Art – August 24th

Balance. I think about it a lot.

On the one hand I can get really, really focused. Which can be good, it gets things done.

On the other hand, being that focused means that you can miss other problems, other threats, other things that need to be taken care of and might be just as important. Which can be bad, it leads to mistakes.

I sometimes get to where I was an hour or so ago and I have nothing for my daily post and I don’t want to take the time. I’m focused. I have no thoughts to share. I’ve used up all of my current pictures. I’m not going to get into the politics or news of the day because that’s a bottomless well of toxic sludge. I just want to stay focused and get things done and off of my plate!

Then I remember. College. Physics major in addition to working full time plus to make ends meet. Focused. Laser focused. I had to take a breadth class and the only thing I could find at 08:00 AM, when I got off work from the graveyard shift, was an Art 101 class. UC Irvine was legendary for “performance art.” (I’m pretty sure I’ve ranted at length about this elsewhere on this site, so search for it. If I haven’t, someone let me know, it’s a fantastic story. For now, just the summary version.) I was skeptical. To say the least. I wanted instructions to follow. I wanted to learn to draw or paint or sculpt or whatever. Get my “easy A” and get out.

As Coach Corso says, “Not so fast, my friend!”

The short version is that I learned to think. I learned to look at problems differently. I learned a skill that I can occasionally click on in my brain, to see things differently, to “think outside the box,” so to speak. And like the old joke about the guy who tells his guru that he’s too busy to meditate for an hour and gets told instead to meditate for two hours, the fact that I didn’t think I could afford the time to play around and come up with something to post tonight meant that I HAD to stop and make that time anyway.

So I did.

Nothing fancy, taking a bit of a generic photo from earlier in the week, transforming it, twisting it, transmorphing it, playing around for a while with this and that, listening to some weird ass music (Erasure, John Michel Jarre, and Enigma primarily) until I got to something that looked cool.

Balance.