliness still creeps in. Especially in the city, because of the fast pace, I think. It does for me, even often sitting in a room full of people I know and love. I have to connect with them. I can't go without it, and I'm one of the most task oriented people I know. Living jointly at this tempo often means cutting people out, not making more room for them. Loneliness should be a sign to us.

To have produced beautiful fruit from your labor is very satisfying, but it's not even close to enough. There comes a point when to continue working without sweet, long lingering pauses to enjoy the fruit and the hearts of those laboring around you, you subtract from yourself instead of adding. 

Your Constant Thoughts

The most valuable thing I can give is my attention. We listen. If not to things or people, then to ourselves. We draw on the world around us. What we put out is built on the back of how we process the things we experience. The things we listen to eventually come out of us. Most of the time, we eventually let our core relationships--whether they're with friends, television, accomplishments, family members, ideas --or worse,   your ideal versions of people--define parts of our identity. Constancy is closely related to intimacy.

kandinsky.painting with white border (moscow).

I have one mind, one body. Every day, I choose how to invest my time and my focus. In large part, this is influenced by what I'm innately drawn to. At least in some ways, what we gravitate towards will teach us about what is already going on inside of us. What goes through your head over and over? What is your constant thought? The thought you wish you could get rid of. The thought that drives you. Write it down. If you're like me, you're walking in circles on roughly the same ground over and over. But why?

I challenge you to try something: Write down your most constant thought--the thing that loops through your head when you disengage--every day for about two weeks. Usually it's loudest right when you wake up, and when you lay down to sleep. It can vary from day to day, but I'll bet that in most cases you'll begin to see a significant pattern over time.

Think about sharing it with someone you trust. Consider what it says about what's going on in your heart, and what you are listening to. Writing or sharing a constant thought helps with honest analysis by putting it on an external backdrop. It's often easier to learn by contrast.

Shifting where you place your attention and what you focus on can eventually change the way you interact with the world, and ultimately re-shape your identity. If you want to be different, start paying attention to different things.

Are you an Employee or an Entrepreneur?

The declaration “I am an entrepreneur” is surely more satisfying in this social media age than wearing a name tag or passing out the “standard corporate” business card.  In my millennial generation, we like to think we’re calling the shots, writing our own profiles, that we have no respect for the man--when most of us are just filling out the “About me” interface handed to us with little but over-used quotes. Are we really the rebels we brag like? And if we are, is that even a good thing? Is it better to think like an employee or an entrepreneur?

My friend recently inherited a large, very full mini-storage unit. This friend also happens to be facing--through no fault of her own--a serious debt crisis. I came to help her clean the unit out. We found everything from $500 business suits & stetsons to weird but expensive collector’s items--star wars special edition dolls (new the in box), crystal music boxes, about a bajillion baseball cards & autographed gear. She was very focused on clearing the place out to avoid the monthly fee, because her temp job didn’t pay that well. I saw dollar signs all over that stuff & suggested she try to sell it instead of trying to find more regular work for now.

“Honestly, selling this stuff online is going to pay you a LOT more than any other use of your time.” I told her, but she wouldn’t have it.  She gave away thousands of dollars of ebay-able merchandise. I thought it was dumb at the time, but maybe I wasn’t thinking straight.  Maybe, given all of the other stress going on in my friend’s life at that time, it wouldn’t have been a good choice for her. She wasn’t up to it.  Let us be humans--not just producers. We have to invest what we’ve got wisely, but emotional stability is an economic resource just like dollar bills.

Many of us don’t invest our resources well because we don’t realize what they are. We don’t see value in what we have-- an idea, a skill, an audience--so we don’t do the pruning & feeding that could make it bear fruit. One of my biggest professional growth areas over the last few years has actually been evening the scale in favor of thinking like an employee. I’ve always had good ideas, but overstepping my bounds was the only thing that’s ever gotten me fired. Even though my boss was totally wrong & making terrible decisions --his business went under shortly after he fired me, but I couldn’t’ve known that would happen-- I let being right ruin the resource that provided for me, my job.

Business owners, even some of the really big top dogs are wise to think about investing in relationships-- even over-investing before it's really obvious that they need to. I like to think I’m smart. I’d love to own my own business, or write for a living.  However, even the most brazen entrepreneurial minds need grooming. For most of us, it’s at least partially in learning to operate like a good employee that we’ll find our niche in the market and find success in our ventures. Anxious as I am to show my stuff,  I think lengthy seasons of  learning-- serving under a good boss will give better results in the long run. Like a good bottle of wine--I could probably stand to stay on the vine for awhile.

