Improvisation requires focus and time, two commodities few of us possess. And when you’re waist deep in alligators, it is hard to remember you came to drain the swamp. How can we get focus and time?
Many people we know have read The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss. The title appeals to our inner escapist; we dream of an easier life where the focus is on what we really want to be doing, on our family and friends, on what matters most in our lives. The book describes how anybody can be a Lifestyle Designer, and fund their life with only four hours of work a week. That seems a stretch at best. If you have a “hot cakes” book and an online supplement business like Ferris does, maybe it’s plausible. But we’re too distracted and exhausted to start a business. Is such a radical shift necessary to be happy?
We think the real value of this book is as a set of tools that can help you make time to improvise a more enjoyable, less stressful life. Here are our favorite, truly do-able ideas to fight off the alligators and keep focus on what matters: read more…
We know quite a few people who are working so hard these days, under the constant pressure of all there is to do, that they can’t seem to stop until they hit a wall: they get cold and need to go to bed, or find themselves sitting in front of a computer trying to write and nothing comes. Like us last week. We’ve learned our lesson…
Suddenly, that old Rolling Stones song popped into our head:
From on-the-the road in California and Seattle, in hotel rooms, and in flight, we’ve been reading your thoughtful ideas for taglines, posted in Comments or sent via email – lots of them! Even far from our home base, we feel connected by the community that has grown up around ‘the improvised life’ and awed at the generosity of its readers.
We were putting together a big post about it, with a list of ‘improvised life’ descriptors and taglines that happily boggle the mind, when we found ourselves exhausted, jet-lagged, running-on-empty. We need a rest, we thought…which is part of the deal, of writing, blogging, or making ANYTHING. You’ve got to give yourself permission to stop, and rest, in order to restore the flow. So we are, for a few days. We’ll be back on Thursday, having wandered around the Pike Place Market in Seattle, and drunk some excellent coffee, and recuperated from the red-eye home.
(Meanwhile, we’ve been taking notes on setting up a hotel room “camp” and strategies for surviving on the road. Stay tuned.)
We offer this photo of duct-tape Converse All-Stars as a symbol of what is possible in any given moment.
The other day Reference Library posted an image from the Flickr archive of a brilliant junk collector and “seer” of things. It was of the UNDERSIDE of an old light bulb package: the red-striped ends of its six sides folded into an elegant overlapping “star” like some beautiful Japanese Packaging. The only editorial comment was in the form of the posts title, “Always Turn Shit Over”. Now there’s a life principle! Turn stuff over, on its side, inside-out, upside-down… to get a view you didn’t expect or might not have imagined on your own.
You can do the same thing with ideas: turn them over in your mind, every which way…
Lately, we’ve noticed several odd and very expressive permutations of the word “fling”. Fling/flang/flung aren’t about flinging some THING across the room, but rather describe a PERSON being catapulted, by life…allowing ourselves to being flung, learning lessons, making discoveries, really living. First we read Anne Herbert’s wonderful post in Peace, Love and Noticing the Details:
“Jackson Pollock’s paintings were painted in a time and place where it often seemed that the job of being human was to walk along a straight line that already existed and that other people had walked on.
There was more than one straight line one might choose to walk on, but not many more than one.
Maybe you are trying to find your straight line when actually you are about curving, wiggling streams of many different colors and about drops that are nothing like a perfect circle and exude beauty.
Jackson Pollock didn’t micromanage paint. “Lighten up” can mean let more of the colors in that white light can break into, if asked. Finding your lines, your squiggles, your life might include inventing a new skill and getting good at it, as Jackson Pollock was good at flinging paint.
Fling and be flung and find the life in your life.”
…It reminded us of the incredible use of “flang” we read years ago read more…
Last week, we read an amazing post by Anne Herbert at Peace, Love and Noticing the Details. She described the limited view we’ve been stricken with many times – and offered a simple way out. It is so perfectly and succinctly written, we’re quoting the whole thing right here:
“I can’t do it. All the times I say inside to myself, “I can’t do it,” I could be saying, what the heck, thoughts are easy, ‘I can do it.’
