Okay, that’s a fairly harsh assessment. My passions are very high on my priority list and I’ve become quite adept at sifting passions from passing fancies but my passions are understandably behind some other slightly more important and higher priority items that somehow conspire to take an inordinate amount of my time in sporadic and unpredictable ways. All this to say that I am ALWAYS impatient to get things moving. I like constant progression and generally speaking – on average, it needs to be in a forward direction or I get angry. I understand and am patient up to a point with lateral and even backward moves as long as they lead inexorably to that all important forward angle. I like to see improvement in my life or what is the point?

But momentum is a funny thing. Oil tankers have momentum but NOT maneuverability – just way too much inertia. So while momentum is good I also don’t like to sacrifice maneuverability. I like to be quick and agile. Consequently I tend to shy away from big investments in time, materials or whatever. Now a funny thing happens here because I have been known to have no problem stepping into complicated low agility situations and I think somehow in those situations I somehow manage to divorce or divert the circuit in my brain that would normally be howling in alarm. I haven’t figured out exactly how I’m able to ignore my internal alarms just yet. No doubt that reflex would be useful to have under conscious control.

Momentum cuts both ways and so I’m not so much interested in momentum as much as constant, consistent, forward movement. After all, if I’m going to be alive then I might as well be doing something useful with myself, i.e. something I’m passionate about – which just so happens to be something I’ll be motivated to do reasonably well and likely work hardest on.

Isn’t this essentially what life is about?
To learn… to strive… to improve… and reap the pleasure of these achievements?

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Ochre Navy Green Hooked Lines

Ochre Navy Green Hooked Lines, 2012 - Light Signatures :: (Click to see more)

I was reading an interesting article in NewScientist which caught my eye about an elusive mental state commonly known as “flow”. It seems for some time now people have reported achieving this flow state typically after they have become fairly proficient at whatever it is they’re doing. When they enter a flow state their task becomes effortless and time passes unnoticed.

For some time scientists thought this was hokey nonsense but apparently recent research indicates that it is in fact real and can with some electrodes on the head etc be invoked at will, even if the requisite proficiency doesn’t exist.

What caught my eye was the description of flow – “that feeling of effortless concentration that characterizes outstanding performance in all types of skills.” There have been times when I’m processing image files – retouching, masking, finessing, what have you – that I feel this same way. I recall working for what seemed like only minutes on images for the Metro Motion series late into the night – completely absorbed and intuitively honing the images to the place I wanted. The same thing happened while working on Coloured City.

I’ve always considered these working sessions joyful and pleasant. They were accompanied by music that perfectly matched my groove and mood – so much so I decided to title some of Coloured City after the music I was listening to while working. I think these sessions were flow.

When you’re in a flow state, everything just works perfectly. There is no disappointment or second guessing, you just work decisively, confidently and happily on your task. I had always thought music was the key to activating this for me – perhaps it is to some degree and perhaps it isn’t the only essential element. But now that I’ve read more about flow I think I’m going to have to experiment a little to see how I can more easily and readily enter a flow state while working.

At the risk of sounding foolish – I’ll say it feels euphoric and fulfilling to work this way and somewhat boundless – like anything is achievable. All very satisfying components for working on what you love.

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Turquoise Green Yellow Lines

Turquoise Green Yellow Lines, 2012 - Light Signatures :: (Click to see more)

I read a post by Chris Guillebeau some time ago in which he wrote about building a legacy. At the time I was beginning to feel at loose ends about my creative efforts and starting to think they were perhaps valueless in the overall scheme of things. Then I read Chris’s post and I thought wow – not true. My creative efforts taken as a whole over the course of my life are my true legacy and THAT is worth striving, struggling and working hard for – a noble and worthy life goal.

Now, this is by no means my only legacy. I’m fortunate to have a young son and he is another legacy of sorts and of course there are other less obvious legacies – like my small social efforts – leading by example etc. Taken as a whole they comprise my singular contribution to society and future generations. This is exactly what we are ALL doing every day of our lives – slowly inexorably building our own legacies.

For a long time now I’ve struggled with a strong feeling of unworthiness in regard to my creative efforts. I wasn’t formally schooled in art. I have no training in art history. I only ever attended a one year college photography program to gain some specific technical training and a single first year sculpture fine arts university course. So I feel overwhelmingly under qualified to call myself an artist.

