“Run outside. Take a picture of the first thing you see. Run inside. Take a picture of the second thing you see. Write about the connection between these two random objects, people, or scenes.”
These two images are from my workaday world. On the left is the view out of my office window, as the weather is quite awful outside I chose not to just dash outside. The picture on the right is inside my office and features one of my favorite things on my desk, my very evocative Edison bulb desk lamp. It’s cold outside, the weather is just beginning to demonstrate how surprisingly variable it can be, thanks in no small part to climate change. It’s not that the world will actually warm up, although it very well might just do that very thing, I rather suspect we’ll see more variability in the weather patterns instead.
Cold and Hot, as well, perhaps even impersonal and inviting. Once you start spotting dualities they can sometimes just carry you off. It’s not that there are just a finite set of dualities either, and I’m sure including more pictures would just add to this particular sense of contrast that we see here. I don’t really find the outside to be that compelling except during the spring, or I should say the true spring and not the false springs that appear now midway through winter on accident. There is more stability and comfort in the Edison bulb. This simple and anachronistic bit of technology emits a very warm yellow glow that in the early mornings and late evenings gives my office a very subtle old-world atmosphere. I’ve written before about my affections for both the bleeding edge of technology and the anachronistic throwback technology of the deep past living contemporaneously together and I will always posit that the very old and the very new belong together and that there is wisdom in keeping things that are throwbacks around because you never know when something that has been well-tested may become all important when conditions change and the newest technology cannot cope with changing environments. The classic example i use is how an electromagnetic pulse could render all my bleeding edge technology useless but my Edison bulb and my mechanical hand-wound pocket watch will continue on. This mixing of the newest and oldest makes a lot of sense and speaks to infinite diversity in infinite combinations, something that everyone should take away from Star Trek if you are as earnest about that series as I am. That respecting diversity, even when it comes to levels of technology are vital for survival because you may not have the neat whiz-bang working all the time while the older bits of tech continue to chug along. I keep a fountain pen in my bag because I trust the classics more, as there are no moving parts to a fountain pen other than it’s ink. Older items, or items that harken back to the bygone days are also important to remind you that the world still has room for elegance and simplicity and that complexity, while dazzling isn’t the pinnacle of living.
This connection between the new and the old also is playing out in another part of my life, as I am using something very new, my Day One app, to do something that at least speaks to the past, which is journaling. I write everything in the journal and then selectively share either on my blog or on social media, depending on the level of security and privacy that my writings require. I’ve discovered that over the past few years I’ve accidentally logged every day of my life in Twitter, at 140 characters at a time and including these bits in my Day One journal is cementing my past so that years from now I won’t have to ever wonder about what I’ve experienced and when it happened, there will be a log of it. I’ve found journaling to be a very mixed bag of motives, right now I feel like a digital squirrel bounding all over collecting and burying bits of my past in a safe place – but eventually I will browse this resource and think about what has happened to me and perhaps I’ll learn more about myself or at least remember more of what it was like to be me during that time in my life. On an expanded tangent I sometimes wish I could include journaled stories from my parents and their generation. The things they experienced and the feelings they felt, shared with the younger ones amongst us. I’m very enamored of the idea of learning this way, not from prepared texts that have been curated and vetted, but from personal experience with all its rich colors and opportunities for interpretation and even its foibles and pitfalls. Much of this resembles the StoryCorps project, where the stories of the past are recorded. This is a wonderful place to start browsing, if you are engaged with this idea, and I think the power of journaling speaks to this and maybe someday I’ll get enough bravery to publish all that I have written, maybe some of it will be useful to someone else in the future.
