I’m a bit dead in the water at the moment, nothing brilliant emerging upstairs, no flow happening if I try to do stuff anyway. Finally got my spray paint a while ago to finish those frames, but had lost all steam in the meantime when it came to showing the result.
This morning it occurred to me that perhaps this is a unique opportunity to dig into all those project ideas (well one or two of them) that I just make a note of but never begin because time.
“It is a silver morning like any other. I am at my desk. Then the phone rings, or someone raps at the door. I am deep in the machinery of my wits. Reluctantly I rise, I answer the phone or I open the door. And the thought which I had in hand, or almost in hand, is gone. Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart — to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.
It’s been a while since we had one of these posts! In fact this has been sitting as a draft for a year today exactly. So I’ll release it into the wild with one newly found link as well as the ones I found last year.
and
Plastered plants with a How To
You know, after a while doing other things, I somehow forget how to think in blog-speak. I’ve been contemplating the difference between sharing your projects often vs. not sharing at all until a whole big thing is done. For the former you need to come up with finished items to show, tailored for the blog, which can be a rushed affair with focus on the telling, not the making, forever trying to create variation – it has suited me well enough since I do thrive best with more than one type of activity, but if you become too ambitious you can lose your breath all of a sudden. This typically happens to me with daily challenges for instance, especially when “the world” pounces on you mid project and sucks your batteries dry.
As we get older, we focus more on specialized knowledge than broader learning. A new paper argues that’s slowing us down.
Well, I may be deluding myself of course, but I feel every bit as sharp as I did 30 years ago. If I needed to learn a new language for example, I’d assume I could just go ahead and do so. How about you?
Source: How Thinking Like a Little Kid Can Keep You Sharp As You Age — Science of Us
