Fearless Creativity!

Spirits in the material world

2019-08-20T19:38:51Z

This past weekend I had an experience that will likely be familiar to anyone who’s done any amount of solo travelling. I found myself (with my family, in this case) in a new place, with a small group of new people, in a fairly isolated environment, in which we interacted fairly intensively for a few days.

It probably helped that we were pretty off-grid, with little or no cell phone or wifi service, and so forced to be more in the moment than is perhaps the norm for most people these days in our hyperconnected (but strangely disconnected) world.

We cooked together, ate and cleaned up together, talked and sang and joked and walked and talked some more together. And the world did that thing where it gets really small – that little house in the countryside was the whole world for those few days, and those people, previously unknown, seemed very quickly like close friends.

It’s a nice thing, and I hadn’t experienced it for a while.

During our final meal together one of my new friends asked me, in the course of conversation, an interesting question. It was a question that initially made me slightly uncomfortable, since it brought up some old and long-suppressed thoughts and feelings, and I felt like I needed to give it some thought in order to properly contextualize my answer. The conversation moved along before I could do that (the problem with wanting to answer questions properly is that sometimes the world doesn’t want to wait around for you to get your thoughts together), and the moment was gone. But I’m left with the question, and it won’t go away.

So I’m going to try to answer it here…

When is a piano not a piano?

The context of the question was that my wife and I were trying to describe a tiny, smoky, wonderfully charming and sadly long defunct jazz club here in Berlin, called the Bebop Bar. One of the best things about this place was its tiny little half-height parlour piano, a Manthey Klaviano. It was objectively a pretty terrible instrument, in purely technical terms; it was old, the action was uneven and clattery, pretty much the entire bass section was virtually unplayable and made sort of vague low thumping sounds… not, in other words, a pristine concert grand. A funky old bar piano.

But somehow, despite all of that, it was magical. There were a couple of really great players in our circle, and we used to sit around talking about how it was somehow impossible to play badly; it just seemed to draw the best out of whoever played it. We loved it. I was trying to describe that dichotomy.

The question that my friend asked me was, “Do you believe that instruments have spirits?”

Now, I should probably explain, especially for anyone who hasn’t read a lot of my work here, that there’s a pretty big side of me that is staunchly rationalist. I come from a family full of scientists and I tend to be very convinced by rational explanations of how the world works, and skeptical about most things overtly spiritual, supernatural or paranormal. This was not always the case, which we will come to shortly, but it’s been my primary bias for a while now.

The person asking the question had given me the impression they were substantially more open to spiritual ideas than I tend to be, though that may be an assumption on my part.

So of course my initial impulse was to give a kneejerk, reductionist answer: No, instruments are mechanical objects, tools, refined and beautifully crafted perhaps, interesting, charming or ‘characterful’ maybe (whatever that means)… but nothing more.

And yet…

Are you experienced?

I’ve had a number of experiences in my life that challenge that die-hard rationalist side of me, and more than a few of them have been in musical contexts. I’ve had many experiences where playing a particular instrument is a surprising, inexplicable experience, in which I play differently than on any other. I’ve had experiences where I feel like I’m watching over my own shoulder, as my fingers do things I simply do not know how to do.

Now, I’m not saying that these experiences are empirically inexplicable, or that they are necessarily connected to a specific instrument; they are likely an amalgam of the environment, the playing situation (whether solo or with other performers), in some cases the heightened focus and concentration of a performance or a recording session, my own mental and/or emotional state at the time, and so on.

Nevertheless, they are experiences, moments, that have consistently challenged my inner skeptic. They have transcended, for me at least, the boundaries of reductionist explanation. They don’t make sense. Or rather, they make a different *kind* of sense, but one that flies happily in the face of my rational bias.

I’ve even been lucky enough to get a few of these moments ‘down on tape’, as it were…

(This is actually one of the reasons I can enjoy listening to my own music… because I feel that in many ways it isn’t ‘mine’; I was just there, a part of the moment and the creative experience to be sure, but not fully in control. If I had been fully in control it wouldn’t have come out like that. It would probably be much, much less interesting, and listening to it would be uncomfortable because I would be aware of its flaws and therefore my own limitations. Since I don’t really feel like I ‘made it’ in the sense that I think most people imagine, I can sidestep that whole narrative of self-criticism. It was just a wonderful moment that I was lucky to be a part of.

The interesting thing, the magic, whatever you want to call it, comes from letting go of control, from surrendering to the moment and everything and everyone else involved in it. Bringing my knowledge and abilities and creativity to it, yes, but not controlling it.)

So I want to think this question through a bit more, and provide a bit more context to how I think about these things, in order to arrive at an answer I can be comfortable with.

I think there are lessons about creativity and music, and perhaps about spirituality, to be gleaned along the way.

But I’m afraid I have to start with the fundamental nature of reality, and how I understand it… so, you’ve been warned.

What on earth am I on about now? Bear with me…

The stories we tell…

We do not see the world as it is. Our eyes and ears and brains do more than describe the world. We make it. The world you experience is yours alone. It is a story you are telling yourself. It is based on sensory input, yes, but interpreted very generously. Your brain is taking in that raw sensory data and editing the hell out of it, and trying to make some sort of cohesive picture of what is happening, on the fly, as it goes along. The resulting narrative is based at least as much on what you have ‘experienced’ in the past (the stories you’ve told yourself before) as on the raw data your brain is trying to make sense of.

And everyone you’ve ever met, everyone and everything else in the world, is doing that too, through their own personal lenses. And this informs and affects the ‘realities’ that we live in on a very basic level.

This is not a pet theory of mine, it’s pretty established cognitive science.

But we tend to act very much as if the world were objectively real and exactly the way we personally think it is. We become intensely invested in, and defensive of our particular personal story, convinced that it is right and that anyone with a different interpretation is therefore wrong. And if we have any self-respect at all we need to prove them wrong, and ourselves right.

This leads to a great deal of pain and emotional violence. It’s kind of at the heart of our dysfunctional human condition.

Without getting into convoluted discussions about confirmation bias, or the Dunning-Kruger effect, I want to bring my little question into the context of this understanding of the world.

I guess what I’m getting at is that to answer this question we need to define the term. What is a spirit? Do you and I, or my new friend and I, mean the same thing when we use this word?

