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.
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.
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.
I always WANT to write something amazing in my blog posts, I really do.
I have visions of an eager subscriber looking forward to daily pieces from my blog. Content so damn good and interesting that it hits a sweet spot in the reader’s brain. Like drinking a coke or listening to a great tune, my writing in my dreams is good enough to build a career on top of.
But…
But I can’t even think straight at the moment with 2nd child exhaustion syndrome. No sleep = no brain functionality = no good writing.
I am struggling to even poor a cup of tea, let alone inspire the world with wordcraft.
Bear with me and my blog though, apparently the little critters grow older and easier with time! Either that or the parents collapse and never ever recover.
I hope it’s the first one.
If I follow you on Twitter, I have been trawling through your followers and people you follow with a feverish obsession!
You see, I just re-joined twitter after a long break. Although @chimpwithcans was posting my blog posts automatically, I was not using the service actively. Now I have started actively following and posting, I am trying to find the best people to follow. Trying to find peers.
I am not interested in how many followers a person has, but I am interested in whether they are my type of person. This is hard to measure though. It involves experimentation, dedication to reading posts, trying out following people who I think may be of interest. Dropping those who are not.
I think it could be worth it. Finding a peer group and working with them, intentionally and on a regular basis, would be a great thing to get out of social media.
When you are trying to make a contribution, there is not shortcut – particularly if you are not part of an ‘old boys network’ automatically getting your foot into the door – instead you have to start with becoming skilled. This takes practice and effort. Nothing more, nothing less.
Take the wildlife artist who can show a progression from school day sketches to celebrated conservation art: see link
Or the ESG researcher who has worked their way up to be in charge of a whole department: see link
The question then becomes not “who do you know” but “what can you do”. That is far more fair on all involved.
The concept of ‘networking’ has always been a hard pill for me to swallow. It always seemed like it was forcing something that wasn’t there naturally. The smooth handshake and business card, wearing a suit with a flash smile to win someone over – it’s just not me.
I have a different perspective now. Networking and leveraging your network is something that defines us as humans. It calls back to our tribal roots and it is unavoidable. Essential.
However, the pace at which networking operates is much slower than I thought when I was younger. A good impression here and there adds up over time, until you get referrals, or you give referrals to someone in your network.
A strong network should have some key attributes:
A network is extremely valuable. Greater than the sum of its parts, it is a safety net to weather any storm.
Chimpwithcans 