Walking
With every step you take, it’s possible you might fall.
That’s not pessimism, it’s the reality of being a perambulatory human being.
Mathematical models have demonstrated that walking is just falling over and over again, but—and this is essential—it also means controlling the fall in such a way that it propels us forward, moving us a smidgeon closer to where we want to be instead of landing us flat on the ground.
These falls are irregular and require a flurry of tiny corrections with each new stride to ensure they land as intended, rather than wobbling us off-course or tossing us into a painful faceplant.
Making things for a living is a bit like walking in that it sometimes seems like the most natural thing in the world, requiring little thought and serving as the obvious, logical means of getting from where we are to where we’d like to be, while at other times feeling borderline hazardous: each step a possible stumble, each new foothold progressively less certain, secure, and familiar than our point of origin.
I’ve been making things since I could hold a crayon, and I’ve been making things for a living for about two decades.
For the past twelve years I’ve made things for strangers, many of whom have become familiar faces and names and usernames during that period. These strangers have become an audience of people with whom I truly enjoy sharing and engaging, and a collection of relationships that afford me abundant creative freedom—two things I treasure as much or more than anything else I possess.
That said, with more freedom of movement comes more opportunity to fall.
Vast, open spaces allow you to perform at your most ambitious, peak capacity, but also to flop spectacularly: floundering in public, bruising your knees and your ego and possibly your reputation, with nothing to hide behind and no one to blame but yourself when it happens.
The reality is that this can happen no matter how open your space, how liberated your time, how expansive and cherished your audience.
Putting yourself out there in any capacity is terrifying, and I’ll tell you from experience that the fear of missteps doesn’t go away even after you prance and meander around for years, by all outward indications knowing full-well what you’re doing and confident every step will land precisely as intended.
What does change with time is that you eventually become more comfortable with an imperfect, personalized sort of walk. Something that’s less like the self-assured stride of a runway model and more like the snaking stroll of a curious vagabond or the chaotic wandering of a traipsing child exploring an unfamiliar neighborhood, comfortable with all the unfamiliarity because life has shown itself to be ceaselessly novel and provocative—the greatest joys often bundled with the strange and mysterious.
You come to realize that by sometimes shuffling, sometimes trudging, sometimes tip-toeing while gazing skyward, or full-out running toward a muddled horizon, or holding stock-still staring at your own feet, you'll get to where you need to be: however distant the coordinates, however late or early you might arrive, however many times you may fall and pick yourself back up along the way, and whomever you might be when you finally get there.
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Projects
Brain Lenses:Legibility & Agency
Let’s Know Things:Long COVID
Curiosity Weekly: May 4, 2021
One Sentence News: Info / Subscribe
Interesting & Useful
Some things to click:
The Ocean’s Youngest Monsters Are Ready for Glamour Shots(some beautiful ocean photography)
The Pulp Magazine Archive(this is such tacky fun)
Slow Looking(an interesting concept: a forced slow, meditative look at a work of art)
4D Toys(a short video that offers one of the better visual explanations I’ve seen for what four-dimensional objects might look and seem like to us 3D humans)
Old Book Illustrations(another really great archive, very worth clicking around and exploring)
Construction of the World’s Longest Floating Bridge(some interesting engineering concepts in this piece)
Analyzing the Design of Unusual Japanese Butter Tableware(exactly what it sounds like—also, I now must have some of these)
Outro
I’m in the process of building a sort of home base for most of my projects, which bundles them together in what I think (and hope) will be a useful way, and which should give me more creative freedom moving forward, while also allowing me to make some stuff that doesn’t fit cleanly into any of my existing project “boxes.”
This is something I’ve been thinking about doing for ages, but I’m finally moving forward on it and intending to get a rough version live within the next few months. And that means that there’s enough tangibly there that I can finally see all the flaws and worry about how I’m going to ameliorate (or accept) them.
I’m excited about this! But also worried that it won’t serve its intended purpose, won’t be useful to folks on the other end of it, or won’t be sustainable, in terms of money or time or energy expended, for me.
I woke up at around 4 this morning and couldn’t get back to sleep because my brain was determined to bring up all the things that could go wrong with this specific effort, all the details that aren’t right and might not be wrangle-able into a more-right state, and how it’s generally all destined to fail and will probably drag everything else I’m doing and have worked hard to accomplish down with it.
All of which is to say: I’m at a normal stage in the creative process that—despite being familiar and predictable—is still not fun, is out-of-proportion stressful, and will likely continue to plague me no matter how many years I do this sort of thing professionally.
If you’re making something, anything at all, and you’re worried about how it will turn out, how it will be received, generally stressed and are maybe worried you just aren’t cut out for this: it’s okay. It’s part of the process and very normal, even if it’s not particularly pleasant. I feel you and am rooting for you and am happy to send you some encouraging words, if you like.
If you have a spare minute, drop me a line and tell me something about what you’re up to, how life is for you at the moment, what you’re looking forward to, what you’re dreading: whatever’s on your mind.
If things aren’t going great, if you’re struggling, dealing with overwhelm or stress or sadness and if you think it might help, even a little, to vent to someone on the internet who is not going to judge and who responds to every email he receives, you can reach me at colin@exilelifestyle.com or by replying to this email.
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If you’re finding some value in what I’m doing here, consider supporting my work via one of these methods: Become a patron / Buy a book / Buy me a coffee
A nice roundup of Open Source, experimental, and tiny digital tools.