But, lately I’ve had a growing sense of entitlement about who I am and what I do – a self-awareness of sorts. Reading Chris’s post about building a legacy only served to snap it all into perspective – to provide a completing sense of purpose to the whole endeavour.

In truth, it’s not like I haven’t put in a huge amount of effort to learn on my own for many years in many varied areas. I have a degree in computer science, I’ve attended countless workshops and seminars, visited many galleries and openings, read a ba-zillion books, blog posts, FAQs, help files – you name it – if it was related to my pursuits or interesting I gobbled it up. I had an extensive and in retrospect fairly intense period of music training from about age 9 to 19 in piano, trombone, voice and theory – which I find surprisingly is still buried deep within me as I take my son to his new music lessons. I have pursued my interest in photography since the age of 10 when I remember asking for a tour of our family portrait photographer’s dark room to see how this mysterious thing called photography worked – that was 37 years ago when my personal exploration of photography began.

Over the past 4 years I’ve spent pretty much all my creative effort analyzing my work, thinking about what I’m doing and why. In a nutshell – trying to figure out how to explain myself.

Why do I make the work I do?
What am I trying to communicate with my work?
What is the thread of my interest?
Where does the source of that thread originate?

For a long time I’ve felt my answers were shallow, trite, ill considered and cliche. But slowly – recently – I feel I’m finally arriving at an honest answer to these questions about who I am and – as I’ve said before the most important question of all – WHY.

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Green Streaks Roadside

Green Streaks Roadside, 2012 - Light Signatures :: (Click to see more)

When I was a little kid the most important question to me was Why? “Why do dey” is what I used to ask says my grandmother – I think I was 3 years old. Still, WHY has stuck with me my entire life. WHY is the central precept of my life and continues to inform just about everything I do, particularly creatively.

I remember as a kid sitting in the back seat while we drove somewhere through the Ontario countryside on a sunny morning – probably to go camping. I was watching the telephone wires at the side of the road undulating in smooth rhythm between the poles. The trees in the far distance seeming to never change while the farm fields up close were a blur.

Right beside this memory is another – this one a school trip to Toronto. I grew up in Guelph about an hour’s drive from Toronto. We were on a school bus of and I was sitting by the window so I could see the gravel shoulder along the edge of the highway. I was staring down in a daze watching as the lines from innumerable tire tracks snaked, twined and writhed in the soft gravel as we drove.

I’ve had similar experiences riding in trains watching tracks beside the train twisting and twining as they separate and combine. Sometimes this happens with tire tracks in fresh snow

These experiences and my strongly inquisitive nature have brought me here, now – photographing movement and emotion in my urban home. It seems those snaking moving lines in the gravel, the rhythmic telephone wires, motion blurred fields and twining tracks imprinted on my young impressionable mind in such a poignant way that I am still pursuing them today. And of course WHY over arches all of this.

Why is this important to me?
Why am I doing this?
Why am I here?
Why?

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Green Yellow Purple Pink Striations & Cross Hatches

Green Yellow Purple Pink Striations & Cross Hatches, 2012 - Light Signatures :: (Click to see more)

Well the majority of my “spring” clean is over – but man was that ever difficult. It’s prompted me to be kind of pissed with myself for accumulating so much material. The emotional as well as time effort this has cost to process and deal with all this stuff is, I think, more than I’m willing to pay. That’s easily said – the difficult part is changing my evil ways. Lets face it, I’ve simply got to stop holding on to stuff and maybe even slow the acquisition process.

This is particularly difficult for me – I like to build things. My good friend Paedric likes to call me Builder Will because I’m always busy building something – and not your ordinary kind of thing. I like to construct systems that solve a problem or a need. Could be something computer or something wood or just some kind of method for coping – like this post.

I’ve been thinking a lot – all my life really – about our obsessive societal need to accumulate objects. We like to shop. What a concept. This idea is at the root of a lot of problems we face today that I won’t get into now. Most of us tend only to think about the cost of acquisition. Can I afford to purchase something? How can I purchase this now versus later? How am I going to pay for this thing? We almost never think about afterwards – after we have purchased said item. Oh we might think about the cost of maintenance – like what happens if it breaks – what is the warranty coverage – where can we get it repaired – how often is it likely to break etc. But I would hazard a guess that we never ever think about what this item will cost us to own.

