8 Clicks from Nowhere ䷀

Dispatches ⌂

Category: [2026] The First Year

Chapter List

  • 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.

  • Routine Back

    Nothing reminds me so much of the value of my everyday get-up-and-do-stuff routine as when I step out of it for a few days.

    Every few months I take on a weird side project (for pay) that becomes all-consuming. A contract here, a part-time gig there, and always an interesting side-quest from the main project of my semi-retired creative life. The week before I wrote these words I was at it again, up north having a little adventure in the rural Canadian prairies. 

    And while the details change, the post mortem is almost always the same: I have been decoupled from my routine and then I need to spend a week or two trying to find the routine back.

    Routine is, after all, a cognitive shortcut for feeling productive. Whether or not productivity is your end goal, or if the effort it is meant for something less clinical and more spiritual, routine is often way more important than we give it credit for being.

    Routine is habit. Routine is a temporal obligation to be somewhere doing something on a clockwork regularity that, bluntly, gets stuff done.

    For me, routine is sitting in a cafe for an hour in the morning sipping a hot drink and typing something, writing, making, creating with a regularity and scheduled purpose. Without the routine I may get it done, but more than likely I would not. Deciding with a planned regularity that this is where I need to be and when I need to be doing something means I don’t need to find the motivation or overcome the paralysis of deciding: it is just due.

  • Nowhere Beyond 

    Is the hotspot a myth?

    Are there places in the world that are better for certain types of creativity, or is it possible to find community outside of noted centres of imagination: San Francisco, Paris, Tokyo, to name a few that come to mind when pause to I think.

    I find when evaluating spectra of a thing, it helps to look for the opposite: if we are asking if hotspots for creativity exist, what is the opposite of that?

    As I write this I am coming off of a temporary gig up in the northern parts of my province where I was even deeper into nowhere than I usually am. I was in a small rural community for a whole week and out of happenstance and curiosity I tried to figure out if I could buy some watercolour paints (I’d left mine at home.)

    “You’d probably need to get something like that off Amazon.” The hotel receptionist suggested.

    Imagine that, I thought to myself. 

    I personally got started in watercolour because I was in an art store and I impulse-purchased supplies. Then I took a local class. Then I found other people who could paint and I used them as inspiration. 

    My home city is hardly a hotspot for watercolour painting, but it is very telling to see what something looks like when it isn’t even a “spot” let alone a hotspot for a specific kind of creativity. 

  • Food Shelter

    Certainly among the most well known of the Delphic maxims of Greek philosophical origins[1] is the command to “know thyself” and in such understand one’s own limitations and role in the world.

    It is not particularly surprising then that I might choose to devote a substantial part of this writing project to the idea of personal understanding and in particular getting our own heads around personal honesty.  There are, after all, a great many myths we build up around our own narratives, lies we tell ourselves about ourselves, that are just as like to be limitations we unnecessarily tangle into our heads that quickly become powerful barriers to even the simplest acts of creativity.

    To know thyself is to accept the worst of ourselves as well as the best.

    To know thyself is to face the demon as well as entertaining the muse.

    And to deny that already before me a million books and blogs and podcasts have already spent time and ink and data on these topics would be a fools errand. 

    Do I have something unique to contribute, or am I even in that fooling myself about my own role in this conversation?

    I might suggest that this is but the first myth I can tear down: we all have perspectives that may retread common ground but are seen through a set of eyes, heard through a pair of ears, sensed by our personal neurons and it is just as important to know ourselves through this effort as to simply absorb the perceptions of others. As important as the basics of life to a creative soul.

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

  • Biological Imperative

    Having a kid transition into adulthood in late 2025 and through 2026, this last year as I write this, has put a lot of perspective on my own life—as both a parent and as a creative soul endlessly seeking personal meaning through art and words.

    Kids are, often by a kind of cynical definition, a kind of legacy that demands a legacy.

    We parent for a million different reasons, but not the least among those reasons is the biological imperative to pass along a bit of ourselves.  That’s not selfishness or ego any more than it is the raw organic chemistry of life.

    And the physical passing of genes is the (relatively) easy part: simply having a kid, as difficult as that is for many, is step one in a lifelong process of a notion wrapped up in a word that often fails to do the effort justice: parenting.

    I reflect on these things and notice more and more each day that the Kid, for all her uniqueness, has embraced a kind of creative legacy from me: she dabbles in art, she writes about film, she plays with music, and she looks at the world through the same quirky lens that I tend to find distorts my perceptions of everything I see and do.

    This is modelling, sure. This is biased opportunities, of course. This is parenting, always.  But eighteen years of effort has also led to a kind of creative legacy of self that I have, probably as a side effect of just being open and transparent, have instilled on the next generation.