"The emptiness is normal. The richness of our neighborhood is the exception."
--Charles and Ray Eames, Powers of Ten
Monthly Archive for May, 2008
I took the train to Los Angeles. I thought the 14 hour trip would be excruciatingly long and painful, but now all I can think about is trekking across the country on the rails where I can see the underbelly of American landscapes and farmers will stop their work to wave to me as I pass.
Something should be said for moving in circles. I remember being a kid and spinning in my mom's office chair as fast as I possibly could for as long as I possibly could. During the dizziness that followed such spinning my sister and I would challenge each other to see who could stay standing the longest.
The use of an office chair then versus now is drastically different. The chair I sit in now has no wheels, has a straight wooden back, and a narrow seat that seems to barely accommodates my wide hips. I slouch close to my computer screen unless explicitly thinking about working on my posture.
And somehow, this is the straight path. It is the path with a slight incline that keeps me just shy of out of breath but teases me with the promise of an eventual break.
I saw a speaker today who talked about thinking of the past spatially and visually rather than just temporally. He talked about the invention of the railways as the destruction of real time because they introduced universal time.
I think I prefer his notion of history, and I'd like to think about the future in the same way. I have a stack of interests and I can hardly separate one from another, let alone choose which one I most like. How does it change things if I think about making space for all of the things I'd like to do rather than making time for them?