High definition

When my new friend posed her question, my brain made certain assumptions about what she meant, in order to fit her and her question into the story I tell myself about the world. Based on our very limited time together, and also based on my own frame of reference on what is meant by such a term, an image formed in my mind. I assumed she meant an ethereal but sentient being, entwined inextricably with the physical object of an instrument. Of course I don’t know if that’s what she intended, but in that moment it’s what I had to work with.

So, do I think a funky old piano in a smoky Berlin jazz club has an individuated, sentient/conscious intelligence, with which I am communicating with as I play it?

The reductionist skeptic in me clearly wants to say no. But if I accept that something is happening, something that I can’t entirely explain but I can definitely feel and experience… I can also easily accept that someone might take that input and build it into a different storyline where that’s precisely what was happening. Which story is ‘correct’?

If a fellow musician told me that she experienced her performance on, say, her beloved cello (a random example), as a direct communication between herself and the spirit of her instrument… part of my brain might say privately, Whoa, that’s pretty out there… but another side of me would say, OK, fair enough! I know the feeling that you’re describing. I might not choose the same words to describe it myself, my brain might spin a different story out of those raw materials, but that doesn’t change the fact that I can accept what you’re saying and I think I understand what you mean by it. It ‘makes sense’ to me – not rational sense, but another kind.

Fishin’ for Religion

I’ve been interested in, and investigated to various degrees, a number of different spiritual traditions over the course of my lifetime. I’m a curious person, and I managed to figure out fairly early on that life seemed infinitely more interesting, full and colourful if I stopped subscribing unquestioningly to a single interpretation of reality.

I grew up going to a Christian church but have since explored (without ever really practising any of them) various flavours of Buddhism, Shamanism, Hinduism, Sufism, Gnosticism, various Native American traditions, and so on. I would never position myself as any kind of expert on any of them, but I’ve been interested in all of them at one point or another. Each is a story about the world, and holds a particular wisdom and specific insights. None is ‘right’, none is ‘wrong’, in my opinion. They are narratives, or perhaps more correctly meta-narratives that underpin their adherents’ personal narratives.

I guess the belief that my piano – which is around 100 years old, and carries its history in every nuance of its soft, gentle sound – or the one I grew up with, built in 1898 and in my family for generations, which I recorded my latest solo piano album on – or the Steinway that I chose for my first fully improvised concert recording – the belief that they have individual spirits, with which I commune when I play, might be considered a form of Animism. I’ve always had a certain attraction to Animism; the part of my brain which doesn’t quite accept reductionist thinking has always felt like it makes a certain kind of sense. Not rational sense, but another kind.

The way we imbue certain objects with ‘sentimental value’, the way we might love an old hat, or a favorite walking stick, or a beloved house… this acknowledges that an object can be more than an object, can have more importance than its strictly practical utility. It carries the weight of its history, of the feelings we associate with it.

So I guess in the end I have to say yes. I believe that an instrument can be much more than the sum of its parts, can be more than a collection of strings and wood and felt and brass, or whatever it’s made of. And given that I believe that, I find it perfectly acceptable to describe that ‘something more’ as a spirit, or in any case in spiritual terms. How else to describe it?

I think any object can be seen through this lens, and certainly any object deeply entwined with the mysterious and transcendent experience we call creativity.

I like the idea of seeing and feeling the creative process as a dialog with something mysterious, whether I see that as living specifically in my instrument or as a larger, Universal force or energy. I’ve always liked this idea – the aliveness of music. I wrote about it in the extensive ‘liner notes’ of my first album, Passage, 25 years ago.

Reduce, reuse, recycle.

So I guess that also means I have to accept putting limits on rationality. SOME limits. In very specific circumstances. Not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but accepting that it’s not always and everywhere and in every situation the best or the only way to think about things.

I think for the most part science is still our best tool for making sense of the world around us in a way that circumvents our inbuilt tendencies towards confirmation bias, towards blindly accepting narratives that reinforce what we’ve already decided to believe. I think most people, and the world at large, would be better off if we were more rational and less emotional.

BUT I think that reductionism is still just a narrative. It’s one way of interpreting the data. It’s enormously useful in most ways, in most situations… but not necessarily the most helpful interpretation when it comes to creative work.

Let me put it this way. It’s probably entirely possible to reduce what happens between me and a piano to its technical components – the physics of the instrument and of sound, the biomechanics of my body and muscle memory of my fingers, the neurons firing in my brain, the peculiar applied mathematics of music theory…

But none of that describes the experience I have when music starts to happen, when the ‘aliveness’ of the moment starts to tell me (in ways I cannot describe but which most creative people will recognize) which way it wants to go… and above all, when I surrender to that and let it happen through me.

A spiritual narrative, much as my rational brain balks at it, simply fits my experience of that moment better. It’s more interesting, and more fun.

The reductionist model is kind of boring. It doesn’t inspire me. It makes me hyper-aware of all the flaws in my technique, the limitations of my musical knowledge, the imperfections of my instrument. It doesn’t acknowledge that the specificity of all of those things can lead to strange and inexplicable magic. That kind of sucks.

The spiritual model invites me to play with a mysterious, elusive but fascinating partner. Call me crazy, but that’s a whole lot more enticing.

And with that, I’m going to go play my piano!

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Reboot: Creativity in Crisis

2017-05-16T16:24:39Z

Hi there.

It’s been a while. Nearly 4 years, in fact, judging by the date on the next-newest post to this one. Lots has happened! I wasn’t sure if I would ever get back to this blog. I mean, I never intended to stop, but life kind of got busy for a while there and it fell by the wayside in kind of a big way.

But today I have a reason to fire it up again. And that reason is the subject of this post. Warning: this post – and likely those that follow, at least for a while – will be predominantly personal in focus; however, it (and they) will touch on themes that I think most creative people can relate to, no matter how fearless…

Busy busy busy

A little backstory: I’ve written before about my performance work, which mostly consists of playing piano and keyboards – and increasingly, various other instruments including accordion, trumpet, french horn, and flute – for circus-tinged stage shows here in Germany. That work kind of took over the bulk of my life for a few years – over 200 shows a year for a few years, and these are typically long, intense shows.

I finished a run of such shows, at Palazzo Berlin, in March of this year, and found myself without any performance work on the horizon for 7 months, an unusual situation and while problematic on an income level, not an unwelcome one: I was pretty burnt out, needed a rest, and figured I could tie up a few loose ends and then dive into one or another of my various dormant personal creative projects.

