8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

A
BLOG
FROM
NOWHERE

  • Hard Change

    Change is hard.

    Until I went through the work of trying to rebuild my career from scratch I spent a tremendous amount of time looking across the bridge of that change and imagining what was on the other side. 

    Before I spin this little essay into a retelling of a whole “grass is greener on the other side” idiomatic fallacy of yearning, I will clarify: I think that yearning for change can be motivated by all sorts of things, and yes, visualizing the future state of your life in a positive way is one of those things. I also think there are a lot of reasons that people seek change in their lives and none of them are entirely right-thinking nor entirely wrongheaded, either. 

    Change is motivated by many things and each of those things is shaped by personal circumstance, individual and unique as fingerprints, combining the notions of our histories, our dreams, our hopes and our fears. And more so, I think that if you were to ask anyone to fully explain their motivation for change they might look at you with a distant stare and struggle to fully explain the deepest of those impulses to cross the bridge into something new.

    I have been walking across my own bridge for over two years now and I still cannot quite see the other side except in whispered rumours and hints of something interesting when the fog occasionally shifts and my vision clears long enough to look. It’s a hard walk. And an even harder one to justify to those still standing on solid ground.

  • Middle Earth

    I recently started re-reading The Silmarillion[1] by Tolkien and was reminded of how the book opens: it is a collection of stories, after all, and one of the first pieces is a long letter written by Tolkien to one of his colleagues. In it he writes describing in informal detail a great deal of in depth background and lore of the world of novels. 

    Of course, this is interesting just on its own, particularly if you are fan of the fantasy stories set in Middle Earth. 

    But from a creative point of view it is interesting for a whole other reason: the format.

    We all struggle with busy lives. The world doesn’t routinely pause for any of us to sit down and just write. Even if you had weeks of time off from a paid job to explore creatively, fitting in words and creative effort needs to be squeezed in around managing your household or cooking meals or shovelling snow. 

    As someone put it aptly on social media recently, even just sending a text message these days is a whole spell slot. 

    Tolkien may not have had a busy life in the way we think of it, certainly not in the sense of replying to emails and curating a personal brand on social media, but he was a professor and a scholar and pre-digital. 

    And I certainly can’t assume or know if he wrote such a letter that sits in the introduction of one of his lesser-famous books for any other purpose than correspondence. Yet, he certainly found an interesting way to multi-task that we still enjoy the results of decades later.

  • Strange Runs

    I took up distance running seriously in 2008, shortly after my daughter was born. I had been dabbling in the sport for a decade previous, but right around new years and that time of making resolutions I signed up to join a training clinic at the local running supply store. Nearly two decades later I’ve run tens of thousands of kilometres, completed hundreds of races, and found a network of people who are some of my closest friends.

    Being a runner also had a strange effect at the office. 

    There were enough of us runners that we found each other. In meetings, in the lunch room, or by winks and nudges from others who relayed that “did you know so and so is a runner, too?”

    This is not a post about running. 

    This is a post about networking.

    Taking up a sport, a hobby or a creative passion and being open about that in your professional life has a weird and magical way of interconnecting us in the otherwise dispassionate spaces of the work world. 

    …not that this is some deep insight. Shared interests forge tribes, after all. 

     But while you could just as easily find that tribe talking about a great band or the local sports club, finding out that your coworkers are aspiring authors, avid photographers, spending their evenings composing music, or just own a really expensive running watch, too, is a different level of camaraderie that shouldn’t be overlooked by creative spirits.   

  • Junk Drawer

    I have a collection of jars and each of them are filled with a mismatched array of screws left over from a long list of household projects: building our backyard deck, fixing the fence, installing drywall in the garage, assembling a doghouse with the kid, and a long list of other things I’ve long since forgotten. 

    Whenever I need to fix something, work on something or the urge strikes to connect two pieces of wood for some reason, I rummage through the screw jars and inevitably I find what I need.

    I hadn’t realized that not everyone does this. I assumed that it was just a universal trait of the average, everyday, homeowner: keeping a jar or two of mismatched screws on the shelf for those just-in-case moments.

    But no, and rather I have started to believe that it is more the habit of the creatively minded. A jar of screws has the potential to be useful in the future. And in the same way I also keep loops of string and bits of interesting wood I find on a walk or a bag of curious stones from the river or lists of writing ideas or recordings of curious sounds or introspective thoughts that lead to no where in particular… at least not yet.

    But maybe someday that junk will be worth more creatively than the collection itself.

  • Toys Tots

    Whatever happened to the artist you were as a child and can you find them again?

    As I start out to wrap my head around the roots and purposes of creativity inside this little blog I could not help but look back to the very beginning of the individual journey we each take. After all, by training I am a biologist and walking in perpetual lockstep with the core idea that development and childhood is intrinsically linked to both developmental purpose and evolutionary advantage. I don’t have the research chops or educational bonafides to dig into this in any scientific way, but it certainly seems to shade my approach to how I think about the play-like creativity that paints and colours the life of many (if not most) modern children in the western world. 

    Was it something about the opportunity youth presents or maybe the lack of structured limitations yet to be learned until later in life? Perhaps the notion of the creativity of youth is entangled with the lack of social expectations to be productive, make money, or have a formal role in this consumer-driven society. Maybe there really is an evolutionary and developmental aspect to kid seeming to be more creative (if generally less skilled at those creative pursuits) that has already been studied and I can unravel with deeper thinking and reading about it. Or it simply may be that my bias is glaring through the window of western privilege and the notion that kids are creative at all is wrapped around a generous interpretation of personal observation. 

    Who can say?

    Under the category of Toys & Tots, I’lll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.