Wake Up!

 Our history is one of the slow diminishing of the citizen to that of the consumer. We are now the commodity being sold to the highest bidder. We all sit staring blankly at our phones that have become systems for delivering advertising housed within a thin layer of content. This content, in the old world of print media, used to be produced by professionals. The system was still supported by advertising, but the layer of content was much more meaningful. Today, we are both the amateur producers of the content and the target of the advertising that surrounds it. We spend a good portion of our days receiving advertising and wading through meaningless content. We have become the spectacle. 

What is the escape? Turn off, tune out, and don't participate in the spectacle. The more time we spend looking at our phones, the less time we have to live. If you spend even one hour a day looking at your phone, that's 365 hours a year-- that's nearly 23 16-hour days). If you were to spend 2 hours a day, which is likely a more accurate number, that's 45 16-hour days in a year, a month and-a-half. Imagine if you had done something else with that time? What if you had read a book or even written a book. Produced art, anything but staring at a small screen that is slowly sucking the life out of you. We live in a dead world. Wake up! 

Painting Has Become Significant

I was talking to a friend a couple of weeks ago and he mentioned how good I should feel that I have found something I love doing. There are not many people that find something that can put them into a state of flow where your perception of time seems to disappear. I was a little dismissive, but it was a good observation. When I paint, I do sometimes lose track of time. I can be in my basement studio working on a piece and I will lose all awareness of time, three hours can pass without me even being aware. I will look at the clock on my computer and be surprised by the time. I put this up against my normal day at work where time seems to stand still. 

It doesn't mean I am producing great work that people are clamoring to buy, but it does mean I am producing work which might be the most important thing. How much of our lives can slip away with no sign we were even here. So far, in my painting journey, I have completed 70 paintings. As the years pass, I would like to mark them with at least a couple dozen more per year. If I live 15 more years, that's another 360 paintings. Is that possible? Only time will tell. Here is my most recent work, Maria Callas (14x11 oil on canvas): 

Wasted Life

How did it come to be that alcohol is such an important part of life. Before I start, this is my perspective, which may be more about me than society. Is it just me or is alcohol, a drug, an important part of every social encounter, every weekend, every holiday or special event? If you go to the grocery store, my local Safeway or QFC for example, the alcohol section is the largest section of the store: there is the aisle of beer coolers, the cold wine section and the room temperature wine, and the spirits aisle. and then add the end of aisle displays of beer and wine located next to various sections of the store. How did this come to happen? We have a heroin crisis in the US, but we don't mention alcohol as a major issue? And yet, more people die as the result of alcohol use than die of all the other drugs combined. We clearly have an alcohol crisis in this country. How did we get here?

For one, alcohol has received a free pass for the past 87 years since prohibition ended. Alcohol has been marketed as the most wonderful product, the perfect pairing to all of life's happenings. Get married? Drink! Get divorced? Drink! Graduate? Drink! Get/lose a job? Drink! Regardless of what happens in your life, alcohol is there to make the pain go away or add to the pleasure. That's the message we receive and, seemingly, the one we believe. But, alcohol destroys lives. Ruins marriages. Tears apart families. In fact, scratch the surface of most social issues and alcohol is sitting somewhere in the back of the room contributing to a great many of the problems. I don't know the precise statistics, but something like 40% of all violent crimes are alcohol related. Think about that for a minute. Hear people screaming in the middle of the night? Alcohol. What to do? For one, we could start to be honest about the drug we are dealing with. 

I am not saying that everyone that drinks has a problem, but I do feel that everyone that drinks avoids the idea they are using a drug when they sip that wine or gulp that cocktail. It has to be the only drug that is marketed as being so much fun. Marketing always lies but is there any other product out there where the lies are so thick? Looking at the advertising for alcohol one has the impression it's the greatest product on earth. You can pretty much take any add and end it with a bottle of some sort of alcohol and the ad would make sense as an ad for alcohol because everything has been so distorted. Everything is a time for glass of wine ad. Our heads are so flooded with these messages, and the way we are used to living, that anything that happens has to include alcohol.