But the weeks went by, and then months, and I realized I wasn’t doing that. The minutiae of daily life – parenting, taxes, home maintenance, computer maintenance, changing phone contracts – was like a gas that expanded to fill its container, and its container was my life.

And so I found myself with a creeping sense of anxiety. I have long defined myself in terms of the creative work that I do, and a lot of my sense of self-worth is tied up with that, for better or for worse. It’s one thing to be too busy performing, playing with other great musicians and crazy talented performers, digging deep and delivering in a professional show night after night and not really feeling like I have the time or energy to dive into a personal passion project. It’s quite another to have, in theory at least, all the time in the world and still be unable to get anything started.

Has it really been that long?

It’s not like I haven’t done anything creative in the past few years – even discounting the show work. Last summer, for example, I scored and co-produced an amazing audiobook for with cousin and longtime collaborator, Brooke Burgess. It took a crazy amount of time and creative work and I’m very proud of the results, but it was not my own project.

As well as 4 years since the last post here, it’s been nearly 2 years since my last Sound Fascination piece, and nearly 3 since the last major installment (Volume 3) was finished. 10 years since the Stillness3 album, though we did have a small reunion concert in February, which was nice even if hardly anybody came. Many years since my last solo piano concert. It’s been a long long time, in short, since I really dove into a personal creative project, let alone pursued it to any kind of completion. And this, to me, represents a kind of crisis.

So that’s what this reboot is going to be about: a reboot of the blog, yes, but more importantly and more broadly a personal creative reboot. I need to get back on the horse, and my plan is to write about the process and share it here. I’m hoping it will be a document of a creative person finding a way out of creative crisis through creative work, and not just the record of a slow motion personal trainwreck.

A hard habit to break… but harder to start!

I’m also hoping it will be of interest, possibly even helpful, to someone else… but frankly that’s not really my first concern. Looking back at the articles I’ve shared here before, I think they represent something different and something I don’t feel I can continue or even want to. Sure there are some engaging and possibly even useful pieces, but overall it’s a bit self-indulgent, sort of look-how-creative-I-am-I-have-so-much-to-teach-people.

This will be different. This is confronting my failure to maintain what Twyla Tharp calls The Creative Habit, and trying to find ways to refocus my very unfocused creative brain on bringing something new and beautiful and strange into the world. I do think that creativity, like fitness or cooking or reading or yoga, is best seen as a habit – and if we put energy into our positive habits hopefully they will supercede our more problematic ones, like posting comments on pointless online videos.

Some of that effort to fire up that habit again might involve rebooting old projects, like the Sound Fascination series, or the Cliffjump book, or maybe even the long-dormant Symmetricity, my erstwhile novel-with-a-soundtrack. Some of it will be starting new things, as I’ve long been of the opinion that starting something new is a great way to get out of a rut. But in many ways I feel the best approach is to go back to the beginning and try to figure out what made me want to create in the first place, find the seeds that grew into those first flowers and eventually became a whole garden of mad creative projects.

Photo by DominusVobiscum

I liked that garden, it was a nice place, but it’s desperately overgrown with weeds now and trying to hack my way back to it by the usual methods doesn’t seem to be working. So my plan now is to go back to the seeds and start again.

Stuck in the middle with you…

So I hope you’ll join me, and read and listen as I try to find my way through this process, even if I stumble and scramble a bit at the beginning for lack of practice. I’m hoping that the (intended) double meaning of the title will hold true – it’s not just about a creative crisis, the crisis of stalled creativity, but about finding the creativity *in* that crisis, and using it to find the way out.

I think there’s something to that, and I suspect I’m not the only one. Sometimes you need to get stuck in order to remember why you need to get unstuck. I suppose there are those lucky creative people for whom maintaining the habit is effortless, they never seem to struggle with it at all, the work pours out as if from a bottomless fountain. But I’m pretty sure most people are more like me – it feels like that sometimes, for a while, when we’re lucky… and other times it just… doesn’t. The gears get gummed up, the muscles atrophy, the well seems to run dry for a while.

And when that happens you need to change the formula.

I’ve been through phases where everything was flowing freely and it seemed the ideas would never stop coming, they arrived conveniently fully formed and all I needed was to get out of the way and let it happen. Making Passage was like that, and A Suite Hereafter. The whole Continuum series was based on that process and that feeling. I know it well… but I also know that it isn’t always like that. And I know that when it isn’t, you have to find a way to put one foot in front of the other until you’re on your way again, no matter how hard that seems.

I don’t want to put the cart before the horse here and make grand statements about all the amazing things I’m going to do now, having arrived at this stuck point and decided to do something about it. Things might not turn out to be that easy at all. I do have a goal in mind for this process, something that’s been a long time coming, but I’m not quite ready to announce it yet.

What I do know is that, seeing as it’s 2017 and all, this revolution will likely be televised, i.e. there will almost certainly be a video component to it. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

That’s about all I’ve got for now. Stay tuned!

-tobias

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Brains ‘R’ Us (or are they?)

2017-05-16T13:40:05Z

I’ve been thinking about brains.

Well, to be honest I’ve done a whole lot of thinking about brains over the years, so this is not exactly a recent development. But brains have been, umm, on my mind, as it were, even more than usual lately.

I think what started it, I mean this latest bout of cerebral preoccupation, was an article about a scientist getting a very large grant from the European Union, like a billion dollars large, to develop a complete virtual model of a human brain.

Now the idea of artificial intelligence is nothing new, of course – we’ve had blockbuster movies about it, after all… And the idea of AI has always been to explore the workings of the human brain by modeling various aspects of it in software, as it were… So the idea of a complete virtualization is not exactly revolutionary. Arguably the concept is foundational, at least since a brilliant young scientist devised a kind of ‘test’ for artificial intelligence that bears his name….

But this is not an article about artificial brains per se, and truth be told it’s real, organic brains that interest me more – and not just brains either… But brains are where we’ll start, for now.

