Tag: Salamander City

How do you Deal with the Daunt?

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What is it about new beginnings that makes them so exciting?  The thrill of the unknown?  Or, more:  what makes us bite off more than we can chew when we start something fresh?

Let’s say that you love movies.  You watch the special features on new DVDs, you read interviews with the production crews and the cast, you attend new releases the night they come out, sometimes go to advanced screenings.  Or maybe you don’t.  Maybe you just love movies and watch the same old ones you used to like, once in a while when you feel like it.

And you decide to become a filmmaker.  How does that even happen?  Do you start with your phone camera, taking little snippets of things and editing them together?  Do you find a cheap or free video editing program for your computer?  Maybe you want to be the next James Cameron, but you know as much about focal length and lighting a set as a fish knows about toboggans.  Where do you start?

The bigger question is, how do you overcome the trepidation of trying to do something you’re not just unprepared to do, but vastly so?  You have years of work ahead, dedication, perseverance, luck, trials, failures, and work, work work.  How do you push yourself to pick up your little digital camera and start noodling with the buttons to figure out what the heck they do, on a given Sunday afternoon in the hour before you go get groceries?

Have you tried this?  It’s extraordinarily difficult.  Why decide to push a boulder up a mountain when you can just stroll by?

But that is what we do, so often.  That is what James Cameron did, and any other great achiever.  It is also what you do when you enter into a relationship with someone new, or sign a mortgage, or get a new job.  You may consign its ups and downs to a simple daily effort, but it is a much larger scale project than that.  And the projects you see as enormous, like a career in filmmaking, are made much the same way:  with a simple daily effort, over a long time.

cabpanora

This is a panorama of the cabin at Salamander City, not long after I started in on it (click to see a larger image).

I tossed some things in there I thought I’d need.  Gloves.  A ladder.  A table.  Some water so I could stay hydrated while I tried to figure out what to do and how to do it.  I didn’t know I’d need borate salts, or sandable silicon, or rust-proof copper meshing, or telephone pole pieces, or that I’d deal with an incompetent excavator or a quarry deliveryman or an angry retired county clerk, or that I’d learn how to heat a bath using a woodstove or divert water using a french drain or cut curved coping into logs to fit them together.

I just knew I wanted to try to restore and enhance this cabin and property.  And the way to do it was one small step at a time.

This week a new page on this topic is posted here:  Tabula Rasa part 2.

What gargantuan projects have you taken on, and how do you deal with the daunt?

The Triumph of Tranquility

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NYC
New York City.  A symbol of human achievement.  Countless busy souls have spent their lives here, crafting.  Building the engines that make the world work

If I were to ask you what your idea of bliss is, what would you say?

I asked a few people, and the answers tended to fall into a few categories:  financial windfall, tropical relocation, and sex with an ideal partner.  They all make a kind of sense we can understand.  Who wouldn’t like to have these?  But for the most part, when asked what bliss meant to them, folks presented a version of inactivity.  Being someplace special or having some kind of amenity at their disposal was wrapped up in it, but they mostly just want to relax.  To sit in place in the sun on the beach as the tide rolls out.  To recline in an old chair by the fire and read a good book.  To leave work so they can travel overseas and just see things.  No labor, no projects, no purpose except to enjoy.

But for me, pursuit of a purpose and enjoyment are inextricable.  My idea of bliss is to choose a thing that I want to work on and accomplish, and to be able to do it, unfettered by responsibilities that interrupt and steal time.  The idea of total inactivity does not appeal to me, except after a long day of work.  Doing nothing, experience has told me, is actually awful.

Nest
This empty bird’s nest at my camp in the Adirondacks is also a labor, but one to create a space for peaceful safety.  A toil to escape toil.

I have been wrapped up in the race of purpose my whole life.  Every day, finding the motivation to pursue, pursue, pursue.  Imagine the great things I can do, then fall in love with the work of doing them.  Then, exult in the accomplishment by imagining the next thing.  I have disconnected with the part of me that slows down and finds solace of any kind in relaxation for the sake of relaxation.  Relaxation that is not just a relief from some labor of some kind, but is an intentional act.  An occupation of itself.

And I have chosen this.  But I did not know how deeply this disconnect was affecting me until recently in my life.  Until I forced myself to experience the other side of the coin.  As it turned out, doing this was extraordinarily difficult.  But the rewards are many.  I am still trying to grasp the triumph of tranquility, the purpose-that-is-unpurpose.  And it is not bliss, at least not to me.   But it is valuable, for a different reason.  It is a widening of one’s cumulative intellect:  There are whole worlds of perception and understanding within lengthy, peaceful repose that are invisible to the eternally goal-driven mind.

If you’d like to read about how I came to this understanding, and see some pictures of the setting for the experience, click here.