works of wanderlust

Tag: goals

  • urban sketch, one

    Crossposted on Notes for a Sketch

    It has been a few years since I plunked myself into the blank pages of a sketchbook for my reprisal into the plein air arts. It was an adventure that took me down a rabbit hole of watercolours and personal expression through ink and pigment that has been hard to quantify in the context of the last few years.

    I waned in my artistic efforts this past year or so for two reasons.

    One, simply, distraction and stress.  Bumbling between efforts of professional self-actualization is a chore, let me tell you.

    But two, performance pressure. I got too caught up in the gig-ification efforts of my sketchy self. I saw all these people documenting their personal artistic journey’s online and felt like I could, should, would do the same. But then art becomes performance almost instantly. My art becomes a posting frenzy to get stuff online and getting stuff online becomes the driver for art and trying to post things that are (a) good enough to post and (b) interesting to my nascent audience became this emotionally all-consuming feedback loop of anxiety about quantifying and artistic output and all that jazz. It was no longer about making art but rather about producing content. It is the sad story of our age, to be honest, and hardly unique to me.

    So I admit. I took a little break.

    But we’re leaving for Japan in a couple months, and I would be so regretful if I went there without a sketchbook and the intention to lock in some art on my travels. Bothering with the whole paints and brushes bit is a bit of hesitation, though, so what I’m left with is honing some simpler sketching efforts. 

    I just completed a running streak. I ran every day for sixteen days in a row. I admit this is hardly a record, even for myself, but there is value in locking in on a repetitive daily goal with the intention of building a practice and a foundation of skill or endurance. There is absolutely nothing saying that I can’t do the same thing with my sketching, right?  And with October just a few dozen hours away, looking towards the month as a daily sketching challenge I could easily see myself getting out into the plein airs of the city with such intention to match a running goal, but with a pen and paper.

    So, a new series on this blog. Urban Sketch.

    This is not put here with the intention of returning the world of artistic performance, no. Rather, to use words as  I often use them—for personal reflection, logging, and being mindful of the whys behind my whats. 

    I’m going to try and draw every day in October. I had intended to go to the art store today, and I still will because I do really need to refresh my watercolour paper for the winter season, but I’m going to go with the intention of getting back into that artists mindset, too. And I’ll write more about it here, of course, as the months wear on.

  • writing: enough

    It’s all well and good to write about writing but at the end of the day you’ve really just got to sit down and do it.

    It’s mid-June and Father’s day is approaching. This is something of an anniversary for me because on the day after Father’s day, two years ago, I had a meeting with my then-boss and resigned from my job.

    I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. I’ve been thinking about it because—as my kid told me just yesterday as she prepares to transition out of grade school and into adulthood—you kinda put on rose coloured glasses after you finish something, don’t you?

    I’ve spilled uncountable and unpublishable words on the reasons and follow-up of quitting a job and avoiding the perceptions of others that goes along with that: weakness, disloyalty, presumptions of cause, and all those things. Really, it was just an opportunity that I had and it was time to make a switch and take a break, and the stars aligned.

    Inside that opportunity was the notion that I was going to fill at least parts of my days putting words to paper. (Well—digital paper.) And heck, inside of these last two years I have typed out what has probably amounted to a quarter of a million of those aspirational words.

    I mean, along with writing, I’ve done a long list of other things. Frankly, I need to. Writing is as much as chore as any task. You get tired. Your brain needs breaks. I gave myself a modest daily goal and was persistently reluctant to push past those goals as a means and a method to avoid burning myself out on writing. SO I write for a bit each day and then do other things. Though, oddly enough, those things have varied, but the writing has kept pretty consistent.

    Yet here I am, almost at the two-year anniversary of that transition, casually poking at the pursuit of full-time work bear again, and looking back on what, if anything, I accomplished in the wordsmithery field that defined a big chunk of the last two years.

    Sure, a quarter million words including probably what amounts to a hundred mini-essays, the first 90% of a long novel, a string of blog posts, a small collection of short stories, and lots of vaguely reflective writing.

    Tiny goals, two years… big results.

