Life is for the living

A friend of mine is almost finished with college and planning a 6 month trek from Western Europe through the Middle East and across the breadth of Asia.  Someone might say he's taking a big risk by not diving into the job market straight out of school.  I say that we need to grab every opportunity that allows us to truly enjoy life, and if such an opportunity does not present itself, then fucking make it happen.  The biggest risk is waiting a lifetime to truly live.

"First I was dying to finish high school and start college. And then I was dying to finish college and start working.
Then I was dying to marry and have children.
And then I was dying for my children to grow old enough so I could
go back to work.  But then I was dying to retire.
And now, I am dying... And suddenly I realized I forgot to live."
- unknown

"We live as if we are never going to die.
We die as if we have never lived."
-unknown

... I wasn't able to dig up an author for either quote, but the message is what is important here.

The Green Post

Over the past few months I've been steadily increasing my weekly intake of sustainable lifestyle and design knowledge. To those who are interested, here are some of the highlights...

Cradle to Cradle [link]
Of all of the books I've read this year, this may be the best. The authors argue that any system that requires regulation to do less harm, is a system in distress and in need of redesign. Simply put, they are pioneering the next industrial revolution, one where the very concept of waste is eliminated. Here's the copy & paste from mcdonough.com:

William McDonough's book, written with his colleague, the German chemist Michael Braungart, is a manifesto calling for the transformation of human industry through ecologically intelligent design. Through historical sketches on the roots of the industrial revolution; commentary on science, nature and society; descriptions of key design principles; and compelling examples of innovative products and business strategies already reshaping the marketplace, McDonough and Braungart make the case that an industrial system that "takes, makes and wastes" can become a creator of goods and services that generate ecological, social and economic value.

The Story of Stuff [www.storyofstuff.com]
When we throw something "away", where exactly is "away"? How is it possible to buy a cute little green radio for $4.99 at Radio Shack, when the materials and labor to create and sell that radio should cost way more than $5? This short video provides some perspective on the lifespan of products. Again, here's a blurb:

From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It'll teach you something, it'll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.

Time: The Clean Energy Scam [link]
I read this article in Time magazine published a year ago, and hope that views on ethanol and biodeisel as "green" fuels have started to change since then. The big picture is much dirtier than the emissions would indicate.

"People don't want to believe renewable fuels could be bad," says the lead author, Tim Searchinger, a Princeton scholar and former Environmental Defense attorney. "But when you realize we're tearing down rain forests that store loads of carbon to grow crops that store much less carbon, it becomes obvious."

Promising news:
Here are a few links to things that will make you feel better about the future of sustainable industry.

• Car-Free Suburb Planned for Melbourne, Australia
• Greenest Eco Resort in the World Coming to California? ...this looks like it could be incredible! Check out the overview pdf.
• TED Talk: Willie Smits: A 20-year tale of hope: How we re-grew a rainforest

Places to Start

Try this:

1. Create a bookmark folder in your web-browser called "Save the Planet"
2. Check out "21 links to save the planet" on PlanetGreen, and put all those links in your new bookmark folder.
3. Once a day, maybe when you get to work, right-click on the your "Save the Planet" bookmark folder, and select "open all bookmarks in tabs."

Bam! You just planted trees, funded education, protected oceans, saved baby seals, saved several square feet of rainforest, removed some CO2 from the air, gave children free books, gave free food to the hungry, helped to provide free child healthcare, and helped fight breast cancer... all by opening and closing a few tabs in your browser, and maybe clicking a few buttons! And if you're feeling especially kind, you might even take a look at some of the sponsors on those sites. I've been doing this for almost 2 months now, and even added some links of my own. Suppose each each site only planted a single tree for every visit I made, I still would have helped to plant about 1500 trees over the past 2 months!


Of course, clicking links only goes so far, so here are some other resources to broaden your view and give you ideas for how to me more resourceful and less wasteful:

• http://www.treehugger.com/
  
• http://planetgreen.discovery.com/
  
• http://www.ecofabulous.com/
  
• http://www.ecogeek.org/
• http://www.inferknow.com/green (firefox extension that offsets CO2 output)

You might try using Google Reader to organize all these for you as well as other blogs that you like reading (like mine!) Check out the quick tour here.