I need to find the knowing how to do it. The brain is vast, deep, includes the whole body. And the body includes the whole world as I hear someone on the street speak who just got back from a place I think of as elsewhere, as I breathe air that who knows where it’s been.
Who knows how to do this that I’ve been telling myself that I can’t do? Maybe me, as is, now, if I get confident, listen to “I can do it,” and sink into what I already know. Maybe I need to hang with someone else who’s been doing it for a while, and watch, listen, move. How big the world.“
Thank you very much, Anne Herbert. You are a gift!
For several years, this sign from Thomas Ashcraft‘s site Heliotown has been my browser’s home page. In all that time, I’ve never tired of it, nor become blind to it (though Tom has since made it invisible on his site, having moved on to other things). Every once in a while, a friend will be over and use my computer to check their email or look something up. When Tom’s sign pops-up they invariably say “That’s SO great; can you email it to me?”. It seems Tom’s words are ones we would all do well to remember. They are another way of saying “answers always come“…”the moment provides“…
You can still enter Heliotown through the sign, a sort of back door…
At ‘the improvised life’ we are big on signs; they make up many of the posts in the Surprise Box and I’ve written about how helpful it can be to tape a sign up on the wall of your office or bedroom to remind you of what’s really important (that we so easily forget), like Holton Rower’s great “Apologize Every Day”.
Kevin Kelly recently wrote about Anne Herbert, a writer he knew in the early ’80′s who edited CoEvolution Quarterly, the companion magazine to Whole Earth Catalog. She is most known for coining the phrase, “Practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty.” Kelly hadn’t been in touch with her in all this time, but remembered her writing:
“…it was telegraphic, lyrical, abbreviated, evocative, extremely personal and mystical. She wrote in short bursts. Like proverbs from a secret bible…It was not like any writing I had encountered…
Everything he says about Herbert’s writing is true. It is often like haiku (without the constraints): tiny meditations that caste a unique light on everyday things. Here are some: read more…
This clip of the the comedian Louis C.K. riffing on Conan O’Brien’s show is a rare combination of REALLY funny and totally wise/smart/true. It is about looking around at what we have, recognizing miracles, counting blessings…
via the Technium, part Kevin Kelly’s vast and amazing site.
This morning in my Inbox, my daily email from Seth Godin‘s blog carried an unexpected gift: a free, downloadable ebook called What Matters Now:
“Here are more than seventy big thinkers, each sharing an idea for you to think about as we head into the new year. From bestselling author Elizabeth Gilbert to brilliant tech thinker Kevin Kelly, from publisher Tim O’Reilly to radio host Dave Ramsey, there are some important people riffing about important ideas here.”
And each of it’s 82 pages is, indeed, inspiring and thought-provoking, REAL. There are interesting and useful takes on Fear, Dignity, Meaning, Ease, Strengths, Technology, Enough, (Dis)trust, and Sleep, to name a few. Many are mightily therapeutic. read more…
On BoingBoing recently, Mark Frauenfelder wrote a terrific overview of Cheap:The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel, who asks “What are we really buying when we insist on getting stuff as cheaply as possible?” The answers are a revelation and worth reading; they range from low-quality food supply and deserted town centers to low wages and the loss of craftsmanship.”Ruppels book offers suggestions for how to get ourselves off “the cheapness drug”, but the real fatso nugget of useful info in Frauenfelder’s post, are the questions he asks himself before buying anything, as he tries to practice her recommendations. read more…
The brilliant Maira Kalman has done another wonderfully illustrated op-ed for her periodic blog “And the Pursuit of Happiness” at the New York Times. This time, it’s about the nature in invention, starting with Benjamin Franklin …
“He believed in doing good.
He made charts and had daily goals…
….He saw a dirty street and created a sanitation department…
He saw people needing an education, and he founded a university….”
….with mentions along the way of Daguerre, Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, rubber bands, bobbi pins, peaches, and an “enterprising beautiful woman in a green jacket and yellow blouse” who ran a jello mold competition in Brooklyn, to name a few. But to me, the very best part of this very great and incredibly beautiful work are the words (above), that everyone should have on their wall (or heart)…except read more…