Begging the Question

The most wonderful things in this life aren’t the ones that arise outside of any individual or organized collaborative purpose that we here possess. We may be able to recognize and appreciate them, or even participate and contribute to them, but never really control them. True blessings, and even curses, always come in disguise, I think. One can turn into the other within the context of an individual life depending on that individual’s reaction to it.

The Great Carina Nebula (credit here)

An obvious blessing is more often than not a source of obstructive pride, blinding us to life outside of it. The best lessons and life processes, however, are those we would probably never choose for ourselves. They are things you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy, but would never take back either. Profound truth and beauty are completely other than the animalistic, reactionary behaviors we tend toward. Transcending problems and stress in this life is not possible without re-timing our hearts to the beat of that outside source.

People say God doesn’t act in the world, but I see the universe as a place that God made and created for His own purpose that we would seek Him out of it. Yes, terrible things happen and yes, it’s falling apart, but it’s like He’s holding it all together with a lynchpin. He’s giving us the forum we need to seek Him.

The things we see and marvel at like sunsets, stars, trees, flowers and oceans-- the handiwork of God-- could just be incidental fingerprints left there because it was Him who made it-- the handiwork couldn’t help but be marvelous because of the source-- not because that’s all He had to show. For me, it begs the question, prompting me to get up and find Him. (Prov 25:2 “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of kings.”)

True Story: A Monday Evening

9:02pm: Say goodnight to roommate, head to back patio with a stack of cardboard, matches, fire starter, fire wood, a good book, mosquito repelling candles & wrist to toe mosquito proof clothing in search of adventure/ relaxation. Turn on twinkle lights.

9:06pm: Cardboard fortress surrounding fire starter in a satisfactory manner, light corners of butter & pizza boxes.

9:08pm: Veiled in a cloud of smoke- nothing but 1/8 inch charred box corners, admit defeat at hands of wax coating on cardboard.

9:09pm: Enter significant mass of grocery ads to even the score. Move scooter cover to avoid melting due to large flames.

9:16pm: The un-aided sweet sound of crackling remains... Logs appear to have caught fire.

9:17pm: I love twinkle lights.

9:19pm: Enter roastable hot dogs on sticks. Excellent.

Sitting Bubbles, Karoly Karsay

9:21pm: Sticks may be too short. Fingers may be burning.

9:22pm: Flame very small to not actually there. Commence blowing on heart of the fire to maintain dog roastage.

9:23pm: Face covered in soot, getting kinda sweaty, hot dogs still looking geometric & cold to the touch.

9:25pm: Begin packing up. Throw last pieces of cardboard & paper on firepit more in an attempt to burn 'em up & avoid walking back to the recycling bin I fished them out of earlier than an attempt to re-start the fire. Think pitifully,"Dear God, save my fire?" Go inside to microwave hot dogs.

9:27pm: Return to check that fire is out. Find it cheerfully crackling almost as big as before.

9:28pm: Grab a beer from the fridge. Settle in to put a dent in my book anyway while the flame goes out.

9:29pm: Minor incident with frozen state of beer. Briefly ponder the science of temperature & matter.

9:55pm: Finished a chapter in the book. Fire still burning.

9:56pm: The moon is beautiful. Is this really happening?

10:01pm: Roommate #2 comes home to find me with snack, beer, book & flame. "This is awesome!" she says. I smile & shrug. Not ready to betray my frustration & near defeat. Bid her goodnight after briefly re-counting the events of our day.

10:44pm: Full of book & snack, face still covered in soot, smelling like campfire, satisfied with adventure & the simple pleasures in life, I retreat to my quarters to disengage from consciousness for the day.

You know, the little 'a' with a circle around it

Being a young professional can be quite trying at times. For one thing, a large portion of my time is spent performing tasks that could easily be done much more efficiently with simple machinery, like an answering machine (although it lacks a certian charm which I believe myself to posess on occasion). Recently, while executing the most crucial of charges, answering the phone, I encountered a gentleman who was having some trouble.

"I've recently become a client of your firm," He said," and I'm trying to send you some information in an email, but it keeps bouncing back."

"All right sir, what email address are you sending it to?" I ask.

"www.joeslawfirm.com"[name changed for privacy].

[This is the part where I had to go to great lengths to keep my professionalism intact.] "Sir, I am very glad you asked my help because think I can help you solve your problem. What you have actually been trying to send your information to is a website, not an email address. An email address does look quite similar to a website except that it will say 'person@joeslawfirm.com', you know, their user ID and then the little 'a' with a circle around it. So just try adding that first part and call me back if you are still having trouble."

"Oh, yeah, I... that's what I was going to say. I've seen those little ones like that before. I know about the circle, so that was going to be my next try."

The best part of the story is that this man was in his early 30s. I have no idea how that is possible, but yes, it is a very true story.