    Just sitting down literally every day and writing… something.

    Is any of it worth anything?

    I mean, if you are judging my productivity in the context of publication and sales, then look: the world is fickle. I’ve written thousands of those words on the frustrations of commercially viable wordcraft. We live in a world where barely a fraction of the people read, and then when those people do read they are doing it as an escapism, and it seems from where I sit that most people are hoping to escape into romantic fantasy or comic book absurdity or political theatre or—well, heck if I knew maybe I would have gone viral and we wouldn’t be having this one-way conversation, would we?

    If, on the other hand, you are simply judging me by the fact that I write, say roughly, about 500 words per hour and have produced, again roughly, about a quarter million words, then this means that I have spent about 500 hours over the last two years writing. That’s a lot of practice… and a lot of personal value.

    Yet, at the same time, it doesn’t feel like enough.

    What even is enough?

    I don’t have a number, per se, but I feel like if I was to tell you that I am happy with my output despite the fact that a quarter of a million words and 500 hours of effort seems impressive, I would add to the end of that statement that I probably could write a bit more.

    Now, maybe you see the posts on this blog and you read some of it and wonder why I write on the topics that I write on. But heck, it’s all practice tho, isn’t it? Movie reviews, updates about my weekend, stories about my garden, meandering philosophical essays on the productivity of a Saturday afternoon. None of it’s breaking news, but writing enough is often about putting in the time and practice. That goes for anything. You don’t judge a runner for training multiple days per week for a race or begrudge a chef for prepping ten thousand meals before opening her own restaurant. Why point a questioning finger at a writer for just writing and writing and writing and then writing some more—even if the topic is blah or not of interest to you in particular?

    As such, my only advice on this topic was right there in the lede. I realize that even for myself I’ll only feel like I’ve done enough when I actually just done it. I just gotta sit here and keep writing, practicing, honing this craft, and perhaps amounting to something of that even I approve is enough.

  • big fishing it

    I quit my job yesterday.

    That sounds overly dramatic. But it is true.

    I have been working a part time gig at a little local retail grocery store, off and on, for the last nine months. Karin spotted the advertising along the side of the road last summer, and we followed the progress of the store getting ready to open. I had mostly been sitting around pondering my next career move and writing a novel and enjoying temporary unemployment during my career break, but it was starting to drag a bit and getting hella lonely, so I put my name in and the next thing I knew I was working.  I helped set up and stock the store. I was there for opening. I was there for a couple big management upheavals. I left for a bit, while they were sorting some of it out, but lately I’ve been back for a couple days a week, working part time, doing some inventory management and getting out of the house, to boot.

    But a few weeks ago that little itch in the back of my head started to nag.

    There is a twenty year old movie that I’ve always liked called Big Fish. The film is essentially a string of allegorical tales told at the end of the protagonist’s life and I can’t really explain it any better than to say he was a man who was full of big fish stories and this bugged the hell out of his son who was trying to understand his ailing father.  So from that the movie plays out as these big fish stories are told as tangential narrative of the film’s father son drama plot. And then, all of that is to say merely that there is one particular story that struck me as relevant lately. It was about when the young man, on his way out and away from the town of his childhood into the big wide world takes a detour that leads him to an unexpected small town in the woods. It is the town of Spectre.  And the place is filled with lovely people who have taken off their shoes and who dance in the grass and drink lemonade on the porch. It is the embodiment of what many might call success. Or retirement. Or giving up and settling. It is a place the main character realizes is somewhere he would like to get to eventually, but that he has stumbled on this place too early. He has reached it too soon.

    Spectre is, of course and as I said before, kind of an allegory for post-work, retirement, winding down, whatever you want to call it. It is meant to symbolize the rewards and spoils of a well-earned life, I think. And the main character quickly realizes that too. He sees people settling into their comforts and hiding themselves away from the hardships of the world, to waste away the rest of their lives enjoying the spoils of their lifelong efforts.

    And the main character having reached it at the start of his career realizes he had arrived there far too soon.

