From WordPress. I’m pulling this blog off of WordPress to its own website, the fabulous and amazing…

STUFFMAKESSTUFF.COM!

Hoorah, hoorah, hooray.

What does this mean? Well, this is the last post I’ll be making here on WordPress. So say goodbye. Also, if you’re subscribed to my WordPress account, go subscribe to the new website instead!

The new site will feature the blog, the podcast, and a whole new community of adventurers who have a passion for living each day to remember.

All in all, this move will be amazing. I hope to accomplish so much more with the new site, from the weekly blog posts to some amazing podcasts featuring even more amazing people. And who knows? Maybe more. For now, however, head on over there and check out the new adventures I’ll be having.

Peace.
Hayden

In light of that busy stuff, it completely slipped my mind to post this yesterday, so if you were looking for the weekend post, I apologize that I did not get it up yesterday! Here it is now.

If you’ve been following my posts the last few weeks, I’ve been talking a lot about walking. Taking a walk to work or school or coffee instead of driving is something that seems very inconvenient to us in our fast-paced world of Pandora-fueled drives and carpooling, but it is something that has revolutionized my time. I look forward to the times I take to slow down and walk, because they allow me to experience the world so much as my own person in ways I never have before.

So I’ve challenged you to take a walk, and today I’d like to challenge you to show me where you’ve walked. Take a picture of what you discover, and email it to me, or send me the link to the website for the bookstore you stumbled into but never knew was there. Tag me in your Instagram post of the selfie you took with the man and his dog that walk that road every day. Whatever it is, whoever you are, wherever you are, I want to see it.

Send me stuff anytime between now, and March 14th, and I’ll feature the best/most creative/most outgoing submissions on that day’s blog post.

Show us where you walk!

Peace,
Hayden

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about taking a normal part of your life that you drive, and walk it instead of driving. You can read the post here, which went into a little bit of depth about the small space of time that walking provides, and the breath of discovery with which it will fill your lungs. You’ll find new things, maybe meet new people, and definitely enjoy the whiz of cars as they rush past you at your gentle walking pace.

There is, however, one thing that perhaps seems a downside to taking time to walk: you will probably be walking alone. ALONE is a fairly scary word to most of us. It seems we dread it, and I think even the extreme introvert would suffer being truly without other humans. The presence of other people is something we were meant to crave, and the fulfillment we get from being part of a community – even if it’s just one other person – is entirely satisfying…possibly even relaxing. And even as you walk, you won’t be alone. You’ll have your phone, or your iPod for music, or the knowledge that someone wants you, and those are all great, incredible things to have.

There is, however, a difference between the aloneness you experience in the few minutes you could take to walk to work, and another feeling that you may have experienced when someone else leaves you; abandoned. When another person, or several other people, leave you behind or desert you, that is when you feel truly alone; abandoned, deceived, betrayed, deserted, forsaken, jilted. I know there are probably some of you who have never felt this way, but for the majority of people, I feel safe to say you have felt with some strength an aloneness that only comes when a person you trust, rely on, or love just…leaves. It’s the only aloneness that really matters, isn’t it? That, I think, is the aloneness that we all fear, because in that aloneness, we are left with nothing but ourselves. When someone abandons you, you are suddenly hit with the fact that you are a solitary person by yourself. And that is scary.

But let me be one to challenge that fear, and say that aloneness, in spite of how hurtful and horrifying it is, can actually be a good thing. If you took my challenge to go for a walk, you may have noticed some things that are hardly present in the rest of life: your own thoughts. Your thoughts on the life around you, the whizzing cars and the people you passed and the sounds. So much can be experienced through a single sound, and being alone really helps you to experience each and every sound, thought, and emotion on your own and – more importantly – as your own.

In my experience of abandonment, when someone leaves you, you’re left with just those thoughts. There is the pain of betrayal, but there is also the opportunity to truly explore who you are, and what you think. Without the presence of another individual, the world becomes your own as you view it. If you went for a walk, you probably felt a little bit of this; when I walked to work the other day, I felt the cold swish of air with each passing car, and the different textures of the concrete sidewalk, and the smells of the donut shop that ended up luring me into its doors. While I may have experienced these things had I been walking with someone else, I don’t think I would have attached myself to them so prominently had I not been completely alone.

So let me leave you with a challenge: next time you are abandoned, embrace it. Feel what it’s like to be alone, without people, living life and adventuring by yourself, and remember that feeling. You may have to push through some pain, but the knowledge of yourself and a love the world around you will be so rewarding. In fact, double-challenge: not only should you walk to work tomorrow, but you should walk to work the day after that person abandons you, and every day after that…just so you can begin each day as your own person, with your own world of cars and concrete sidewalks and donut shops in which you can thrive.

