The lady behind the counter was an artist. A barista, she could fashion tiny messages in the cream of the coffee she served. She wrote something to each and every customer.
As a customer, the message depended on what was on the barista’s mind. One man might be told to “have a nice day” by his coffee, another might get a left-leaning political opinion. Another might get a phone number and a small map to the barista’s house.
A cappuccino with a mini-newsfeed.
Cross-legged on the office floor,
Focus, the aim – Can I live like a monk, like a hero, like a God?
Sore, mechanical body bulldozes the spiritual moment. Brain a butterfly flitting to and fro.
A strange automaton wheezing out air and sucking it in again
Filled with inner peace? I fear filling the room with pungent breath.
Soul sucking, boring, dull, dreary and full of people in strange suits? Difficult to break away? In my experience (2 years away from the corporate world) you need to have a few bases covered to successfully leave a corporate job, but it’s no panacea… stress and hard work remain a constant.
Firstly you need to have something to move to. Don’t just leave without a supplementary income. I built up a small business on the sidelines while I spent my days at the corporate office. It grew into something sustainable over 2 years to the point that I could focus on it full time.
Second, get rid of debt. My wife and I went overseas and built up capital in a stronger foreign currency to pay off everything in South Africa before leaving the corporate world. It was probably the best idea we ever had. Debt will drown the best laid plans and entrepreneurial dreams.
Third, be realistic and do it for the right reasons. Chasing one’s passions is different to building a financially sustainable business model. I would love to be a writer or a music producer, but it wasn’t a clear business path for me compared to running a (admittedly boring) risk assessment business. My point is – the life away from the corporate world is not without stress or hard work – and it is not filled with pleasurable activity all day – this is not the aim. The aim is freedom to plan your own day, to answer to yourself and to reap the benefits of hard work. Most pleasure seeking is still on the sidelines even if you leave the corporate life. What I can do now is spend valuable time with my children each morning and evening without the overhanging pressure from a relative stranger back at HQ.
It’s worth it, but work is work no matter who you work for.
I never had any religion or spirituality growing up. I also never felt a lack of moral grounding or sense of wonder at the world. However, I now realise that the most useful thing religion and its rituals can give you are mindfulness and focus. I have never been a particularly focused or driven person. Rather, I have tended to obsess over pleasurable activities like sport, music, video games, drinking and travel. I have also been an anxious person for a long time. Now I am grown up, I need to take control. Enter meditation.
At the core of my meditation practice is bringing my mind back in focus and back to the body and the breathing. It is this active moving of the mind’s focus to what is happening here and now which I believe can be life-changing.
Breaking out of the ruts and grooves in the mind is vital for any change to happen. Meditation can help. Staying present is vital to relief from anxiety. Meditation can help.
Once you start practicing meditation, you begin to look forward to the routine and you begin to miss it when you skip a day.
It helps with such basic skills, but these are skills we need to practice with all the stimulation and distraction in the world today.
They say software is eating the world. In the world of music production, software has given anyone with a computer or an iPad access to multiple sounds and techniques. Is this a valid replacement for the old school methods?
Quincy Jones doesn’t think so. In his recent, infamous interview with Vulture he claims that: “Musical principles exist, man,” he said. “Musicians today can’t go all the way with the music because they haven’t done their homework with the left brain. Music is emotion and science. You don’t have to practice emotion because that comes naturally. Technique is different. If you can’t get your finger between three and four and seven and eight on a piano, you can’t play. You can only get so far without technique. People limit themselves musically, man.”
I agree with him on some of this – A classically trained musician will presumably be able to get more out of a production studio (and an iPad) than I can with my untrained background. But, I also think that convenience and emotion trumps technical proficiency for a reason – it sells. And so we have music-by-numbers.
The internet has let the genie out the bottle. By giving publishing and creative power to anyone with a modem, the internet upended the music industry harder than any other i can think of. Music used to have the perfect model. Scarcity in its production process meant that money was made at an astounding rate, and this could be ploughed back into experimentation within the industry. However with the cash dissipating due to online piracy and access to resources – most songs on the radio are now designed to appeal to the masses, and to guarantee a sale. Much like we tend to have sequel movies at the cinema, new ground is rarely broken in the mainstream music world.
My response to Quincy is – so what? Move out of the mainstream then. What Quincy Jones fails to realise in his interview is that mainstream music is only one type of failing music. In fact, the term ‘mainstream’ and ‘pop’ are becoming less and less important. The internet has built up communities around every kind of genre you can imagine – from classical to afro-electronic beats driven by iPads – you can find it if you want to.