Special Powers

I’ve been fascinated, in a lay observer’s sort of way by the neurological and cognitive sciences for a number of years now, and anyone who shares this interest will almost certainly have come across the work of Oliver Sacks. (If not, go and find as many of his books as you can find, or start with his excellent Ted talk…)

One of the many remarkable characters Sacks has profiled over the years is Stephen Wiltshire, sometimes known as the ‘human camera’ for his extraordinary feats of visual memory and recreation. This extraordinary presentation is where I first became aware of him, and it’s been ‘viral’ for a good while now so there’s a good chance you’ve seen it too:

Somewhat less well known is this wonderful video of Stephen’s musical counterpart, as it were, Derek Paravincini (known, probably in reference to Mr. Wiltshire’s nickname, as the ‘human iPod’, though I find both of these sobriquets a bit troubling as I feel they drastically underestimate the real creativity involved in both cases, emphasizing the admittedly more unusual abilities of memory and perception):

Abilities and Limitations

Now both of these young men are considered to be on the autistic spectrum, which leads many to surmise that their extraordinary abilities in one mode of mental activity to be somehow related to their lack of ‘normal’ development in other areas, often social or linguistic.

This has always seemed a little odd to me, since the are plenty of examples of ‘extreme’ abilities or unusually gifted individuals in many fields, including visual and musical, without accompanying autism or related issues.

However, the fact remains that there are many such examples, remarkable gifts or abilities that transcend our normal experience and defy our intuitive understanding of what the brain is capable of. And yes, they are sometimes accompanied by limitations in other areas, so there is perhaps something to the notion that there is a relationship there; I’ll leave it to Oliver Sacks and other neuroscientists to explore that more cogently than I am able to.

It’s All Connected

No, the thread I want to explore is a little different, and to get there I’m going to use one more example. This one floated by and caught my attention in the way these things do, and as a musician I couldn’t help getting caught up with it: The Mindtunes project, in which a DJ and star of Britain’s electronic music scene, a computer scientist with some brain imaging equipment, and three guys who love dance music but are variously paralyzed or severely physically limited, get together to make a dance track (or, in Mark Rowland’s words, a “big, fat, dirty, epic Dubstep tune”):

The result is pretty amazing and uplifting, even if it also functions as a great big ad for Smirnoff. There are worse ways to advertise, so more power to them for doing something special that probably changed some lives in the process. It’s not really my kind of music, but I am very intrigued by the project nevertheless for various reasons, not least of which is the possibility of creatively empowering people with profound physical limitations.

So what’s the connection here? What’s the pattern that links these very different examples of brains at work? How are they different from a giant computer running insanely complicated software designed to mimic the way our human brains work? And what can it teach the rest of us about creativity?

The answer, my answer, is that all these brains are attached to bodies.

And that means more than I think it seems to at first glance.

Brains, Bodies, and Senses

Stephen Wiltshire’s extraordinary brain is connected to a pair of eyes and a pair of hands. Yes, the brain controls the eyes and the hands, but this process is far more complex and subtle and non-linear and organic than any computer controlling a camera or a printer. We know this intuitively, but I don’t think it can be overestimated.

Derek Paravincini is more than a powerful computer connected to a perfect microphone and a player piano. The process by which his brain processes sound and pitch, and *experiences * sound and pitch, is more than computation. I know this because I have a bit of an inside track on this one – my brain and ears and hands do that too, though my natural abilities are nowhere close to his.

I felt a chill of recognition as I watched this presentation – I know that landscape of pitch and pattern intimately, and I can tell when I see and hear someone exploring it the same way. The musicians I work with every day know it too. There is something subtle, almost magical about what happens at the nexus of brain and ears and fingers and instrument, a kind of intimate knowledge that depends on, but also utterly transcends the theory, the ear training, and the manual technique that underlie it. A whole that is far more than the sum of its parts…

The Landscape of Possibility

That’s what I’m interested in exploring with music, and my hunch is that some version of it is what most people are exploring in their creative work: the subtle connections of the brain, the body, the senses, the tools and the space that the work takes place in. And the infinite landscape of human communication that forms in this nexus.

Hell, let’s go further: this mystery underlies our whole experience as human beings, as sentient beings even. And it’s why I think the AI people, as fascinating and important and transformative as their work may be, are a long way from replicating what our embodied brains can do.

Let’s take another example, from a very different angle: a series of videos, also making the rounds ‘out there’, called People Are Awesome. (Aren’t they? Aren’t we?)

These might seem more like bodies attached to brains than the other way around, since the extraordinary feats are by and large more physical than mental or creative at first glance, but to me it’s the same thing: people with wonderful brains attached to wonderful bodies doing things that fill us with wonder, by creatively exploring the the landscape of what’s possible at the nexus of senses, brains and bodies.

Could you be more specific?

And here’s the crux of the matter: this is not an abstract thing. I think this is a common error. It’s not about showing what any of us could do with our brains and bodies if only we worked or practiced hard enough. It’s much more specific than that. It’s what each of us can do with our particular set of senses, brains and bodies. Each of us has our own incredible and unique landscape-of-what’s-possible to explore. And when we share the results, there’s just enough commonality to make the results relatable, and let us experience the wonder of discovery vicariously, and be inspired to see what we can do with our own brains-connected-to-bodies.

So when Mark Rowland uses his brain, connected to his ears and to a computer, to help create music in the Mindtunes video, I know why he’s smiling like that. I can’t know what it’s like to be him, but I know that joy and where it comes from. No matter how ‘limited’ our bodies or our senses might seem, we all have our personal landscape of possibility to explore, and the exploration is a beautiful, joyful thing, and so is the sharing of that wonder and joy.

What I’m trying to say here, to sum up, is that intelligence and creativity and the importance of art and music and science and technology and all the amazing creative things we do are not, or at the very least not exclusively, the result of processing. No amount of processing power can replicate it or replace it or make any of it, or any of us, irrelevant (though certainly, as with the Mindtunes project and in a million other ways, it can enhance it and enhance the sharing and appreciation of it).

No, intelligence and creativity are not just the result of extraordinary processing power, they are physical too – the result not just of big brains but of big brains attached to bodies. Specific brains attached to specific bodies. It’s the result of exploring what our specific brains and our specific bodies can do, no matter how ‘limited’ or how ‘extraordinary’ they may be. And sharing it and inspiring each other to explore some more.

It’s All About Touch

Since this has been a post full of examples, I’ll leave you with one more… one of the most amazing, and famous, examples of someone overcoming extraordinary obstacles to develop and share her remarkable mind with the world. I’m talking, of course, about Helen Keller.

Here’s a video, which I also stumbled upon randomly the other day, of Helen and her teacher, Anne Sullivan, demonstrating how this remarkable and gifted teacher found the way to unlock her pupil’s prison:

It was through touch. She took what she had – practically the only sense Helen had available – and explored with her the landscape of what was possible for her, with her brain, attached to her body.

And look what was possible, as it turned out!

