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

  • 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.

  • Anything New

    I never really learned to play the piano.

    That is, sure, I could jab the keys and grind out a mean Chopsticks as well as the next ten year old, and sure, we had a little keyboard propped up in our living room when I was growing up, and sure, I could poke a key or two at a time to feel out a song. But I never took lessons, never practiced scales, never learned chords, and never did anything besides fumble at the ivories.

    I have been trying to remedy that in 2026, and my days are incomplete if I haven’t sat down at the keys for at least half an hour each day.

    I recommend learning something new. Anything, really.

    Acquiring new skills can sometimes unlock a powerful ability that you never knew you were missing until you found it. A new perspective, a new way of looking at old problems, or a new bit of insight into the otherwise mundane.

    And you never really know what that will be until you try to acquire those skills.

    When I took up running I started to see the world from the perspective of footpaths and interconnected trails.

    When I learned watercolour paints I suddenly saw colours in a different way.

    Now when I get my head around the piano and chords I listen to music differently, hear the shapes of things when I watch movies, and get a bigger sense of sounds that dance around genres of music.

    Your experience will vary.  But you will experience.

  • Story Layers

    One approach I have noted while writing fiction bears a striking similarity to watercolour painting.

    I have been dabbling in watercolours for about half a decade (as I write this) and it took me a good chunk of that time to get my head around the true power of watercolour painting: layers.

    For a long while I was making reasonably good paintings with a technique that was closer to colouring in the lines: I would sketch something in pencil, then paint it in, mixing my colours in the tray.  The results were okay.

    Then I took a class and was forced to learn about layers. 

    Watercolours are semi-transparent, and when used in particular way can be built up layer by layer to add tonality, depth, blends and dimensionality. Draw a three dimensional cube. Paint all three visible sides with one layer, then paint two of the sides with another layer of the same paint, and then paint one side with a final layer, again with the same paint: voila, you have three shades of paint, implied shadows, and a depth that wouldn’t exist without this simple bit of layering technique.

    I started to think what that looks like with words.  We storytellers sometimes rush through a scene to describe it, but what if we painted back over parts of that scene with additional layers, again and again, until the depth and dimensionality we were seeking appeared right there on the page.