8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Tag: meta monday

Chapter List

  • Poise Purpose

    Three years prior to writing these words I was on the brink of a huge professional change.

    I’ve made a lot of excuses for that change over the span of time that followed it, but it was locked in step with the topic of this category of writing: finding purpose and keeping ones poise, and the side effects of failing in either or both.

    This isn’t a self-help blog, but it is very much the reflective writings of a guy who burnt out hard at his career because of a lot of big ideas that are in lockstep with both professional poise and purpose: that for many a job is a job, your salary could always be higher but you get the work done—but also that for many of us finding meaning and an honest life in our work can be an essential part of the balance.

    Burnout follows when that balance fails. And that balance is more precarious than ever when one pursues work that is already heavily skewed towards purpose and meaning, like creative pursuits, and away from salary and strict process, like creative pursuits.

    That doesn’t need to be a fatal blow to those efforts. At least, I think so.

    Under the category of Poise & Purpose I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • 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 blog 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 podcast have spent 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.

  • Tools Troubles

    Fellow Canadian Marshall McLuhan told the world that the medium is the message[1], and I have long taken that to mean that it is as valuable to study the tools and techniques as the final product if we are ever to understand the whole.

    The artist can easily get lost in the tools, though. Photographers can bang on about their camera specs. Writers can wax poetic about their favourite keyboards. And musicians these days it seems are just as apt to post content about the subtle tonality differences between brands of violin strings as share their music.

    Yet, creativity is and always be an intimacy with the tools and techniques. The art and the mechanisms that enable it are inseparable and interwoven as two things can be. 

    Maybe that’s why we get hung up on the medium and the message and often confuse the effort to concentrate on them both with the attention they deserve. 

    Or maybe I just like writing about my toys and I am going to devote some space on this blog to share my thoughts about keyboards, cameras and violin strings. It wouldn’t be the first time, after all.

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

  • Knots Blocks

    How does one go about unlearning what society probably taught us about talent?

    I know from personal experience that almost everything I believe about what it means to be good at something is wrapped up in an expectation from an audience: an employer, a customer, a friend, or even a parent (reaching right back to the beginning.)

    As I write this blog and parse out the various topics I want to explore I realize that I have already written a lot about those very expectations and how to first recognize them and then later prioritize how much heed they should be offered.

    Even as I was sitting down to write this I had just come off a few moments of drinking some tea and scrolling through my social media feed. My favourite feed these days is a collection of photographers promoting their work. And yet noting just how rigid the conformity is within the confines of that feed has been nagging at something in my mind. Every post is some glamorously lit epic nature scene or a broody black and white bit of urban street photography or a smiling family squared into the frame with a rustic backdrop to set the mood. Kudos abounded for those posts because, yes, they were solid works of technical skill—but also, maybe, perhaps because they fit into a mold of social expectation and consumer value. 

    Are those guideposts for other to follow? Or is there something mundane lurking in aligning creative outputs with social expectations? 

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

  • 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.