That video touched me to my core, and I suspect I’m not alone. Every example I’ve used has filled me with the wonder of what’s possible, what our brains and bodies can do. And there are a million more out there, a billion more stories or more.

What’s yours? What’s possible for you and your brain and body? Are you exploring it? Feel free to tell me about it in the comments section, below…

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A New Place: musings on movement and stasis

2019-08-20T19:58:41Z

photo credit: serendipity

There’s a unique feeling about being in a New Place – somewhere you’ve never been before, a place you get to see and experience for the first time, with fresh eyes and ears. Anyone who has travelled a reasonable amount will be familiar with it. There’s an alertness, an innocence, an openness to the experience which is really special and which can never really be reclaimed on subsequent visits – although familiarity, of course, brings its own very different rewards.

There is also a difference between being in a new place for a very short time, just passing through as it were, and moving to a new place for a longer period. ‘Just passing through’ is what many tourists and travellers do – even if you have a few days to spend in a great city, say, you still have limited commitment and are really only there for the quick ‘taste test’.

There’s nothing wrong with this, but the fact remains that living someplace new for an extended period – say, a few months at least – is an essentially different experience. You see things through different eyes when you’re looking for things to ground yourself and your new life in. There is a greater sense of commitment to the neighborhood you have landed in, the shops you know you’ll visit many times, the patterns you’ll fall into.

You’re inserting yourself into the environment in a more substantial way, and allowing itself to get much deeper under your own skin. You’ll become enmeshed with it, hear and feel its more subtle rhythms and allow your own to synchronize somewhat with them.

And being conscious of this at the outset (perhaps because you’ve done it a few times before, as I have) is a pretty neat feeling. It’s fun to know that there is so much waiting to be discovered, so many secrets waiting to reveal themselves to your explorations, so many stories waiting to unfold.

Just passing through, or staying a while?

That’s what I’m experiencing now, for the first time in many years. I’ve relocated for 5 months or so to Vienna, Austria – one of the great cities of Europe, without a doubt, and a place with a deep and complex history and culture which I’m excited to have the opportunity to really explore.

And it’s got me thinking about that particular sense of openness that comes with relocation – as distinct from the dislocation of travel which I discussed in the last post. More than being open to new experience, allowing a place to make its superficial imprint on you and imagining what it might be like to live there, this is about opening ourselves up as well. It’s a symbiotic thing.

In a sense, any creative act is more like this than like the just-passing-through feeling of travel; we give of ourselves to a new creation, and we allow it into ourselves just as we shape it, put our stamp on it, and so on.

But I’m wondering if some creative work is more like this, and some more like travel. There is a different feeling when poised at the edge of beginning something ‘big’, a sense of anticipation that many things remain to be discovered, many secrets have yet to be revealed…

In a sense I suspect that my ‘shoot-from-the-hip’ improvisational approach might be more like the day tripping tourist or traveller, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. While pondering this an image floated up from the depths of my memory, which might shed some light on the subject.

Storytime

Once, a long time ago in a city far far away (Vancouver, to be precise) I was spending a lovely sunny day wandering around Granville Island, which is a little enclave of theatres, restaurants, a brewery and market square, and an eclectic mix of artists’ workshops, studios and galleries. It’s a great place, a kind of escape from the city in the middle of the city.

While wandering about aimlessly in a park-like area I became aware of a slow, rhythmic ‘chinking’ sound, and my curiosity led me to follow it to its source. In a sunny courtyard in front of his workshop a sculptor was chipping away at a large stone sculpture. I watched him for a while and then engaged him in conversation.

I told him that I was a musician and that I specialized in improvisation, creating spontaneously and entirely ‘in the moment’, and we mused on how different that was from his work. I asked him how long he’d been working on that particular sculpture and he said “about a year”… and estimated it would probably take another year to finish.

I was flabbergasted – the idea of someone spending that much of their lives on a single piece of creative work was so far removed from my experience. It still is, to an extent, though perhaps a little less so (I was pretty young then so two years seemed a lot bigger chunk of life than it does now).

I’ve got you under my skin

It didn’t change my life or my work, but it made me think about different approaches to this notion of how much time a given piece of work deserves or needs. I still think there’s something in the rapid, ephemeral way of working, and I’m still somewhat more drawn to it overall.

But a small part of me wonders what it would be like to be deeply engaged with something that would take years. How that project would form a much bigger and deeper part of my life and work than a piece that I make in an hour or so.

Of course in a sense I am very much involved with a big ongoing project; the development of a creative voice, the slow growth of technique and skill and sensitivity and mastery. In the end maybe it’s not so different.

And there’s also a reason I’m here, which is to play another of these crazy dinner/theatre/circus shows that have become the mainstay of my music career. I’ll be getting into that a bit more in the next post, but it’s worth mentioning since tonight is our official premiere…

In any case, it’s kind of interesting (to me, anyway!) to think about how this new place will sink into my perspective, my narrative, and my creative work over the time that I’m here. And it’s kind of exciting to be at the beginning of that journey. Kind of like being at the beginning of a new creative project, pregnant with possibility and potential, its hidden subtleties waiting to be discovered and revealed, along with the ways in which it will inevitably change us.

So, what about you? Are you a tourist, a traveller or a stay-in-one-place type? Are you at the beginning of anything exciting? Is it different than being at the end? Better? Worse?

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Bits and Bites

2012-10-22T14:35:08Z

photo credit: theilr

I can’t say I’m the world’s most prolific social media user sometimes, especially when I’m going through a heavy work phase as I have been recently (more on this soon)… but sometimes I have to admit that it facilitates wonderful meetings with people I would very likely never have encountered otherwise.

Recently, after a lively debate on another online-friend’s post, I was contacted by Deryn Collier to see if I was interested in making a contribution to her ongoing series of ‘Soundbites’ – short, provocative question-and-answer format pieces on creative ideas and issues.

The question Deryn gave me was this:

Stacey Cornelius’ post a few weeks ago got us talking about creativity and risk. You have a project underway where you compose a piece in less than an hour and you post it immediately to your website. Most people would call this risky, but you think of it as exploration and play. Is there a difference? What is it? Risk of what? Exploration of what?

And, given the tight 200-word limit, here’s what I came up with:

First I should probably clarify that the ‘under an hour’ thing is more a prescription than a rule, as I don’t like being rigid about these things. However, it’s a helpful framework for actually getting something done… It also minimizes risk, as it’s clear that not every session will produce a masterpiece.

