Body of Work
Current location: Milwaukee, WI, USA
Reading: Solaris by Stanisław Lem
Listening: Nobody Sees Me Like You Do by Japanese Breakfast
(if you have a moment, reply with your own 3-item status)
Body of Work
Over the past handful of years I've thought a lot about not just my work, but the totality of the work I've ever done, am doing, and will do.
This is a different exercise than mulling over a single essay or podcast or book: it's looking at each of these things in the context of all the essays, podcasts, books, talks, tweets—anything at all—I've ever made for publication, distribution, and ultimately consumption by other people.
It goes even further when I allow myself to take another step back.
My portfolio of work matters, but so do my other actions and activities. My pursuits beyond the things that allow me to pay rent and buy groceries.
Looking back, considering the whole, did I help people see or learn or do more than they might have otherwise?
Did I grow as a person in a way that demonstrated the potential and possibility of such growth? Did I do it in a way that was value for me, but also for others?
Did I, in general, leave people better than I found them (for some value of "better")? Did I leave the world better than I found it, and bare-minimum, did I do everything I could to avoid making it worse?
There are countless tangled threads in this larger, kinked and knotted knit of big-picture considerations and concerns.
Some people, I suspect, have latently lace-like life-braids that're tight and smooth and effortlessly intricate. They intuitively know what they can contribute and how to apply those contributions beyond themselves.
But most of us need to regularly reassess, check our warp and weft for inconsistencies and imperfections, and decide which of these strands of effort and expenditure to adjust—to correct to the best of our ability—and which to further integrate into our design.
On a grand enough timescale it's unlikely anything we do will be meaningful enough to be etched into monuments for our distant descendants (or successor-species) to remember and celebrate: that's just the nature of eons and erosion.
We can nudge, and that nudging—combined with the nudges of others—can move mountains and reroute rivers. In this way, we can do big, difficult (hopefully positive) things, even if our personal contributions are proportionally piddly.
At the human and even societal scales, though, we wield more potent powers. We can change lives and life-paths, and we can brighten someone's day and top up their energy levels when they desperately need a boost.
The more we align our individual efforts, assessing our output as a textiled totality, calibrating our arsenal of oomph and creative capacity and our lifetime of interactions and inventiveness toward outcomes we believe will make things better, the more likely it is we'll make a measurable, if modest, difference.
And in some rare cases, we'll find ourselves in the position to say or show the right things to the right person at the right time, directly or through our body of work.
At such moments, even the most humble, purposeful effort can mean the world (far out of proportion to the exertion itself) to whomever is on the receiving end of it.
If you found some value in this essay, consider supporting my work by buying me a coffee :)
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Projects
Select, recent works from across my project portfolio.
Aspiring Generalist: Pivot Penalty
Brain Lenses: Innovation Behavior
I Will Read To You: Winter with the Gulf Stream
Let’s Know Things: Free Information
Curiosity Weekly: Feb 1, 2022
Curiosity Daily: Feb 1, 2022 (I'm trying out a daily version of this email, containing different links than the Weekly version)
One Sentence News: Feb 2, 2022 (podcast version)
Consider supporting everything I make by becoming an Understandary member.
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Interesting & Useful
Some things to click:
Enter a sentence and get a playlist based on that sentence.
Is It Big? Is this brand part of a big corporation or group?
An interactive map of the evolutionary links between all living things known to science.
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Outro
I went to an estate sale in my neighborhood not long ago and bought a half-dozen pieces of artwork.
Despite minoring in art history (and at one point planning to become an illustrator and painter) and loving art (and being around art and learning about art) I've never been able to buy art because I haven't had a place to keep it.
It felt like it would be almost cruel to acquire such works only to have to get rid of them in short order because I'd be back on the road, living out of my carry-on—no room for paintings in my bag, no consistent walls upon which to hang them.
I'm in the process of exploring what having a homebase from which to travel might be like, and I'd been thinking about getting a few pieces to go with a few others I've been given by family and friends.
Reader: it was fun. And it is fun, owning these pieces, looking into the artists who made them (and their history, and the history of the entities behind the distribution, framing, etc), figuring out what I acquired and what they might be worth (not much, but that wasn't the point) and from whence they came—all of it.
I'm being careful, because I don't want the acquisition of things—even art—to become the point; I'm not looking to become a collector of anything for the sake of collecting.
That said, my very small investment in these artworks has already brought me a lot of joy—my apartment is prettier than it was a week or so ago—and I'm now figuring out where to hang everything while also learning more about the fine art market, how to price various mediums, how appraisals works, and how to do more thorough research into a given piece (I suspect having the excuse to research this flurry of new-to-me topics is part of the appeal).
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What are you up to these days? How's life? What are you working on or learning about? Own any art you'd like to tell me about?
You can tell me what's up and say hello by replying directly to this newsletter or at colin@exilelifestyle.com. I respond to every email I receive and appreciate you taking the time to write :)
You can also communicate via the usual methods: Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or AI-generated art based on a prompt you provide.
If you’re finding some value in what I’m doing here, consider supporting my work: Become an Understandary member / Buy me a coffee (or: Buy me a monthly coffee)