Do Better

I suppose it's kind of a childish question: What is the meaning of life? If you try to find an answer by reading philosophy you will encounter the response that it's not a real question because there is no answer that is good enough. What possible response could anyone provide to that question? Love? Art? Caring for others? Leaving the world a better place? Procreation to keep the species going? There is no answer that is satisfying. What are we left with? We look up at the night sky and feel the power of the universe and then we go to bed to face another day. That's about it. One answer could be to continually, up to the very end, strive to be a better version of yourself today than you were yesterday. If you were a fool yesterday strive not to be one today. If you were selfish yesterday, strive not to be selfish today. If you were lazy yesterday, strive to not be lazy today. 

Life has to be about becoming something better each day. The question becomes what constitutes better? I think each of us knows what better could be just as we generally know what doing the right thing means. We intuitively know the right thing to do. 

What am I saying? Listen to that inner voice and let it become the dominate voice, the one that knows you could be better. There is time for all things if we are wise with our time.  

The Difference?

Life is long enough it's just a matter of what we do with that life. 

How is it that some people, having lived much shorter lives, managed to accomplish so much? Did they simply not think in such terms or were they driven by some inner flame that was completely out of their control? There must be some sort of psychological illness involved in accomplishing so much in one life. What drives individuals to churn out a lengthy list of accomplishments? It must be the case that just as deviant behavior can have a cause, the accomplishment of what appear to be worthy goals also has a cause. Something drives that effort that is out of the individual's control. Which is not to say that thing can't be acquired. The question is what is that thing? Is there success that is driven by negatives and another type of success that is driven by positives. 

What truly is the profile of an individual that accomplishes much? What is the thing that drives them to achieve so much? Another question: why does that negative thing drive some towards horrible failure while it drives other towards what we perceive to be incredible success? Where does that "thing" come from? Some people break and die while others become stronger. There must be some outlook on life that separates the two. Grit? Having a center that continues regardless of the outcome of our efforts. Some fail once and fall away, while other fail a thousand times and continue on. Perhaps it comes down to how we see failure? How we learned to see failure? Does failure make us weaker, or does it make us stronger? Is that grit? 

Stimulus and Response

It's an incredible thing to realize I don't have to react to what happens around me without thought. That is, something can happen, and I can decide how to react rather than having some automatic response based upon who knows what. Of course, this is all a slow learning process as in start again, and again, and again… 

This idea of it’s always "Day One" is inspiring. It doesn’t give me a license to fail to live up to the new expectations I have for myself, but it does tell me that when I fail it’s not all over. I start again. Maybe I overreacted to a situation and went into my old ways for a few hours, but then I came back and realized the error. I failed to take a deep breath and own that space between stimulus and response which should be the space where we live.

You are not the Past

Matthias: What is it you want?

Quaid: I want to remember.

Matthias: Why?

Quaid: So I can be myself. Be who I was. 

Matthias: It is each man's quest to find out who he truly is, but the answer to that lies in the present, not in the past. The past is a construct of the mind and fools us. The heart knows who we are. Your answer lies there. 

Total Recall, 2017

When I heard the above dialogue while watching a movie on a flight, I had to stop the movie and rewind a few times to write it down. How often do we allow the past to construct who we are, when in fact we are a new person each day with new choices to make. How often are we stuck with this idea that who we are is a composite of everything that has happened to us, when, given our mental abilities, we have the freedom to decide who we want to be. That's a hard thing to take. We are free to choose how we want to respond to our circumstances, and after all, isn't that what a person is? We are creatures that respond to external stimulation. One person is not able to see beyond their conditioning, they are like Pavlov's dogs, while the other takes each situation as it comes and adapts a new response. We are stuck in the past and use it as a lazy way to respond to the world. It is when we drop the past and see the world as it is that we are able to exist at a higher level. We can think the world is a conspiracy to undermine us, or a conspiracy to aid us in reaching our objectives. Both may be equally wrong, but which is more productive? 

From this day forward, I will look at events from a different perspective. One that comes from the idea that these things never happened to me before. My response can be one of love rather than one of, "Here we go again." How much more rich could our lives be if we didn't simply respond based upon our conditioning? Be well.