However, I believe creative risk is largely artificial and comes from falling into a trap I like to call the Phony Syndrome – imagining that everything we ‘put out there’ is an opportunity for the world to discover the frightened child hiding behind the confident, competent façade we try so hard to maintain.

But kids don’t actually do this to themselves, at least not until we teach them to. They don’t worry about how their work will be perceived, they just pour the blocks out on the floor and start stacking them up into something. What people will think of it or whether it’s ‘good enough’ are thoughts that don’t enter their minds until later. I think it’s our great mistake to let them in.

So I basically try to channel that approach as much as possible. If people end up liking the results, so much the better!

A few clarifications…

I confess I found the short format really difficult. 200 words is a tight enough limit that you really have to make every word count, which is hard work but worth it in terms of really clarifiying what you want to say. The downside is that you lose complexity and nuance – I’m someone who believes pretty firmly that there is more to every story, and other valid and valuable ways to look at everything.

So I was worried that might come off as trite, that it trivializes the very real sense of risk and danger that many people experience around creativity, which I don’t want to do. In fact I do understand that, all too well, but I seem to have found a way to not be crippled by it, which does in fact have a lot to do with maintaining a playful attitude.

In a way it’s very easy for me to say this stuff, I have a body of work that I’m fairly happy with and proud of, and which in some cases has made a real impact on people, far beyond what I could have hoped for. In other cases it’s had very little impact at all, but I am still proud of having managed to get something done, and make something I think is beautiful. That’s what it comes down to in the end…

Learning and Unlearning

So my little mini-essay is not intended to say that falling into the ‘phony syndrome’ trap is a mark of weakness and stupidity, and look at me I’m so much smarter and better because I’ve figured out how to be confident and cool (which I’m often most definitely not). It’s just an observation that this kind of kneejerk self-doubt and self-criticism is largely a learned, adult trait – and if it can be learned it can probably be unlearned, at least to an extent.

I do tend to think the best way to retrain ourselves to be playful is by re-imagining our Big Important Creative Work as simple play, as pouring the blocks out on the floor and stacking them up into something. Take away all the expectations, the attachments to the outcome, the inflated value of the work itself, often before it’s even become anything yet. Just find a pattern that looks interesting and explore what’s there, and above all HAVE FUN.

The advantage we have as adults is that we can bring much more to bear on these explorations – more technique, more perspective, more experience. The disadvantage is this tendency to start taking it all so seriously, investing it with our whole sense of self and value. If we can get around that, the added stuff we bring to the table can make it more fun instead of more serious, and in the end I believe the results are better, more honest, more organic, less contrived.

So that’s what I’m working on anyway. Incidentally my book ‘Cliffjump’, which explores these ideas in considerably more detail, is basically finished and waiting for me to have more than 10 minutes of time to focus on getting it into a releasable format. If anyone would like to have a look at an advance copy, drop me a line and I’ll hook you up!

As always, comments are most welcome… or head over to Deryn’s site and join the discussion there!

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The joy of dislocation (creativity and travel, part II)

2019-08-20T15:59:23Z

Photo by Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums

I have been travelling a lot lately, so I guess that means it’s time for a followup to my old Creativity and Travel post from a couple of years back. I’ve also been reading a bit more than usual, and one of the things I’ve been reading is Jonathan Fields’ excellent book Uncertainty, which I may do a full review of at some point.

I liked a lot of things about Uncertainty, and it rang true in a lot of ways; mostly confirming my suspicion that in many ways I am that oddest of creatures, a person who basically enjoys unstable or unresolved situations, genuinely likes to shake things up, try new and unfamiliar things, take on challenges I don’t know if I’ll be able to meet.

In many ways this ties into my general philosophy of ‘just say yes‘… interestingly, an old friend just contacted me via Facebook and told me that he remembers me from time to time when he uses a story about me learning to tune pianos to try to inspire patients to ‘confidently go forth into areas where they have no apparent skill in the present moment’. Guilty as charged, I suppose!

security blankets

However, I am also human and so despite learned habit I am subject to many basic human instincts and traits, so the idea that we can find ways to mitigate our general distaste for being out on a limb also made a lot of sense to me. One of the key concepts Fields outlines is that of the Certainty Anchor: these are things in our lives that do not change and/or that we feel sure of, that can give us something stable to hold on to while we take risks in other areas.

Many of these consist of routines. We can anchor our threatened sense of self around a set of things we are sure about and that give us a feeling of security – familiar places, people, little rituals or practices we do the same way or at the same time every day. We all do this anyway, but if we pay a bit more attention to it and do it consciously or with more intention, we can increase that feeling of security that allows us to take risks in other ways.

So what does this have to do with travel? Travel is when we cast the certainty anchors aside for a little while and step into the realm of the genuinely uncertain. Or at least, it can be. Why would we want to do that? Read on…

Weighing Anchor

I think the idea of Certainty Anchors is a valid one and offers a lot to us restless creative types. There’s no doubt that it’s quite a common experience to be thrown up on the rocks of uncertainty and self-doubt, and Fields does a great job of outlining not only the many pitfalls of creative work but some very practical and effective ways to center and stabilize ourselves.

But what happens when we get too much certainty? When the routine that gives us stability ends up taking over and dulling our edge, making us feel too safe, and that sense of safety strays too far into our work, taking away its (and our) sense of excitement and discovery?

Then it’s time to shake things up, obviously. We need to dislodge ourselves from the grooves our wheels are in before they turn into ruts. We need to dislocate.

Anxiety is the Spice of Life

I’ve gravitated to this word ‘dislocation’ because it sums up a lot of what I feel when I travel – both the positive and negative aspects. I feel dislocated; taken out of my usual familiar surroundings and set down on shifting sand. Again, I seem to be someone who generally thrives on this, and I think part of it is just practice, but I think we can all benefit from it now and again.

“They say that travel broadens the mind… ’till you can’t get your head out of bed” – Elvis Costello, God’s Comic (from the wonderful Spike)

Yes it does. And it’s not just removal of our usual sense of location-based or situational security. It’s also new stimuli, new sights or sounds or smells, unfamiliar people, new challenges. It’s also, for me, often a bit of time to let these things percolate and combine/recombine in my mind. It’s moments out of the daily grind for all these new experiences to percolate.

