In my dark winter lying ill
At last I ask
”How fares my neighbor”?
Matsuo Basho
Matsuo Basho (1644 – 1694) was the most famous Edo period poet and a haiku master.
To read more poems, click here.
In My Dark Winter
First Anniversary and Some Reflections on 2020
Happy Birthday! Today is my birthday, and the blog celebrates its first anniversary. A few reflections on this first year of creative freedom may be in order.
2020 was not what I expected, and it’s not what you think. Yes, Covid-19 wreaked havoc with our lives and certainly with mine too. But it’s more than that.
I had resigned from my corporate job at Microsoft to do one thing: create. Finally, I would focus on my art and do all the things I was dreaming of when stuck in endless conference calls (I lived quarantine life before Covid-19 imposed it on the rest of the world).
It sounded simple, and I can see now that how deceptive this simplicity was. Hindsight makes things easy to see for what they are. This simple one word, create, encapsulated so many things that I was lost. By trying to do too much, I did nothing in the end. It’s not an excuse, just a late epiphany. Here’s a passage from one of my blog posts in late 2020.
My To-Do list had over 200 items on it (properly categorized, of course). The length was not, in fact, the issue, but the prioritization. What would be the best use of my time? Write every morning, then work on photo projects in the afternoon and read in the evening? What about the blog? I loved blogging and wanted to make room for it. And social media? And I don’t mean watching cat videos on YouTube (even though this may happen more often than I’d admit), but my Facebook photo page and Instagram (posting well-curated photos, of course).
Where would I then fit drawing/painting/making music/going to art galleries/reading New York Review of Books/going to yoga/making tasty-yet-healthy smoothies/creating a new garden/gardening/listening to thought-provoking and inspirational podcasts/watching interesting and motivational TED talks/learning more about astrophysics, or 19th-century explorations, or psychology, or fractals – to say nothing about the mundane things like cooking (healthy, mostly vegetarian and locally sourced), or nurturing relationships, or just having plain, old fun?
Well, Covid-19 did take care of the art galleries or yoga (although the devil’s advocate could argue that you could manage both online), but the rest? The paradox of choice. So many things to do, so little time … no wonder I was anguished.
Fear played a role, too. Of course. I was afraid to finish anything because that would expose the big fraud that I was to the world, and I realize now that I was just hiding behind that huge to-do-list.
The way I choose to look at it is that 2020 was my learning curve—a year of discovery. I had to be honest with myself and face my fears. Revisit my values, review my goals, and decide what mattered and where my focus should be. Less social media and news, more arts and culture.
Post less, create more.
My 2021 mantra is, “I don’t have time for that.” No time for fear, no time for distractions. Ars longa, vita brevis.
Related Posts
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Authors Should Be Good Gods
If authors are gods, sole and powerful creators of fictional worlds, they should be good gods. Even if characters are put through hell (and they should, if the book is to have any verisimilitude), there should be a meaning to their suffering. Poetic justice, if you will. It doesn’t necessarily mean a happy end. But something that makes sense. He who has a Why can endure any How, as Nietzsche put it.
This is what makes the Greek tragedies so powerful. The hero’s journey is tragic, yes, and we wouldn’t want to be in their shoes, to have to face those choices. But they find a meaning to their suffering, eventually, when all is revealed at the end.
Related Posts
- Ray Bradbury’s Writing Advice For Writers To Be
- How To Handle Creative Blocks & Avoid Distraction
- Writing Lately
- Just Squander Yourself
- The Theory Of Willlessness
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The Zone: No. 15 – Jan 28, 2020
Milton Glaser’s 10 Rules for Life & Work, the Library Explorer, radiators and the pandemic (true story), a squirrel getting tipsy, and much more in The Zone No. 15.
Another Thursday, another Zone! Are you ready? Here goes!
- Milton Glaser‘s 10 Rules for Life & Work. Difficult to pick any favorites, but I’ll give it a try.
- Some people are toxic. Avoid them
- How you live changes your brain.
- IT DOESN’T MATTER.
- Internet Archive, the non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, music, websites, and other treasures, offers now a thrilling way to browse their library shelves in 3D through their Library Explorer.
- A fascinating photograph taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in the Valles Marineris canyon system on Mars.
- Ear Candy: Éthiopiques, Vol. 21: Piano Solo by Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou. It goes on repeat these days.
- You’ve probably guessed how much I enjoy Studio Ghibli movies; it seems Studio Ghibli is one of the standing points in The Zone. Here’s a good introduction to the Japanese animation studio.