Even if it means you thrive alone.

Peace,
Hayden

I’m starting a podcast to accompany the posts I do on Wednesdays. The podcast will feature conversations with people who inspire the weekly posts, just so that you can discover more of where I am personally inspired each week. Of course, this means I’m going to need to be more on top of posting regularly, and I’d like to say I’ll put an episode out every two weeks, but we’ll see how it goes. Right now I don’t even have the money to afford space online to store the episode files, but I’m looking to upgrade my blog to a full-fledged website soon (www.stuffmakesstuff.com sounds so pretty), and will be able to host regular podcasts with that so that you can enjoy them with ease on your iPhones and iPads and HTC1’s.

You can check out this week’s blog post here, and for the moment, I hope you enjoy the player below which features the very first episode of Stuff Makes Stuff: The Podcast:

If you did enjoy this, please share it! I was up till 3am last night working on it, and it would mean the world to me to know that a phone call I had with one of my favorite musicians had an impact on your life.

Peace,
Hayden

Some of you may not know where that name comes from. The original name of my blog, One Little Corner, takes its name from a song written by a man named Jon Troast. Troast is not only a musician, but a wanderer, and a doer of things. He’s a great example of someone who lives up to the calling of adventurer. Troast has spent the last several years touring the United States and performing “house concerts”; in simple terms, he comes to your house, performs an hour of his music, and if you’re nice, he’ll even sleep on your couch.

Right around when I was first introduced to Jon’s music, he released a song called “One Little Corner”. The song starts with this strumming guitar and crooning of a violin and I think I immediately fell in touch with it. The sweeping melody picks you up and pushes you right into the first verse: “When you feel helpless / Your life’s a mess / You’re so tired / But you can’t rest / When you’ve gone crazy / You’ve lost control / Your feet can’t find the floor”.

So let’s stop right there. How often do you feel this way? So completely overwhelmed by everything, helpless, hopeless, unable to move forward or press on. I think for the wanderer and the doer of things, life feels this way all the time. You want to pick up and go, but suddenly you remember your car payments and work schedule and family dinners and laundry that needs folding and kids that need kissing and friends that need to grab a beer, and suddenly…your adventure seems impossible because of all the impossible things you need to get done first. As Jon puts it in the second verse, “Well, soon enough / It’s twice as high / Cause stuff makes stuff”.

I recently interviewed Jon about how he wrote the song, and the story itself is excellent: “Winter of 2008, I had been doing some touring that fall, and I got back, and before I had left I had put a bunch of stuff into storage and was going to be moving into a new place when I got back from that tour. So I got back and the new place wasn’t quite ready…there wasn’t an official move-in date, so at the time I didn’t have a place to live. But I talked to a friend of mine and he said I could stay with him for a week or two until the new place was ready, so I was at his place and feeling very — I don’t know — unsettled, just because some of my stuff was still in my car and then I had a few things stored at his place and a lot of my stuff was in the garage at this place I was moving into, and I was getting ready to set up another tour, and I just felt like I couldn’t undertake that in my current surroundings.

“So instead of getting overwhelmed with all I was trying to take on, I thought if I could just start on something, just one thing, focus on that and then move on from there. So I really just kind of poured myself into songwriting, and I wrote I think a song a day for six or seven days in a row. And one of the songs I wrote during that week-long period was “One Little Corner”, which talks about not getting overwhelmed with the big tour you’re setting up, or the fact that your stuff’s scattered all over, or the fact that you are looking for a job and trying to find a house, or, you know, whatever your circumstance might be. Fix the toilet and the sink and the water heater; just focus on one — whatever you can get done for that next little while, and when that’s done start looking around for the next project or step or whatever it may be, and just not get overwhelmed with the whole lot.”

The chorus goes: “Just find one little corner / Put it in order / Stay there till you feel like you’re alright / Then look out to the others / Soon you’ll discover / The peaceful little corners of your life”. And this here is the key. It’s why my blog was named after the song, and why it steals its current name from one of my favorite lines ever written.