    Working in a grocery store warehouse is hardly an idyllic retirement. But at the same time, stepping away from challenging work that forced me to think and create and build and collaborate and fight for ideas, the warehouse was kind of an important job disguising the fact that I had arrived at that type of work too soon.  I wasn’t ready to spend the rest of my life sorting olive oils and checking the expiration dates on the backs of packages of cookies. I had arrived too soon at the low-effort post-career semi-retirement job that I had romanticized in my head.

    Like the main character of Big Fish, I needed to find my shoes—or ditch them entirely—and run back out onto the path to figure out my next challenge. And more importantly, I realized that I could not do both simultaneously. I couldn’t keep this little part time job in the soft grass and then also to devote myself to the path ahead. I needed to choose. I needed to decide if I was settling in for the long run, accepting a life of short commutes to a little grocery market in the suburbs where I may aspire to climb the little heap of food stuff dramatics and spend the rest of my life doing just that, noble and important and simple as it is—or if I needed to get back out on the hunt for the things I really wanted from my life, from myself, for my soul, my creative endeavours and my personal magnum opus of creating something far bigger than that.

    Like the titular big fish, I don’t know where my trail will lead, but I am pretty certain that I want to be on it again.

    So, I had no other choice than to make that decision. I had no other choice but to quit and move on.

    So yeah, I quit my job yesterday. 

    That sounds very dramatic, but maybe it is.

  • Cross Country

    Last July, right smack dab in the middle of 2021, one of my running friends suggested that a few of us sign up for a race.

    This wasn’t unusual. We sign up for races all the time, and even many virtual races lately.

    This race was a big one, though. A year-long virtual team run spanning every province of Canada in an effort to cumulatively run ten thousand kilometers in one year, from the West coast to the North coast and then over to the East coast.

    We signed up. We ran. We tackled The Big Canada Run.

    And on this past Sunday morning, as a ten klick team run through the fresh weekend snow, we logged our last bit of mileage.

    We finished.

    In a little more than eight months, nine of us managed to log a remarkable ten thousand kilometers (or about six thousand two hundred miles for you still stuck in imperial measures.)

    Day after day, week after week. Competing against over two hundred other teams doing the exact same thing.

    One run at a time, a few kilometers here and bunch more over there. Training runs, group runs, solo runs through the snow, epic slogs through the heat, half marathons, ultras and even just jogs with the dog.

    I’ve done virtual races before, but this is by far the largest.

    I’ve logged my own mileage for over a decade and often recorded high numbers over the course of a year, but never computed my distances with a team to reach such a monumental milestone.

    Epic races are just epic goal-setting exercises. They let us see ourselves and our efforts against a backdrop of something so much bigger than ourselves or our individual footsteps. And running across a continent is so much bigger than running the loop around my park … even if I did have the help of eight of my friends.

  • ch-ch-ch-changes.

    It’s been nearly a month since I’ve dropped a post here, I realize, but with the world swirling in chaos and my life sometimes feeling like a lot of the same, I now find myself needing to write yet another explanation post.

    Winter Hoarfrost

    I’ve been thinking a lot about my professional life these days.

    I’m locked up in golden handcuffs, as they say, doing a job that pays entirely too well, can be occasionally cushy, and gives me a lot of flexibility in life. On the other hand, I have no passion for the work, I’m a cog in a bureaucracy and rarely seem to have any effect on anything, and my work life is a never-ending series of video meetings on what amounts to the same general topic day, after day, after day… after day.

    It’s boring and frustrating and unremarkable all at once.

    I’ve been reading about midlife career change.

    I’ve been talking to people who have pulled the plug on something in their forties and reinvented themselves.

    I’ve been pondering budgets and possibilities and realities of economy and family and obligation and how it all fits together into a giant jigsaw that is my career choices.

    This morning I took the first tenuous step towards a massive change.

    Not a plunge. Not a flying leap. Not an irreversible veer.

    A step.

    And it may amount to nothing. Or it may turn out to be everything.

    Only time will tell.

    But if and when something comes out of that first step, and it’s time to take a second… third… and on and on, then I’ll likely have a lot more stuff to say, and be able to be much less cryptic about it.