Some months ago I supported a PledgeMe campaign to get Matthew Dentith, who has a PhD in conspiracy theories, to a conference in Miami. Today I received a postcard that made my day; it started as “I have seen 8 alien shape-shifting reptiles…”
Nice to see that Matthew is enjoying the US’s conspiratorial environment.
I don’t believe in New Year resolutions: the idea that people have to wait until this particular position of the orbit around the sun to start doing something. At the same time, I am not great at sticking with changes of behavior: I get distracted easily and I trace it back to losing momentum. Once I stop I find it very difficult to restart.
Yesterday—Tuesday 27 January—I decided to fix at least one thing at home every day, so I can one day be up to date with all the DIY and TLC the house needs. It can be working in a big project or as simple as hanging a picture, but I have to do something. In reality I have been doing this since mid-December, but I prefer to formalize it just to keep momentum. Keep on moving forward; that simple.
Often times we experience mental paralysis: we can only see a problem, a situation or a person from a single point of view (mea culpa). Some times the single mindedness of our view point becomes so bad that we inexorably drift to complete silliness. This is the case when one keeps on insisting on a point that has been shown to be, how to put it, wrong.
Photography is a fascinating hobby. I think it was around 30 years ago, may be a bit earlier, that I started taking it more seriously. Learned to process film and to use an enlarger and to witness the magic of an image slowly appearing on paper submerged in developer, while a dim red light bathed the room. A few years later I stopped taking pictures, mostly due to economic problems: I was not able to even buy film, let alone to process it. Photography stayed dormant for many years, then resurfaced in the digital area, but it did not feel the same.
Where was I? Point of view. Now I can see my son taking pictures and something clicked—pun intended—in my mind. His point of view is related to mine but with no composition or any other restrictions (and all pictures come from half a meter below my normal eye level). The “problems” I see are many times not there any more.
We slowly, and often unknowingly, become role models. We transmit at least part of our points of view, which is a really scary thought. The way we move our hands, our tone of voice, our way to view the world are absorbed and learned. Once I understood this I could start polishing my self, try to become more flexible, perhaps even more tolerant, because my point of view—or at least parts of it—will live on, even when coming from half a meter below.
P.S. I posted this text in my other blog on 2011-01-23 and it reappears here as part of my blog consolidation process.