If you ever find yourself in a place where all this stuff is weighing on your head — bills and relationships and interviews and lack of sleep and the drive to work and that paper you need to write and the hurts from the past — slow down, take a breath, and pick one of those things. Do one little thing at a time. As Bill Murray would say, “Baby steps.” If you look at the whole mess as it is, you will be overwhelmed and you will stay overwhelmed until you stress yourself out and end up really being hurt; but if you break that mess up into tiny chunks, and just take on a tiny chunk at a time, eventually, you will learn to handle bigger chunks and bigger corners and soon you will discover peace. I’ve learned this through the stress of failed relationships and failed classes and failing health, all of which hit me at roughly the same time last year — just taking one little corner of one of those things and working on that helped make the stuff not so much and the whole mess seem a lot more manageable. I know the last few posts have been about taking huge steps forward and adventuring worth into the world, but sometimes we need to take those adventures on step at a time. I’ll leave you with this quote from Mr. Bilbo Baggins:

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

Peace,
Hayden

Secret Staircases

Peace,
Hayden

I think a lot of people think I had a pretty heartbreaking 2013, and yeah, there were a lot of really shitty moments. But through all of the bad, there is one particularly sad night that I remember, and that’s the night I finally watched the series finale of NBC’s The Office. There was so much emotion that hour of television brought out of me; I was just so sad to see it go. Maybe it represented something, but after you become so attached to people like that, and then know they’re leaving forever…I don’t know. It’s pretty beautifully sad. I bring this up because there were some things said by some of the characters from that show in that final episode that really show what life is:

Andy Bernard said, “I wish there was a way to know that you were in the good old times before you’ve actually left them. Someone should write a song about that.” And then Jim Halpert said, “Imagine going back and watching a tape of your life. You could see yourself change and make mistakes and grow up. You could watch yourself fall in love, watch yourself become a husband, become a father. You guys gave that to me, and that’s an amazing gift.” And these two things really struck me that night; even tonight as I rewatched the episode to find these quotes, it made me smile and sad at the same time.

These days, the days that you’re living right now — they are literally the only days that you have. You don’t know anything beyond this; you have no assurance that tomorrow is going to happen. I’ve talked about this before, the fact that today is the only day you’ve got, but I want to reiterate: live today up. Really live!

But that’s hard in today’s world of freeways and drive-thru coffee kiosks. How can we live like today is today and today is the only day we’ve got when we are so focused on the fact that we’ve got to sign our life and money away to the government by April 15th? Honestly, it’s really hard, and some of us do need to live for the tomorrow, the next week, the lifetime of our children that we don’t know for sure will even exist. So what I’m not saying is that you should give up on the future. What I am saying is that you should live today so that it is worth remembering in that future.

Do something every single day so that when you get to the next day, you can look back and remember the day before. I promise you that if you do that, when you get to the future, you’re going to look back to the past and it will be the “good old days” that Andy talks about.

Want a practical thing you can do? I’d recommend taking one of the small journeys you make in your life with a car, and walk it instead of driving. If you live relatively close to your work, leave an hour earlier and walk, or if you typically drive to school, leave earlier and walk. When we drive places, we often miss a lot of things along the road because we’re so focused on being safe while driving…or at least not speeding enough to get a ticket. The other day, I walked to work and discovered a donut shop that I didn’t even know existed. And I’ve been working there for two years, driving past the donut shop almost every single day. And they had the best jelly donut I’ve had in my entire life.

I would never have discovered that jelly donut if I had kept driving. And that jelly donut made that day worth remembering. So maybe today, or tomorrow, or the next day, skip driving. Skip spending gas, skip the five minutes that it would take you to get to work, and walk there. It’ll be longer, it’ll be more work, but it will be so worth it in the end because you will experience so much more of what exists along that drive. And then every time you take that drive in your car again, you’ll notice that donut shop or that bookstore or that tree or that garbage pile and remember the day you discovered it by walking. I guarantee it will make your life that much more full and adventurous. You just have to do like I said in my last post, and cultivate a taste for the mild discomfort that is walking.

What does this all have to do with Atticus Finch? I just really like this picture of him walking:

Peace,
Hayden

I woke up this morning and realized something: I really hate the fact that my society is run by teenagers. I mean, think about it: some stupid girl releases some stupid song about the fact that she doesn’t care about crashing her car into a bridge, and all the teenagers love it. They eat it up. They go crazy, singing and dancing to it all the time. It’s on every social network, at every party. You go to bed hearing it, and you wake up and it’s already playing on your computer. Like, when did destruction and anarchy have to be the anthem of the whole world? Can’t we just sit down, fit in, and be normal? God.

I’m seventeen years old, and I already hate the society I’m born into. This stupid race that practically forces me into writing about how much I hate it.