- The classic steam-heated radiator, still found in many homes across the world, was created because of the 1918 flu pandemic. The radiator allowed people to keep the windows open to provide ventilation.
My Zone
A Quote I’m Pondering
Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential stage of unconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken.
Maria Popova
From My Photo Archives
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To read more The Zone posts, click here.
Hindsight Is the Cruelest Adviser
My head hurts. I’m not awake yet, not really. I fight to stay asleep, my throbbing head a harbinger of the day ahead; no deeds will be done today. Not with a jackhammer drilling the top of my head.
It doesn’t work, of course. I know that but hope does die last.
I go about my business in slow motion. I know better than to try to do something important. Years of excruciating headaches taught me that there weren’t many things I could do. Low priority tasks on my to-do-list such as website maintenance (but nothing major), cleaning up the photo library (a Herculean task), or vacuum cleaning (now you know why my house is spotlessly clean). Note to self: never, EVER, upgrade the operating system of your computer if you have a headache!
I’m thankful that this is only the mild variant when I can still do something. The other one I don’t argue with; I just go lay down in the dark, earplugs in, sleep mask on. And pray that it’ll only last a few hours.
My worse headache moments involve the other one, of course.
- Holding an online demo for over a hundred participants. I had scheduled the demo early in the morning when I’m at my best; training sessions are taxing. I woke up with the other one and it was too late to cancel, not with so many people, not on such an important matter (controls and compliance stuff, how could I ever think it was so important??).
- Presenting to a senior executive. You don’t cancel on them. Unless you’re dead, or almost. If I could talk, I would walk.
- Traveling, especially on long intercontinental flights. I still have nightmares, walking zombie-like in a busy airport, running late, being at the wrong gate, not being able to think clearly, etc.; you get the idea.
- Holding a workshop with participants from the whole world after traveling on that long intercontinental flight. We usually had two to four days workshops, and the agenda was down to 15 minutes points. I couldn’t take the day off.
I have to admit that this doesn’t happen as often as before, i.e., since I left the corporate world. Hindsight is a great adviser, “the cruelest and most astute” (R.J. Ellory). I can see now that a whole lot of it was stress. It was high tempo, aggressive commitments, unrealistic expectations, and perfectionism. It’s a wonder it didn’t get worse. Well, actually, it did, but that’s a different story for another post.
I’m grateful that a headache is just a mild annoyance nowadays. Mild enough, apparently, to write a blog post about it.
Here’s a poem I wrote over ten years ago when my head had almost exploded with pain. It was inspired by Frida Kahlo’s painting The Broken Column. The poem appears in my first poetry book in Swedish, this is a quick translation I made for this post. A complete translation of all poems is on the way.
The Broken Column
(Frida Kahlo, 1944)
Pain arrows
piercing the body,
swirling in the blood,
hammering in the temples,
sawing the ankles.
The wrists,
slashed
by glowing knives.
Pain
Never stops.
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Moon Viewing at an Old Temple
No pretty face is to be seen
Among the group viewing the moon.
Matsuo Basho
Matsuo Basho (1644 – 1694) was the most famous Edo period poet and a haiku master.
To read more poems, click here.
How to Write a Book
How to Write a Book
I admit that “How to Write a Book” sounds like clickbait, but it’ll come to that – eventually. I’m planning on documenting the process of writing my first non-fiction book here, so you’ll see how to do it, post by post.
Or, to be more exact, how I do it. There’s, of course, no silver bullet, no handy manual on how to actually write a book. If anybody claims that, they’re lying. Or delusional. Sure, you can learn some of the technicalities: show, don’t tell; kill your darlings*; beware of adjectives and adverbs. And so on. But there are no shortcuts or miracle solutions; you learn how to write by writing and reading a lot. There’s no way around it.
I’ll document what I do here, on the blog, and I hope you’ll find it inspirational, if not instructive.
My Winding Path to Writing a Book
So (gulp) writing my first non-fiction book. It’s the book I needed to read myself, a (not always so) gentle push to live my creativity, let go of the fear and just do it. Write the book. Create the collage. Take the photo. Just do it!
I always thought that I didn’t have enough time or energy to be creative, to do the things I wanted to do while I was climbing the corporate ladder. Given enough time, I’d dazzle the world with my art.
And, lo and behold! November 2019 came and I resigned my fancy job at Microsoft. “Now I’ll show them!” Or not.
