Do you remember why you started chasing your art?
Do you remember why you started taking photos, painting landscapes, composing music, or scratching out short stories in a dimly lit cafe?
I’m sure a few people have stumbled across this blog and consider it a bit of navel gazing, culture-vibing, self-help sludge from a procrastinating wannabe, and maybe they’re right.
I spend a small chunk of my day, nearly every day, doing some reflective writing on my hobbies and interests, and I do it for a very specific reason: I want to rekindle the memory of why.
I want to keep the fire lit under the reasons I do any of this at all.
I’ve felt burnout. I’ve encountered the darkness upon a long and lonely path and I know what it feels like to forget why you bother doing interesting things. Burnout cares not for strength of spirit or power of will. It only knows of despair and indifference. It wants you to forget the why. It wants you to overlook the origins of your passion and limit your recollection of the reasons you started out on the adventure in the first place.
I stave of the darkness by writing these little short essays, often to remind even just myself of the answers to all those questions. I recall the beauty of a sketch gallery I wandered into in Dublin. I remember the vibe of yearning to play the violin whilst watching the symphony one winter evening. I recall listening to a beloved children’s author speak of the transcendent joy of the written word.
All of it lights against the darkness. All of it reminds me of successes lost to my own blindness.
Terms FROm this POSt
- blog
- I admit, I am pretty old. And I started posting formatted words and photos online before the word blog had even entered the common lexicon. Most people work in the medium of social platforms these days, but being both a product of my time and a stickler for content ownership and control, I still lean into and promote the idea that a personal content managed general purpose website is the beating heart of the internet I once knew and loved. I use blogging software, but I don’t think of these sites like blogs, more like living documents that happen to look an awful lot like blogs.
- burnout
- If I occasionally rage against the machine of capitalism it is because it once used me to stoke its own fires and I came out the other side charred and spent. I have given myself too deeply and too freely for the success of others, a noble thing when done for the right reasons, a terrible and painful loss when given for the wrong ones.
- cafe
- Chances are the words you are reading were written in a small local cafe on a quiet morning with a hot cup of tea at my side. The places we work and create have a huge influence on what emerges.
- short story
- Usually averaging about five thousand to ten thousand words, a work of short fiction is an exploration of a big self-contained idea in a small space, leaning into clear and intentional writing with an eye for literary economy.
- vibe
- There are many words that try to encapsulate the ineffable feeling or aura of a thing or an idea. Vibe is yet another comfortable and trendy stab at trying to pin down a definition for something that is hard to define about those very things. It often implies an alignment, positive or negative, with the feeling given off by the subject of the vibe.
- violin
- I write here quite a lot about the violin. It is exactly what you think: that four stringed wooden instrument with the distinctive curved body shape. Played well it is tuned to the range of the human voice, so it often haunts our hearts and reminds us of singing. I have been playing since 2016 when I took it up as an adult student, but one who could already read music. I can play, but the quality to which I aspire is something I will work on for the rest of my life.
- winter
- Where I come from this season isn’t just a metaphor for something, nor is it an abstraction linked to a romantic holiday snowfall. Rather it is a deep months-long freeze that restricts travel and keeps us hiding in our homes for nearly half the year. Many of us embrace it, but the reality is that cold is cold is cold and it is limiting as much as it inspires.
