Wingman
With my nephew Dylan Jeffrey:
Brave
“The brave may not live forever, but the cautious do not live at all”
– Sir Richard Branson
Ise
In the Mie prefecture of Japan, you can find the Ise Jingu, a grand shrine to the Shinto goddess Amaterasu-omikami.
The shrine was built 2,022 years ago. But it was also built two years ago. Because the Ise shrine, which is made entirely of wood, is disassembled and then rebuilt anew every twenty years.
When the Ise shrine was being erected for the first time, Augustus was erecting his Roman Forum. Emperor Ping of the Han Dynasty was expanding the Weiyang Palace. In Africa, Natakamani, King of Kush, was planning his pyramid in Meroe. And in Mexican cities like Uxmal, the Maya were busy constructing temples of their own.
By now, you can still find the majestic ruins of all of those structures. But you can’t find the Roman Empire, the Han Dynasty, the Kush or the Maya; they’ve all gone extinct.
Two centuries back, when the Ise Shrine was built the first time, it was presided over by an order of Shinto monks. Shinto monks from the same lineage preside over the shrine today.
Nearly every culture has a history of grand architecture, of constructing impressive places they think will establish their perpetual permanence. But, perhaps, it’s not the structures that make a culture permanent, and the building of them that does. Held together by their purpose, by the regular schedule of care, of destruction and rebuilding, the Shinto monks have continued forward for two millennium. Unlike those extinct civilizations, their destination is impermanent. But their journey is perpetual.
Columbus
Also, in honor of today’s holiday, please read this Oatmeal piece, stat.
Happy Bartolomé Day!
Pitcher
Po-chang needed a master for his new monastery, so he called all his monks together and set a pitcher before them saying, “Without calling it a pitcher, tell me what it is.”
The head monk replied, “You couldn’t call it a piece of wood.”
The cook walked up and kicked over the pitcher spilling the water and walked away.
The cook was put in charge of the new monastery.
Some People Call Me Maurice
While all the cool kids have, for years, been streaming rather than purchasing music, and though I’ve long had a Spotify subscription that I occasionally used to find tracks that popped to mind, I’d long listened primarily to the overly large collection of music I actually owned – much of it dating back to ripping MP3s of my now-retired CD collection back in the later 90’s and early 00’s – rather than stuff from the cloud.
With the launch of Apple Music, however, I’ve been listening to streaming music first and foremost. And though it’s occasionally led me to repeat plays of some rather suspect choices (no, seriously, “Trap Queen” is an excellent song!), it’s also allowed me to wander through a bunch of choices – some of which I’d even owned – that I might otherwise have ignored or missed.
Today, I spent six hours and seventeen minutes straight listening to John William’s soundtracks for all three original Star Wars films, sequentially. And, holy crap, is that some awesome music.
I mean, sure, it’s basically Holst repurposed, with a Wagnerian leitmotif structure and a liberal pulling from E. W. Korngold. But, seriously, that’s some compelling, magical stuff.
In particular, and in a way that you rarely hear in scores recorded one-off with a studio orchestra, the London Symphony is so amazingly tight, in tune and synchronized across articulation and volume. Above it all floats Maurice Murphy’s principal trumpet – alternatively soaring majestically and cutting incisively. It’s everything an amateur classical trumpeter might aspire to be.
If you haven’t listened to those scores – and, ideally, to all of them one after another – take advantage of the power of streaming music to do so. If that doesn’t make you fired up to vacuum, sort files or clean your bathroom, nothing will.
Medium
For as long as I can remember, and across pretty much all of my thinking and writing tasks, I’ve been torn between using computers and using pen & paper.
By now, I keep my to-do list online (still in ToDoist), though I print it out each morning (from my trusty, highly-recommendable and cheap Brother HL-L2340DW), and work all day from the paper version.
I brainstorm and outline best on paper, but can draft and compose far faster on-screen.
And after recently converting the contents of a slew of separate Mac and iOS apps (Day One, Paprika, NVAlt, etc.) into a series of Evernote notebooks (as I’m now testing out using Evernote as my ‘everything bucket’), I’ve also taken to scanning all of my incoming mail, receipts, etc., into Evernote (primarily using their free Scannabale app), and lazily filing the physical papers by simply sticking all the stuff from a given month into a single file folder together (ie., “October ’15”).
Nonetheless, I also recently backed a Productivity Planner project on Kickstarter. Which, in turn, drove me to buy a Five Minute Journal, the prior project from the same designers.
I’m a pretty reliable journaler already, and in fact even previously used the outline of the Five Minute Journal questions as part of what I recorded daily in my digital journal file. But, as often turns out to be the case, there’s a difference between the experience in one medium versus the other. With the Five Minute Journal bedside, I’m more reliable at answering its short questions as the first thing I do when I wake up, and the last before I go to sleep.
So, consider a hard-copy Five Minute Journal – it seems to be making me happier, at least. And give some thought to which tools you use for your various pursuits. McLuhan may have overstated it, but if the message isn’t the medium, the medium still certainly very much matters.
Happen
“It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.”
– Leonardo da Vinci
Follow Through
“Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.”
– Enrest Hemingway
[Ghosting]
Apologies for the radio silence here, but I’ve been blogging pseudonymously elsewhere, and banking future blog posts for a shortly-launching business site, and it appears I only have so many words per day in my brain. Trying to get this blog back into the rotation.