I like the idea of percolation, of idea fermentation. I think it’s one thing to give our brains new information, and sometimes an instant, fresh, authentic reaction can be very creative and rewarding, but often it’s what happens when the brain has had some time to digest and reflect that the really interesting things happen.

trains of thought…

That’s probably one reason I like to travel by train. You get the constant stream of fleeting images, the scenes rushing by the window that our brain has just enough time to register and imagine scenarios around – I wonder what it would be like to live there? What might be down that lane, or over that mountain? – but it also has time to stretch out and work through those thoughts, let them germinate and become something new and unexpected.

We also often find ourselves in contact with unfamiliar people, and that can stretch our mental and creative muscles as well. I’ve always been enamored of the idea of the Single Serving Friend; this is borrowed from the movie ‘Fight Club‘ – Edward Norton’s character describes his clever idea about a ‘single serving’ friendship to a seatmate on a plane.

It’s been my experience that we can have strong connections and experiences with people we are next to on a plane, or otherwise meet only briefly while travelling, because we know we are not required to maintain them afterwards, they are temporary, fleeting connections and we can have a sense of freedom in them.

The ‘single serving friend’ is a cute concept, but it rings true – we’re trapped in a small and frequently uncomfortable space with a complete stranger, and we have hours to fill, and we are social animals. The great advantage from the point of view of creative dislocation is that we are frequently confronted with people we might not otherwise ever meet or make contact with; they may have opinions or experiences far from the norm of what we’re exposed to. I suppose that’s scary for some people; I’ve always found it more exhilarating.

why don’t we do it in the road?

Another thing I enjoy about travel, particularly about the getting-from-one-place-to-another part of it, is working on something. Most people on a train or a plane are killing time – reading, playing a game, and so on; some are bent over spreadsheets or reports, taking advantage of the ‘trapped in a tube’ time to get something done that they might not necessarily enjoy, but which is more efficient than just staring out the window.

I like to set up my little mobile rig, including headphones and a mini-keyboard, and work on some music.

This is partly for the same reasons someone might be working on a presentation or report, just for efficiency; and it’s also because music happens to be what I do, for a living, I don’t generally have to prepare spreadsheets or presentations.

But there’s also something else. I like the feeling of doing something unusual in public. I kind of enjoy knowing that people are a little intrigued, wondering what I might be doing. Partly because you don’t see it every day, I suppose, but also because of our innate sense of curiosity. To an extent we are all wired this way, and it expresses itself in the way we are tempted to read over someone else’s shoulder, to watch what they are watching. Our eyes wander, our curious brains want to know what other people are doing.

But this is particularly strong, for me in any case, when it comes to someone else doing creative work. If I see someone sketching in a public place, for example, I am filled with curiosity about what they are drawing, why it caught their eye, how they see it differently, what details they might be focusing on. This despite the fact that I can’t draw my way out of a wet paper bag.

It’s the same when I see someone writing longhand in a journal (less so with computers), or in the rare cases I see someone else working on music. And I kind of enjoy knowing that others might be thinking this about me.

delirious insights

A final factor that strikes me as important: fatigue. I spoke earlier about percolation time, about creative fermentation. Well, one of the times our brains can make the most unusual, unexpected connections is when we’re tired, and travel often makes us tired.

We are not necessarily in the best state to work on ideas effectively, but if we can harness a bit of that slightly surreal instinct for pattern that comes with a tired brain, jot down the ideas, interesting things can come out of it. That’s certainly where this essay came from, in any case…

Thoughts?

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The War Of The Roses, part two

2012-08-19T04:16:02Z

photo credit: Cåsbr

Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, as Nietzsche once said… and yet here I am coming back for a second round. Yes, it’s time for a re-match with the Rambling Roses (Rosa Multiflora) that are not so slowly but ever so surely taking over my parents’ property here in beautiful Nova Scotia.

The lesson I drew from my last encounter with these invasive giants was about physical work and the creative value to be gleaned from it. This time I’ve been pondering what might be learned from the plants themselves – and from the nature of the battle.

I think it’s not uncommon for people engaged in an epic struggle with a worthy opponent to develop a healthy, if perhaps somewhat grudging respect for their sworn enemy, and so it is with me now that I see how they’ve regrouped in the year since I clawed them back, dragging their enormous tendrils down from trees and turning them upside down.

In a word, they’re survivors. They have a spectacularly robust plan of attack, and a resilience that is truly inspiring, although of course equally frustrating. Nearly everywhere I cut them down to stumps, they have shot up six or eight new shoots. In addition, they’ve found dozens of new places to hide their sinewy tendrils – twisted around trees, concealed amongst grape vines, disguised as highbush blueberries.

resistance is futile

So I’ve renewed my assault, re-mounted my offensive. It’s become a bit obsessive at this point, which I realize, but there is something about the extreme physical challenge – tolerating the scratches and exhaustion, fighting through underbrush to find them out wherever they appear – that appeals to some deep internal sense of resolve within me.

But it’s become obvious to me that I can only delay their eventual victory. I may win the battle this year as I did last year, but they are in it for the long haul and they will win the war one day. There are too many of them in the valley now, we are surrounded on all sides and they will come in ever-increasing waves while I’m away, until they are simply too much for me, or I lose the ability to fight or the drive to conquer them. So it goes.

I can accept that. I have not set out to remove them permanently. That would be a futile goal. They will eventually triumph, and will rule this valley until some other, even hardier, even more insidious and voracious competitor comes along (or a parasite evolves to prey on them, as a result of their increased availability). Not this year, probably not next year, but someday.

No, I just want to slow them down, prevent them from choking out a few trees I happen to like, keep the meadows walkable for a few more years, make sure we can still see the North Mountain from a few points in the yard. I’m just buying a bit more time so my parents can stay in their beautiful country home a bit longer and a bit more comfortably. It’s a small thing, but it’s my contribution.

my point, and I do have one…

Now, try reading all of that again, but instead of invasive plants, picture in your mind, as the enemy in my little vendetta, the Resistance. You know, the endless excuses and delays and distractions we create and/or allow to come between us and our creative work. The term is borrowed from Steven Pressfield’s excellent book ‘The War Of Art’, which I reviewed here a couple of years ago. It’s a good word, and captures something essential about the psychology and the experience of doing creative work.

I know I’ve taken a contrary position before, preferring a more playful approach, but I have to admit that viewed through this lens there is something compelling about the ‘heroic battle’ metaphor when it comes to defending against the Resistance. There are times when you have to steel yourself, commit and resolve yourself to winning at all costs, enduring the cuts and bruises and extremes of exertion, the lack of sleep, the alienation.