The problem is not a lack of proficient musicians or producers in the world. It is just that Quincy is looking for new things in the old places. And those old places are broken now.
I am learning how to use Twitter. An intimidating place sometimes, Twitter for me is a roller-coaster ride of fumbling around. Like a little kid with training wheels on a bicycle I am wobbling through it.
I get stuck wondering what I actually want to say. In real life I am not particularly outspoken which is something I want to change, but what sort of stuff should I start to be outspoken about? As you can see Twitter raises lots of questions for me to grapple with.
Finding people to follow has been relatively easy. It is creating content that is the hard part for me. I get desperate to put stuff out there into the Twitter-sphere, even if I have nothing coherent to say, and it has bad results!
Today I re-tweeted one of my favourite people on Twitter and the result was a block.
To explain, it was a very heavy tweet to re-tweet (Mau-era China resulting in deaths for millions of Chinese) and I added an extremely vague and poorly written comment, tenuously linking the story to Cape Town’s current drought. I kept the guy’s Twitter handle in there, linking him with my post. It was extremely clumsy and didn’t go down well!
I am devastated and hope he reconsiders. I have written to him to ask for forgiveness. He is one of my favourite people to follow….dammit! Twitter is not coming naturally but I see there may be huge benefits to persevering.
Contrast makes life interesting. Whether it’s art, or social life or in work, having a little light and shade in the mix is essential.
Some examples – The Rolling Stones were good at leaving space in a song. Listen to the verse of “honky tonk woman”…big gaps in there to contrast with the raucous chorus.
Shakespeare’s greatest characters were great because of their lightness and darkness all in one. They had flaws. Hamlet starts off the play hoping to die. In the end he is enlightened. Contrast and tension make the art.
In my work I am similarly trying to merge light and dark of sorts. I trained in environmental management but lacked the financial knowledge that is often critical to getting investment in more environmentally friendly projects. Now I am training as a CFA and hope to have more financial ying to my hippie environmental yang.
Everything interesting has tension and contrast.
In his latest podcast, Russel Brand interviews professor Tony Howard, an expert on Shakespeare. (link) In particular he discusses diversity and themes of parenthood and addiction running through Shakespeare’s work. Howard’s idea is that Shakespeare is one of the greatest reference points for the human condition and for how to best live your life. The interview is fantastic and a reminder of how deep a well-point Shakespeare is for England and the English language. Like the best songs, Shakespeare’s plays give space for consideration. Therefore he is more of a mirror reflecting the truths of humanity for us to consider, rather than a dictation of good versus evil.
The interview pointed me to this poem, The Phoenix and the Turtle: link
I have always found the whole works of Shakespeare daunting. The interviewee refers to the Phoenix and the Turtle poem as a quick and relatively complete introduction to Shakespeare.
I have just started reading it and memories of “A Level English Lit” are flooding back. I thought to share the poem on here too. I will try to reflect on the poem in another post.
This year I resolve that I will dive in to the following:
…and I will pull out of the following:
The biggest challenge here is probably study and work related – How to find time for creativity and learning.
Happy new years.
We are staying in a swanky golf estate up on a hill with views for miles. In the distance at the bottom of the hill I see Knysna central. Far below the trucks rumble down the main road into town, but from the estate they look like small toys for my daughter to play with.
Beyond the town starts the lagoon. Flat from shelter, the water flows, bends and stretches like a snake flexing its muscles, eventually leading you out to sea through two mammoth heads of rock. Here the water hops and jumps to make a choppy swirl – the lagoon meets the vast seas. This all looks like some sort of ancient Oceanic gateway from another world. We are on Olympus. Poseidon will surely come from the depths because the great gate is open.
Fire has ravaged most of the valley below me, but it seemed to pick and choose its victims haphazardly. Anywhere that is within the golf estate has been saved from burning and thick green bush prevails amongst the carpeted fairways and manicured greens. Fairway watering systems surely helped. Elsewhere there are skeletons of houses and whole hillsides are black and naked from the scorching heat. People lost everything. Then there are neighbouring patches, houses, and hills untouched. Unfair.
My gaze is lifted. Baboons have come sauntering up the path eating the protea leaves and fighting with each other for bragging rights. They must love eating the green shoots that are coming up through the ashes.
Chimpwithcans 