By cost to own, I mean the lifelong cost of having this item in our possession. What does it mean to us to have control over, possession of, responsibility for this item. Lets take as an example an easier object – a car. Not everyone has one its true, but for those of us who do, many of you will recognize what a sink hole for money a car is. After you’ve paid the cost of acquisition (never mind the interest cost of acquisition if you pay with a loan or lease), there are a number of other very obvious costs – maintenance, insurance, fuel, parking. All of which add up horrendously. But the costs we almost never think about are – emotional cost, inconvenience cost (ie when it doesn’t function according to expectation), cost of disposal, environmental cost to create it, environmental cost to own and operate it, environmental cost to dispose of it and storage cost.

Ah, storage cost, something I’ve just been dealing with a lot these past few weeks. How much do you think all the space you dedicate to your car and all its ancillary items is worth – to purchase – to maintain – to pay taxes on? Again I think its safe to assume that most car owners need a place to put their car when they’re not using it – like when they’re sleeping for example. If you’re fortunate, you have a driveway where you can leave it – maybe even a garage to store it in, along with all its various accoutrements. What is the property value of all this space? What property taxes do you pay for all this space on a regular basis? What does all this space cost in time and money to maintain so its ready and available to store your car when you need it to?

Here’s my question – Is this efficient? Is this really the best way to do things? Do we need to own so much stuff? Can we get by with less stuff – with having less stuff in our possession and in our lives?

Okay that was four questions, but you get my point. I’m beginning to see the value in being more efficient in my acquisition and retention of stuff. Hopefully I will retain my optimism long after I get past the necessary but difficult excretion phase for all my accumulated stuff.

Despite this, I somehow still manage to keep myself busy – what with the catching up on paper work, book keeping/accounting tasks, equipment maintenance or in this week’s case a massive spring cleaning and turfing out of an amazing accumulation of … well of… stuff. No other good way to describe it.

Over my brief relax time over the holidays, (about a week and half ago only – seems like months ago already – drag) it occurred to me all the extra baggage of goods in my life were dragging me down emotionally and consequently physically. I need to lighten my load – literally.

I have a tendency to acquire and then accumulate just the most amazing mix of things that – well you know – that might some day in the future be useful. Trouble is there’s too much of it, I can’t find it when I do need it, I forget I have it, I haven’t used any of it in the past year (likely MUCH longer than that) and I don’t want it any more. Its inefficient and that bugs me.

So I’m trying to be ruthless when judging whether or not to keep something. Now, as you know, this is er, um…. difficult. Pretty much all of these things we keep are freighted with memories. In some part we keep the things as a type of key to recalling the associated memories. And when we’re faced with parting with these things we feel as though we’re letting go of these memories and consequently letting go of part of ourselves.

Okay, this just isn’t true – although it feels like it is. They are just things, the memories remain, we’ll still remember them. Perhaps they won’t be so accessible without these objects to act as reminders – but then again, were we REALLY planning on sifting through all this junk in order to remember things? Not likely. It’s just coincident with actually having to sort and sift through all this crap that the memories are pleasantly re-surfacing.

So enjoy the nostalgia while it lasts. Get one last ho-rah out of these long lost goodies – then look at them with a critical eye and ask yourself this:

Am I going to use this again?
Ever? Soon? This year?
Is the cost of the physical space it takes up worth holding on to it? I could just re-acquire a much newer, better designed, fully functioning version of it when I ACTUALLY need it again?

Don’t be romantic or dreamy about it – be ruthless. Look at it like its not yours and you found it on the street. Would you pay money for this thing?

Because in my case, I’m paying a LOT of rent per square foot for the space I’m occupying here in my studio and really the square foot of space this object is occupying for a year is worth X dollars versus the cost of just buying it again when I ACTUALLY need it. Why bother saving it unless I know for certain I will use it again?

Now – if only I could adopt a similar philosophy for all my thousands of computer files! Hmmm…