Day 6: Attitude

With rest comes perspective.

Today’s post was supposed to be about something else, but when I woke up, my plan for the day didn’t feel like the right one. I needed to make some changes at home – things here were feeling a little too stuck. Too heavy. I’d like to think that the reason for this has to do with this experiment. Or is this an exercise? I’m not sure what to call this series of little changes. In any case, I knew what I needed to do. I needed to rearrange things. I needed to clean. I needed to change my attitude.

This came out of a sudden recognition that over the course of the last few months, my attitude towards my home had shifted and this change of heart is weighing heavily on me. My home feels like a burden.

Around this time last year, I promised myself that I wouldn’t renew my lease. I had outgrown my surroundings and living in an old apartment building that wasn’t (and still isn’t) receiving the TLC it desperately needs was taking its toll on me. My dream apartment had served its purpose and I was ready to move on. I didn’t make this decision easily – there’s a lot to love about my life here. It was never perfect, but I know I’m going to look back on my time here fondly.

To keep a very long story short, I didn’t move. 2020 happened, I’m still here, and I still have one foot out the door.

As I started to rearrange things, I started to feel better. Somewhere between pulling everything off the windowsills and washing the baseboards in my little reading room, it occurred to me that what I was doing honoured the person I had been as I settled into this apartment. A person that had been so excited to move in. A person that had spent countless hours scrubbing every surface, taking down and gently washing what might have been the world’s grimiest blinds, trying to clean old radiators, and fixing screens in windows. The process of erasing the traces of previous tenants made the space feel lighter. Easier to breathe in. Literally and figuratively. I needed to feel that again.

Today I learned that there is a palpable difference between the energy of a home that is inhabited by a person who is settling in and the one of someone who is leaving. With this lesson also came another important realization: I want to leave this apartment in a different state of mind than the one I am in. It’s time to shift my attitude. It’s time to learn how to live somewhere in between staying and leaving.

Resolutions like this are risky - somehow, some higher power always manages to send you a test. Mine came this afternoon as I left my apartment. When I shut the door, the doorknob decided that it too wanted to leave the building. In my hand.

Perfect timing.

I thought about fixing it myself before I came to my senses, called the management company to let them know that they would need to send a locksmith, saw the humour in the situation, taped up the latch, and got on with my day. This is annoying, but it’s not my problem. I’m getting out of here, and in the meantime, I’m going savour the things I love about living here.

P.S. The door won’t be fixed for a few days, and that’s just fine.

Day 5: Sleep

This is going to be a very short post because I’m calling it a day. Early. Very, very early.

The most exhausting (and I mean this literally) thing about being me is that my love of early mornings conflicts with being the type of person that likes to get things done. Life tends to feel like a very long string of late nights and early mornings. I’m over it.

Today’s little change is learning how to tell myself that I’ve done what I can today, that I’ve done enough, and that I can put away my to-do list. It’s time to rest.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to go bury my face in some freshly ironed sheets. Well before my bedtime.

Sweet dreams!

Day 4: Digitize

Tonight I’ve gone down a YouTube software tutorial rabbit hole and I’m writing this between videos. The goal: learn something new about drawing digitally. This also explains the title of this post! I’m in the process of digitizing my analog brain.

To be clear, this whole digitization process is not something that I’m resisting. I’ve been trying to make this shift with varying degrees of success for years. First came a tablet. You know, the thing with the USB cord and the magic pen. I still love using it for editing photos and digital renderings, but for drawing? Too much distance.

Around the same time came an iPad, which was fun to play around with, but it was just before the time that you could get a decent pressure sensitive stylus, so the results were… underwhelming. As a result, most of my surface design work (more about this another day) is done on paper before it gets scanned and then edited digitally. It’s nice, it’s slow, and there’s probably a better way to get the results I want.

Enter a new iPad, a very high-tech pencil, and an overabundance of software. Progress.

After a few months of playing around, I’m starting to get the hang of all of this, but it’s very apparent to me that I’m not using any of this to its full potential. With that in mind, I decided to dedicate one of these thirty days to trying to see what this stuff can do and what other people are doing with it by observing. I’m impressed. Really, really impressed.

In many respects, this reminds me of the jump I had to make from hand drafting (yes, there’s still a drafting board under my sofa in case the power goes out or something) and drafting digitally. There’s always this pesky disconnect between input and output to contend with.

