8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Category: Artsy April

Chapter List

  • Hard Change, two

    (Continued from Hard Change)

    Change is hard.

    The one thing you never really understand the gravitas of until it body slams you down to the ground of your own ambitions is that there is struggle at every level and with every step.

    I have been crossing the bridge of change for over two years as I write this having left what many would consider a cushy government job in search of something with far less bureaucracy and far more agency to do work that was (for lack of a better way to put it) morally and creatively positive. There are a thousand and one nuances to that statement and a career spanning twenty-five years stacked with as many successes as struggles, but in the end the yearning for something greater than being a cog in a machine won out.

    And what I have I learned is that so few respect that struggle. Those still on solid ground almost unanimously reject the very idea of crossing a bridge to something new.

    The other cogs in the machine often seem resentful.

    Those yearning to have their turn in the machine are often scornful.

    And the many who reject the machine itself are distrustful of anyone who ever participated in the machine at all.

    I stepped out of the machine to find a purpose for the second half of my life that was far across that bridge of change, invisible on the other side, though something of which I had heard through rumours might exist. What I suspect is that the bridge itself might be so long that the crossing of it is the destination itself.

  • Go Board 

    About a year ago I started getting advertisements for a neat little writing setup called a distraction-free word processor. There were a couple varieties, but usually they were little more than a cheap little keyboard attached to a simple screen and marketed as a “this device does one thing” tool. It was intended to keep distractible writers on task by removing the allure of all the other apps on our computers and phones.

    I didn’t buy one.

    But I did realize that the idea itself is solid, and if implemented in other ways has a secondary and perhaps more important benefit.

    For my own version, I bought a small, lightweight bluetooth keyboard, tethered a small phone stand to the wrist strap (yes, my keyboard has a wrist strap) and I keep it handy when I go out to run errands or on travel jaunts or am just playing dad’s taxi. 

    It is not only about eliminating distractions, but it also becomes about casual convenience and opportunity. 

    I am sitting in a cafe right now writing this on my portable setup while I wait for an appointment. I could have brought my computer but I didn’t want to lug it around all morning. I could have brought a book, but why read when I can write? I went light, and then realized I had both time to kill …and a keyboard in my car.

    In this case the distractionlessness is secondary to the opportunity to create—and to create on the go.

    I’m not selling anything here except the idea that the best creative tool is the one you have ready when you are ready and able to create something. A sketchbook in your pocket. A camera on your phone. A keyboard in the glovebox of your vehicle.

    You might think that a simpler and more convenient tool is not going to showcase your best work, but when the alternative is making nothing at all I would argue that making something in the moment is better than having the best tools and never having them around when opportunity strikes.

  • Never Enough 

    I recently came across a social media thread that got my head churning. 

    A person whom I follow, a prolific nature photographer, had received a comment from another of his followers demanding—demanding!—that he reveal the location of the photograph. He posted screenshots of their conversation and it went pretty much exactly how one might expect a dialog between a proud creator and an entitled audience member might escalate into digital fisticuffs. 

    Such is the nature of making anything for a large audience these days, and the the online market in which we all abide merely seems to amplify it as it sends our work to the furthest reaches of culture and opinion. This, and a long list of similar reactions I’ve had personally with people online lately, illustrates a point that has been gnawing at me: you can never know what your audience expects from your art.

    In this case, the photograph was beautiful and interesting and since it was shared for free with tens of thousands of people one would have thought there should be little to complain about. In fact, one would have thought the creator had been more than generous giving away their work. But the person who complained was aggrieved and argued that the photographer was required to go one step further and provide geographic coordinates for the location of the photo.

    Why?

    Unclear.

    But I’ve seen this effect emerge with increasing frequency.

    What you believe to be generosity and quality, giving one hundred percent for very little in return is viewed as insufficient by an invisible audience.

    And you can choose to agree and shrivel at the criticism, adapt to the feedback—or just keep doing what you are doing.

  • Daily Enough

    As I publish these words on my blog I am marking twenty-five years of dedicated posting online. It has made me neither rich nor famous, but I have done it nonetheless.

    There are a lot of famous blogs out there, but the one that always sticks in my head is Seth’s Blog[1], the uplifting and advice-for-life daily posts of Seth Godin, author and marketing guru to the masses. 

    I couldn’t tell you for sure if Seth himself sits down and writes his own blog posts anymore (though I suspect he’s done well enough for himself lately that he has a team of people who manage the logistics of that sort of thing these days and perhaps his thoughts are merely distilled from conversations or other insights—but then I may be completely wrong about that, too) but every day, no matter what, a new post appears on his blog and offers up even just a few sentences of insight. All for free.

    8 Clicks from Nowhere is unabashedly written in the spirit of Seth’s Blog, not as a copycat but as a spiritual and philosophical guiding light: daily insights for whatever they are worth offered up on a free-to-access website.

    As of this post I’ve been posting routinely for a quarter of a century in this format.

    And again—not rich and not famous for it, but certainly a better writer, a deeper thinker, and often driven to push myself for the sake of having something to write about. That’s just about enough to keep me going.

  • 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.