2020 was NOT the year my books would be written, or stunning photos exhibited. True, Covid-19 made everyone’s lives a misery, but even so, I thought I’d do more with my freedom. Instead, I agonized about every word, every photo; nothing I did was good enough, and the fear paralyzed me.
It took most the 2020 to figure it out. I dragged myself out of the hole I had dig myself in, found new routines and created a plan. Hence, the non-fiction book.
Getting Started
To start with, I need to do some research. I’m sorry I cannot say more about it. I don’t like being secretive, and I’m not afraid of somebody stealing my idea. Ideas are dozen a dime; it’s the execution that counts. No, what I’m afraid of is jinxing it. (It seems I haven’t conquered all my fears, after all.) I may share more later if I start feeling more comfortable.
Before diving into that pile of books (and it’s a symbolic pile since almost all my books nowadays are electronic), I do need to have a proper reading list. I’m sure my future me will thank me.
Cal Newport has a great article on building a research database, and I think I’ll keep it simple with an Excel file. There are more advanced ways, but I feel an Excel file meets my needs. I don’t want to over-complicate things; I like to keep things simple.
That’s it for now. I’ll cover the research phase and building the research database in the next posts.
* About killing your darlings. The saying has been attributed to many authors, from Oscar Wilde, Eudora Welty and William Faulkner to G.K. Chesterton, Chekhov and Stephen King.
King leads this attribution game nowadays, very likely due to this sentence from his excellent book On Writing: “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”
Most scholars point to British writer Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch.“If you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.’”, he wrote in his book On the Art of Writing.
Related Posts
- Ray Bradbury’s Writing Advice For Writers To Be
- How To Handle Creative Blocks & Avoid Distraction
- Writing Lately
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The Zone: No. 14 – Jan 21, 2020
Kevin Kelly on making life count, new books, Studio Ghibli artist Kazuo Oga’s painting process, porcupettes (say what?), and much more in The Zone No. 14.
The snow is gone, and the gray is back, but who cares? It’s time for The Zone!
- Jahna Vashti is one of my favorite artists, and I just bought this illustration, Waltz of Winter, for my home office. I had it on my wish list for years, and I decided it was time to act.
- Jorge Carrión, the acclaimed author of Bookshops…, is back with a new book, Against Amazon: and Other Essays, and I can’t wait to read it. (It’s on my wish list, where there are so many books now that it may take a while until I get to it, but I will, eventually).
- George Saunders on the Vitality of Fiction in Increasingly Turbulent Times. And another book added to said wish list, Saunder’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, that guides the reader through seven classic Russian short stories he’s been teaching for twenty years in his MFA creative writing program at Syracuse University.
- NASA’s photos of aurora borealis are not of this Earth (pun intended).
- A baby porcupine is called a porcupette!
- Studio Ghibli Artist Kazuo Oga Painting Process. Fascinating to watch the slow and painstaking creation of one image. Kazuo Oga is the background artist credited as art director on Studio Ghibli’s movies My Neighbor Totoro, Only Yesterday, Pom Poko, and others. He’s collected some of his wonderful illustrations in two books, but unfortunately, they’re only available in Japanese.
- Let’s stay in Japan: teamLab‘s new immersive art installation at the Kairakuen Garden is, of course, breath-taking. I’ve seen teamLab’s Planets during our 2018 Japan trip and I would have loved to see this one. Covid-19 put a stop to it. Fingers crossed for the next one.
- January 21st is the Squirrel Appreciation Day. Here’s a squirrel for you! We have several squirrels visiting our garden (read: raiding the bird-feeders), and this one is the bravest. She’ll tolerate me and my camera within a couple of meters, but only if nuts are exchangins paws.
My Zone
A Quote I’m Pondering
Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance
James Baldwin, Paris Review Interviews II
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To read more The Zone posts, click here.
The Copenhagen Trilogy
Parul Sehgal, the book critic at The New York Times, called The Copenhagen Trilogy a masterpiece, and her recent brilliant review pushed the book at the top of my wish list.
How does great literature — the Grade A, top-shelf stuff — announce itself to the reader?
Nabokov spoke of the shiver between the shoulder blades. Emily Dickinson required more persuasion. “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,” she wrote in a letter, “I know that is poetry.”
I’m sorry to say that I occasionally experience it as the dishonorable and squirrelly impulse to hoard the book in question, to keep it my secret. This can prove difficult, as you might imagine, given my line. All of which is to say, I bring news of Tove Ditlevsen’s suite of memoirs with the kind of thrill and reluctance that tells me this must be a masterpiece.