It is a worthy opponent, the Resistance, and it’s as insidious and as flexible as these Hydras of the plant world I’m up against. If you cut off its head, three more will grow in its place. You can slow it down, you can chase it into hiding, but it will be back in another form, in a new place.

And eventually it will win. We will tire, we will run out of energy, our fire will go out.

But in the meantime? If we slow it down for a while, if we chop it down, we can give ourselves some time, some breathing room. And while the Resistance is down for the count, we can get our work done.

So that’s what I’m trying to do these days, and how I’m trying to view the Creative Conundrum. I’m giving up on trying to win the war. I’m going to respect my opponent, I’m going to win one battle at a time, and I’m going to try to get some work done in the spaces in between.

Thoughts?

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In Praise of Beginners (part 2)

2012-06-04T12:30:27Z

photo credit: Magic Madzik

In part one of this article, we looked at the value of channeling what we might think of as the ‘beginner’s spirit’ in our creative work – that combination of curiosity, naiveté and excitement at the discovery of something new that so often lends the work of ‘beginners’ its energy and spark, and which is all too often missing in more established, ‘career’ artists, musicians and so on.

Today I’d like to look at another kind of beginner, and to think about this idea in a different light. And to illustrate what I’m talking about, I’m going to look at the work of my good friend Josh.

Josh is a cartoonist. Well, in fact there are other dimensions to his work, but that’s the one he’s best known for. He publishes a daily comic strip called Caffeinated Toothpaste, which is basically an illustrated diary of funny, interesting or unusual things that happen to him in the course of the day, filtered through his rather quirky sense of humour and worldview.

(He’s also known to swear quite freely in the course of this… I doubt this will be a big problem for my readers, but just in case – you’ve been warned!)

Now Josh has been putting these strips out for a couple of years now, a little longer than I’ve been at the Sound Fascination project, for which in fact Caffeinated Toothpaste was one source of inspiration. But he’s been far more consistent with it, and in this time he’s finished over 800 comics.

Now, it’s exactly this perspective that most people take on this kind of thing: it’s the number finished that’s impressive (and make no mistake, I’m as impressed as anyone with that kind of tenacity and work ethic). We have a pretty strong bias towards the value of finished works.

But as I was writing about beginners last week, it occurred to me that finishing a piece every day like that also requires doing something else every day, and that’s getting started… Josh doesn’t just finish a piece every day; he also begins a new piece every day, and I think that’s a rather remarkable thing that deserves a bit of thought…

Keep starting stuff

I’m talking about what Neil Fiore calls ‘Persistent Starting’. For Dr. Fiore, it’s a way to overcome the procrastinator’s fear of finishing; for me it’s the other half of the equation that lets us keep that ‘beginner’s spark’ going in our creative work even if we’ve long passed out of the novice phase…

The idea, in my version, is basically to just keep starting stuff. New pieces, new projects, new books, blogs, businesses, whatever. Capture the excitement, the energy, the enthusiasm that comes from starting something new, let yourself get carried away. If you’re stuck on one thing, try starting another rather than beating your head against something that is not ready to be finished right now.

Of course I’m not advocating a total lack of commitment to following through. It’s obviously necessary to finish stuff, too. We are likely to be judged by what we finish, not what we start, and that’s probably as it should be. If we never finish what we start there’s likely a problem somewhere in the process and we should probably try to sort that out.

But me, I’d rather leave a trail of glorious beginnings than an endless series of dreams, ideas, hopes and aspirations that never saw the light of day. And I’m speaking as someone with a strong tendency towards exactly that kind of nebulous dreaming and scheming. It’s a beautiful thing, but if I could trade 90% of my potentially great but never-acted-on ideas for the chance to go back and just get started on the other 10% I’d do it in a heartbeat (or at least, I’d give it serious consideration…)

unfinished business

I also, mind you, have a pretty hefty stash of unfinished beginnings, and sometimes I wonder what that says about me. My biggest piece of unfinished business is Symmetricity, a ‘novel with a soundtrack’ that I’ve put something like a thousand hours into and for which my friend Josh is, ironically, listed as the illustrator. I still hope to get back to it at some point, though I may tone it down a bit in terms of ambition. Life being what it is, I’ve begun to see the value of projects that are not so vast in scope…

However, even if I never get back to it at all, I’m happy that I cared enough about it to get started, and I’m not ashamed of it in any way. It was what another friend refers to as an Enthusiastic Projection (Marc is a fantastic guitarist and mandolinist, composer and generally inspiring musician, and Enthusiastic Projections is a long-running side project, which I think I may have actually played on a track of at one point if memory serves). And that name captures something essential about what I’m talking about here: enthusiasm.

It’s not only OK, it’s absolutely essential to let ourselves be irrationally enthusiastic about starting something new, even if experience tells us we might not finish every new thing we start. Especially in that case, in fact. I think the worst thing we can do is get down on ourselves for too much enthusiasm and too little follow-through, and end up jaded and cynical about our own creativity.

wired or tired? your choice…

Josh starts something every day, give or take, and finishes it too. I don’t, although there are mitigating factors involved so I try not to beat myself up about it. But I know that I spend the better part of an hour sometimes puttering away at email and Facebook and so on, and then realize that I’m too tired to get into anything… whereas if I’d started something creative right off the bat then I’d be into it already and have all the energy and momentum that goes along with that, instead of just feeling tired and overwhelmed. So I am really into finding ways to trick myself into just getting started on something, anything, in order to tap into that enthusiastic space.

(That’s very much the spirit behind the Sound Fascination project, as well as another, still somewhat secret I one that I hope to launch soon – watch this space!).

I’d also like to take this opportunity to mention another great ‘beginner’ that’s been on my mind lately, and that’s my uncle (and godfather, whatever that means at this point) Richard Wilcox, who passed away last week… in the words of his beautiful obituary, “Richard was quiet, kind, generous, self-sufficient and, above all, creative. His furniture and paintings fill the house; the garden is graced by his walls, patios and arbours… Richard’s projects were always done properly, often involving the construction of an exquisitely detailed model first… His early passion for traditional small boats culminated in the making of a beautiful cedar and canvas canoe…”

I’ll miss Richard immensely, and will try to channel some of his boundless enthusiasm for launching into a new project as much and as often as I can. And maybe even finish some small fraction of them!

How about you? Have you started something new today?

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