That’s when I realize that I’m writing a book about how much I hate my world, and expecting that that same world will cling to every word I type like tiny bubbles of oxygen as they sink to the bottom of the pool of their own stupidity. I expect my book to change the world, and make my society a better place that is not run by teenagers, but then I realize that I am a teenager trying to change the world.

Trying to run society.

And then I realize that it’s just a loop. A loop from one person being mad and fed up, and trying to change things about his – or her – life, but that person can only do so by fitting perfectly into the very system that he – or she – is trying to break and change for the better.

See? It’s a loop. Around and around it goes, and nobody knows how to break it. That almost rhymed.

I realize that there’s really no way for me to break it. And that sentence just repeats itself over and over and over in my head, varying in the drama with which I emphasize it:

There’s no way for me to break it.
There’s NO way for me to break it.
There’s no way. For me. To break it.
There’s…no way for me to break it. *Sigh*

This just goes around and around and around in my head, until it very suddenly runs out of my head as I realize something. Just as this sinking realization circles my head, and my novel realization then breaks the circle, so some novel outer force might just break the loop.

As society drives around and around and around on its little loop, listening to the same stupid songs and moving to the same stupid dance, something – or someone – might just come along and break it. Like a car breaks when it crashes into a bridge.

And that’s when I realize that the only way for me to really kickstart that break is to do this.

The End

To start, I’ve been considering some things in this post for some time. A few months of thought, actually, have gone into this post, and it has even made itself into some of the other things I’ve been writing lately. I think it has been mainly subconscious, and it is actually quite perfect that it falls to be posted this week.

I’ve noticed a trend lately where people either actively avoid or have no endurance/appreciation for any discomfort whatsoever. Because people avoid that which is uncomfortable, I think there is a tendency to avoid moving or changing or doing something that is different — not even hard, but just…uncomfortable. I started this year wondering if this trend was due to cultural shifts, or changes in expectations of sexual and societal norms, or if it was just because of an increase in a tolerance for comfortability. I have yet to figure this out, but have been exploring it through my recent posts, thought life, and actions.

Every once in awhile, maybe only once in your life, if at all, if you are very lucky, you will meet a person who divides it to the time before you met them and the time after. There are people who stand out, who make a difference, who inspire. My friend Rebecca is one of those people. And why is it that I delayed posting this week? Because this week, today, this Thursday is her birthday. In honor of that, I delayed my post to tell you a little bit about her.

Rebecca is first and foremost dedicated to her God. This love for her Lord — the promise of relationship and adoration from her Savior — is what pushes her, inspires her, leads her, and fills her with wonder. In the last letter I received from her, Rebecca opened with a verse from 1st Peter.

Which leads me to another thing Rebecca is: insightful, wise…and empathetically so. That verse came right when I needed it, refreshed me and was so true to what was happening in my life. I think without knowing it, Rebecca speaks and gives her friends the words that their very soul needs to hear.

Rebecca is bold with her words. Unafraid to say what needs to be said. She may think she does not know what to say, but she is appropriate with what she does say and do, and does not seek to hurt. What gives her the boldness I see in her? Rebecca is not afraid to be uncomfortable. She has cultivated a taste for mild discomfort, and with this, adventure.

Almost a year after I met her, Rebecca moved from her home in Modesto to a new city far away. When she moved, she had $7 in her pocket and no job. She was moving from the home she was practically born in to a city she barely knew at all. She took what little possessions and clothes she knew she needed, and all alone, ventured out with complete trust that she would be okay.

No matter how poor she was. No matter how much work it would take, no matter how many sleepless nights. No matter how completely alone she would be. Rebecca took a leap of faith.

Sometimes, we grow so okay with the familiar — with the house we’ve grown up in, the people we’ve seen every day, the job we know will bring us a solid paycheck — that we forget just how much we are already loved. Just how safe we are. Faith is assurance of things unseen, and sometimes we surround ourselves only with things we see every day that we forget what faith is all about: faith is trusting that no matter how much discomfort we experience, we will continually be loved, taken care of, and secure.

I think we can all learn from Rebecca’s purpose to adventure and live for something greater than the life she knows will work for her. Instead, she seeks what she is called towards, because where she has been called is the very best life. Even though it’s scary and alone. Sometimes, we have to be okay with being scared and alone because it’s when we take those leaps of faith that we see just how much we are supported.

Happy birthday, Rebecca. You’re an incredible girl and a fantastic friend. Keep on wandering.

Peace,
Hayden

My future seems uncertain.
With problems I’m perplexed —
Oh, well, I’ll still look forward
To the future after next.

Keeping looking forward, people.

Peace,
Hayden