Design is Fun!

So I recently caught wind of a little design fun going around facebook. It goes like this

1. Go to "wikipedia." Hit “random” or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.
2. Go to "Random quotations" or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3 The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.
3. Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days” or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
4. Use photoshop or similar to put it all together.
5. Post it to FB with this text in the caption and tag the friends you want to join in.

I was tagged in one and it made me think about how long it's been since I've done ANY design for fun. So my clicks resulted in the following:

So today I was rummaging through some old art and found this little logo I designed for a site that has since disappeared. It makes me kind of want to use it for something. *shrug*

Creativity and Results

For the creative people who, like me, are astounded by the work and genius of those successful in our respective fields. Who want to start creating something meaningful, even if they don't know exactly what.

I recently watched Merlin Mann's talk entitled "Towards Patterns in Creativity" [link]. I'm not going to explain who Merlin Mann is, because I don't really know. I found the talk through yet another blogger that goes by Greyscalegorilla who recently got caught up in idea of input and output as actions in our lives. Point being that we, the creative people, are constantly saturated with input. We're all reading, and watching and sometimes even taking notes, hoping to find that something that will inspire us into doing something really amazing. Greyscalegorilla's assignment to we-the-viewers, was to do some creative output today. Just assume that you already have all the tools you need to do what you want to, and go and do it.

In Merlin's talk he showed a slide with the following, "Creative work, summarized: In the time you set aside each day to work your ass off, ignore anything that makes you consider stopping."

Here are some of the things I've been thinking about.

• Creative professionals have no shortage of inspiration, the hard part is turning it into something awesome.
• Those of us stuck in between spend too much time reading books about how to do things. It's not about tips and tricks, it's about focus.
• "Scratching" (per Twyla Tharp). Get a box. Set time aside to go and find stuff to put in it. Have a high tolerance for ambiguity, and trust that you will find a way to interpret what you've collected. The point here is that you have a place to collect your inspiration.
• Be willing to make sacrifices along the way. Again, "...ignore anything that makes you consider stopping."

I'll end this here, knowing that anything else I write will likely be a vacuous effort to end with a profoundly inspiring and witty message. Forget the wit. Forget the how-to books. Make something.

Zen mind

Clarity of mind comes in waves for me. I have always been this way. Left and right brain must take turns like alternating pistons in a car engine. When the balance isn't just right, it's as though a veil is pulled over my eyes. Things aren't clear as they once were. I feel uninspired, numb to the beautiful infinity unfolding all around.

This week that veil is sliding off and I'm starting to feel a rhythm to life again. Everything, it seems, is just a little bit easier: waking up in the morning, dealing with daily stressors, even simply thinking two steps ahead of any moment. It's so strange to look back and think, "when exactly was it that I was so stuck in the mud? It must have been so hard for me." But I think back and recall a week in Mexico, two in Peru, and countless triumphant weekends with my family, friends, and girl'fiend.

I expressed in my last entry that I felt drained by work days. I think that this is where I'm reconciling my groove. Today I got to work half an hour early, and left an hour and a half late. When I arrived at North Station, 30 minutes sat between me and the next ride home, and yet I felt no frustration. I spent the time drawing the people around me. On the train, I put pencil to paper again and next thing I new I was fantasizing about surfing sunset at OB.

Last night I meditated for 30 or 40 minutes, there must be irony in this considering the previous paragraph contains about 13 instances of the pronoun "I" by my count. Self absorbed as I am at this moment, last night was a welcome deviation into emptiness. The night before I spent about 2 hours working on a drawing and more time messing around with oil pastels. This is definitely a favorite form of meditation for me. The mind becomes so fixed on shape and shadow that nothing else can distract. A hand may travel to scratch an itch, or the body may reposition itself more comfortably, but the mind defers all these things to the reflexes.

It is claimed that meditation is like an exercise for the mind -- that repeated practice yields improved focus and clarity. I subscribe to this belief, though my experience with rigorous meditation is lacking. The world around can be so over-stimulating that it pollutes and numbs the senses. Sometimes I wonder if a day will come when I will be unaffected by the sound of a car accident. Whatever the case, I aim to chase down the luminescent clarity and focus that has time-and-again washed over me, maybe this time I can ride it out.