All that aside, I think the most valuable takeaway from today’s little change is recognizing that when it comes to learning new software, I tend to turn to tutorials when I’m unsure of how to do something mid-task rather than using them as a starting point. Glad I got this one out of the way early in the month, I have a feeling this lesson will serve me well later.

Day 3: Dawn

Alternate title: Discomfort

Under normal circumstances, I’m an early bird. The pandemic has interfered with this a bit – there’s nowhere to go and I’m usually fighting off some sort of pandemic-induced funk the minute I open my eyes. Oh, and it’s cold. Wind chill of -39 kind of cold.

Anyway. Back to what I’d normally be doing. Early mornings have long been reserved for some form of exercise, meditation, baking, reading, long walks in search of pastry, and coffee. Lots and lots of coffee. Photographs have always been a happy by-product of these walks, but never the focus.

A few years ago, in another lifetime that looked very different from this one, I had a studio visit (this sounds silly because I don’t have a studio, but apparently that’s what they’re called) with a photographer. We had an interesting conversation that has much more meaning to me now that I am more familiar with the constraints of a full-time job on creative work, which quickly gets relegated to the margins of the typical workweek. As you can imagine, this leaves photographers, who are largely preoccupied with light, to work after work, in the darkest hours. Fortunately, I love making photographs at night, but when it overtakes your whole body of work, you start to wonder what things look like at other times of day, in another light.

That was today’s goal: spring out of bed, go outside, even if it is incredibly cold. Get reacquainted with what the world looks like as light gets added, not taken away.

I didn’t go far and I made some photos of buildings that I had previously photographed. Nothing special. I don’t even think the composition is all that different. You can see one of them on my Instagram account.

I was home by 7:04 am, well before sunrise, but it was worthwhile. If nothing else, coffee tastes better when you’ve crossed something off your to-do list.

Day 2: Listen

When I started to make my list of new things I could do, one of the first things that came to mind was to listen to an album straight through. No distractions. Just me and the music.

Why? Because it’s something I’m not sure I’ve ever done. Not like this. Sure, music is a constant companion; I’ll listen to an album straight through on a long drive, when I’m cooking, or while I work. I enjoy the music, but am I really listening?

I don’t know how many of the posts in the coming month will require a before and an after, but in this case, it seemed appropriate to provide some sort of chronology.

Before, or more accurately, some notes I jotted down over breakfast when I decided what I would be tackling today:

This is one of the little changes I’m looking forward to the most. If I’m being honest, my enthusiasm is split.

1. This is so far removed from my day-to-day routine – I’m really going to enjoy it!

2. It’s day two! Pick something that requires little to no effort! I have a feeling I might be wrong about this. We’ll find out.

Sometime before and after:

This evening, it occurred to me that I hadn’t really thought about choosing an album. Long story short, I settled on something that had ended up in my library because it looked interesting, but I had never actually taken the time to listen to it because distractions, an endless supply of music, who knows, who cares. How fitting.

I’ll spare you a full review of the album, but in case you’re curious, it was: Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Il Giardino Armonico with Giovanni Antonini’s “What’s Next Vivaldi?”.

If you know me well enough, this won’t surprise you. If you don’t know me, all you need to know is that the violin, Vivaldi, and I have a long history.

Then there was the question of where I was going to spend the next hour and eleven minutes just listening. Yes, of course, I scrolled down to the bottom of the album to see the total time I’d be committing to this. I even considered looking for a shorter album. Terrible. This is exactly why I’m doing this – I need to break that habit. Anyway. I ended up on my yoga mat. The relevance of this detail will become clear in a second.

After:

That was not at all what I expected. I thought it would be harder to give an album my undivided attention for that long, but it wasn’t. Time flew by. Focusing was easy. At first, that focus went to familiar violinist tendencies – a furrowed brow, muscles wanting to wake up, too much thinking. Eventually, my penchant for the technical faded away and my focus turned to the music. Bliss.

It seems too obvious to state, but my eyes stayed closed most of the time. Even in a dark room, opening them felt like sensory overload (on a somewhat related note: if you ever find yourself in the vicinity of an orchestra that starts tuning, close your eyes. Listen. It does something magical to your brain, I promise).

At one point, the interior designer in me piped up and wanted to think about why I had started lying down on my back, sat up cross-legged at some point, and then moved to sit with my back against the wall. Why hadn’t I ever thought about the position my body would naturally want to be in when listening to music? I have about a million and one other thoughts on the subject, but for now I’m leaving it there. A question to pick back up another day.

P.S. Go listen to this album, it’s terrific :)