8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Category: Part 4 – When Nowhere Clicks

The aging self and what each stage of life might teach us about making things. The life of creating stuff.

Chapter List

  • Post Conformity

    The funny thing about semi-retirement is that while one is still not completely decoupled from the workforce, I have noticed there is a marked volume of indifference that I am able to cultivate and nurture with regards to the performative creativity that I once did when I was younger.

    I can paint for the sake of painting.

    I can sketch things that are interesting to me.

    I can take photos of curious and interesting things.

    And I can do all these things not worrying that it somehow doesn’t fit perfectly into a portfolio or a personal brand.

    The ironic thing, this dismissal of external validation and approval, this refusal to fit into a box for some generic employer evaluation that might skim through these works in the future to see if I’m a good fit for their open job, means that I am probably producing better—or at least more authentic—art.

    It’s one of those lessons that takes a lifetime of creative output to learn and embrace, and once discovered is probably something that would have benefited me vastly more than I realized at the start of my career.

    Honed skills are great, but voice and authenticity are the work of a lifetime, after all.

  • Vibrato Know

    It’s no secret to those who know me that I took up playing the violin late in life. 

    I was about to turn forty and feeling this deep void in my life with regards to making music. It was palpable. I would go to concerts and wish I would have learned an instrument, or stuck with the one I briefly played in grade school. I would see my kid going to her piano lessons and feel a pang of jealousy for her privilege that we were able to give her this opportunity to learn. So I bought a violin and signed up for lessons.

    Ten years later I am pretty okay at the violin.

    I play in a community orchestra, though, and I am surrounded by dozens of other musicians of varying ability, many of whom learned to play when they were younger. I can’t help but compare. And here’s the rub: sitting among a dozen other violinists each week at rehearsal has highlighted something to me. I call it the vibrato problem.

    Vibrato is an important aspect of playing the violin. The finger presses down on the string to shorten the length so that the resultant note can be played. But watch a violinist and you will see that they don’t hold that finger steady: they wiggle it, subtly altering that string length like a sine wave as they are playing the note producing a gentle warbling of the tone. This is vibrato.

    Vibrato is still something I struggle with after ten years of playing the violin.  My fifty year-old fingers never learned early and are fighting to this day to learn it still. Having a young plastic brain would probably soak this up and it would become second nature, but being an older learner has left me to consciously think about it for every note when there is already a dozen other things to think about while playing.

    Extrapolate this to any other art form, any other skill. There is always a vibrato problem for older learners: and I’d like to believe that recognizing it is the first step in knowing how to overcome it.

  • Fibre Arts

    I have a lot of friends who consider themselves fibre artists, knitting and sewing and quilting and weaving, but if you clicked on this post thinking I had something to add to that conversation I apologize in advance: the fibre I have been thinking about more recently is the dietary kind.

    I think you would be hard-pressed to find a nutrition expert that disagrees with the idea that more fibre in our diets is a positive thing. We all know this, of course, but it’s the actual eating more fibre which has always been the tricky parts. Most fibre-rich foods are definitely not in the category of exciting, tasty, comfort foods.

    But then you get a bit older and you spend some time actually heeding that nutrition advice and, yeah, eating more fibre.  The correlation is not immediate, though. It takes a few days, or maybe a few weeks, and suddenly you just feel better.

    Fibre is a also a great analogy for other parts of life. As we age and develop a kind of mid-life urgency to add purpose and meaning to our fleeting days it’s so easy to look past the important bits of advice and go straight for the tastiest morsels. 

    See, fibre is more than a healthy food, it’s a way of thinking about a part of your life that thinks beyond the moment of gratification. It’s the lesser-palatable bits of effort and practice and pursuit for which we often don’t see immediate payoff, but in a few weeks or years makes the most difference.

    Figuring out what’s fibre and what’s something else, though, that’s up to you.

  • Fading Maths

    It would be easy to blame a lack of attention, or a clinical disorder of the same, but taking on a new hobby or creative skill and watching the shininess of it fade quickly is not a disorder of self, it’s just the math of progression.

    Maybe you have just taken up study of a new instrument or have picked up the supplies to tackle an artistic medium you’ve never before dabbled in.

    Your first attempt to create is going to be one hundred percent new progress.

    Your second attempt is going to build on that newness, so it will not be all new, but there is still so much to learn.

    Your third, fourth, fifth and so on for the first dozen explorations of your new interest will yield progressively less new growth, but still represent a lot of new.

    But then eventually (and soon) the newness will plateau. It will seem for all the effort you are putting in you are barely experiencing anything new, barely growing, barely learning. (Even if you are, in truth.) 

    And there’s the root of the equation. Our brains like the newness. We are rewarded with a hit of dopamine, a feel-good moment of joy for experiencing something novel, and those hits come with decreasing frequency as we move from being a beginner in the early stages into a student practicing yet-to-be-honed talents. 

    The math isn’t on our side. So we need to calculate a way to keep our interest and push through towards mastery.

  • Health Full, two

    (Continued from Health Full)

    I haven’t quite worked up the mental energy to call myself retired at this point. I’m not, really. Folks who have escaped the waged-employee chains and can work optionally or casually but who are still not of some societally agreed upon age of actual retirement we tend to use the word semi-retired. It’s code for I finished the capitalism main game storyline and now I’m going back for fun to play the parts I may have missed. 

    My experience though has often been one of adaptation, and while my brain may repeatedly tell me that I’m way too young to be calling myself retired, my body has had other ideas.

    I’m not twenty anymore.

    I strain my back sleeping wrong. My eyes get sore from looking at a screen for longer than an hour. I really need a comfortable chair when I sit at the piano. I probably shouldn’t lift too many heavy objects anymore if I can avoid it. Sitting in the grass to sketch means my knees are going to hurt when I try to stand up again. 

    Creativity is slower, more purposeful, and needs to account for mobility, agility and maybe even time to squeeze in an afternoon nap.

    It’s not weakness to acknowledge aging at any stage of the process. Knowing yourself and your limitations—and importantly, accepting it— as you work towards anything is a superpower, not a submission, even if it often seems precisely the opposite.