Quote of the Day - 2/21/2012

The very air here is miraculous, the outlines of reality change with the moment.  The sky sucks up the land and disgorges it.  A dream hangs over the whole region, a brooding kind of hallucination. – John Steinbeck, 1941 as quoted in John Annerino in Canyons of the Southwest: A Tour of the Great Canyon Country from Colorado to Northern Mexico

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I’m remembering vacations in the southwest…both the visual and the warmth…while I am in Maryland with the outdoor temperature in the 20s and the trees still leafless.

The Steinbeck quote evokes the place quite well.

Maybe in all places ‘the outlines of reality change with the moment’ but it is easier to see in the canyons with the ratio of rock to vegetation so high. The shadows have more significance. Consider that ‘the moment’ may be elastic rather than finite time element depending on perspective. What is a moment in the geologic timeline of a canyon?

And the sky. I am drawn to the southwest by the sky as much as anything else. The daytime blue seems so pure…the sunlight so bright. The light bleaches during mid-day or adds golden color in the morning or evening - changing the scenes. The nights are not so polluted with light that the stars blink out. Does just about everyone spend more time looking at the night sky in the Southwest?

Quote of the Day - 2/19/2012

No one can observe and analyze beautiful things in nature or works of art without increasing his capacity to appreciate and therefore enjoy the best. - Henry Turner Bailey in Photography and fine art

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The quote today is from a book published in 1918 - just as photography was gaining wider popularity. It seems logical to me that having the discipline to notice beautiful things in our everyday activities does indeed increase our ‘capacity to appreciate and enjoy the best.’ I was given a new camera for Christmas 2010 and used it as a springboard to dramatically increase my forays into botanical photography (and photography in general). Now I find that I ‘see’ more than I did a year ago….and enjoy the challenge of capturing what I find.

Henry Turner Bailey was Dean of the Cleveland School of Art when he wrote the book. My favorite images are of things I recognize like the Jack-in-the-Pulpit on page 30 (small version at left) and the dogwoods on page 31.

Note: I’ve provided links to the hardcopy version of this book on Amazon but it is freely available on the Internet Archive to enjoy on line: Photography and Fine Art.

Quote of the Day - 2/18/2012

She awoke from long childhood in which she had always been protected and surrounded by attention and comforts, and not responsibilities. - Isabel Allende in The House of the Spirits: A Novel

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Two thoughts on today’s quote: 

1. It is interesting that we associate childhood as a time without responsibility. Our laws embed the concept in our formal legal system. But having or not having responsibility is not a binary thing. It is more accurate if we think of a child’s growth as a continual path of increasing levels of responsibility. At some point a child becomes responsible for dressing themselves, putting food in their own mouth, completing a household chore, completing homework without prompting, getting their first job, etc. At what age do they cross a threshold that says they are no longer a child? Certainly when they are financially independent…but probably before and the use of age is a simplifying criteria for our legal system which may work on average but not for all individuals.
2. In the past, the optimum in our culture was for women to continue in a child-like state (i.e. without acknowledged responsibilities) for most of their lives. The things that they did were important to their families but were not appreciated by society as responsibilities. The quote reminds us of the awakening that happened for many women as that ideal began to crumble.

Quote of the Day - 2/17/2012

The stream of time often doubles on its course, but always it makes for itself a new channel. - Frederick Lewis Allen in Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920's (Wiley Investment Classics)

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When we hear an news item comparing what is happening today with some earlier time - we should always be aware that while the situation may look the same, it is ‘a new channel’ and the next event may, or may not, be similar to what happened in the past.

This is true in our personal lives as well. The passage of time alone guarantees that the situation is different. That wonderful vacation or birthday party from 10 years ago cannot be duplicated. The elements that made them stand out for you could even seem repetitive and not at all special the second time around.

As we navigate our ‘stream of time’ - let’s rejoice in the prospect of discoveries in our own ‘channel.’

Quote of the Day - 2/16/2012

Many of us would just as soon have our choices made for us but the heroine, when at a juncture, makes her own choice. - Joan Anderson in A Year by the Sea

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When there is a choice that is truly important to us - either for right now or for our future - we should make our own choice. The challenge is recognizing when a choice is truly important. Maybe it isn’t too hard to make the determination if the impact of the choice will happen right away or in the near term. It’s the choices that are more strategic - have an impact months or years away - that are hard to always recognize. The best approach may be to always participate in choices (rather than abdicating) so that the results are still our own too. Only children are allowed to not be fully responsible for their selves.

Remember the old notion of a ‘grown up?’ The implication was that a ‘grown up’ was someone that was not growing/changing in contrast to children that were doing both. While I do know a lot of people that are trying hard not to grow larger, I don’t know anyone that is not changing. Change happens to us all even if we do nothing. Many people have discovered that change and continued learning is just the way they want to live. And that brings us back to the idea of the quote “when at a juncture, makes her own choice.”

Quote of the Day - 2/15/2012

Colette once remarked that she always wanted to see her rooms crowded with flowers and her kitchen table set with whatever seasonal delights the farmers’ stalls had to offer: baskets of spotted quail eggs, yellow, noisy skinned onions, tied bunches of perfect leeks, succulent red berries. She wanted to smell the reassuring odors of good food cooking. And she always wanted her windows, their sills filled with pots of herbs and sweet geranium, to open out into the embrace of tree branches. These things gave her a sense of peacefulness. - Lee Bailey in Lee Bailey's Country Weekends  

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Recently - I seem to be focused on reducing clutter. The quote for today reminds me that some kinds of clutter are an element of a comfortable home. Today, let’s focus on positive clutter.

Colette’s flowers…seasonal delights…pots of herbs - those all are appealing.

For me, positive clutter is functional (and used often) or changes frequently. Here are some examples of positive clutter I have around me:

• Handy containers for colored paperclips anywhere I may sit down with a book. I use the them to mark interesting passages and my place in books.

• Little pieces of paper around my PC with numbers or reminders. They last for a day or two then are replaced by others. I like to use different colors and sizes. It makes the work area seem more personalized.

• A wire basket with banana rack with onions, potatoes, garlic, bananas….any fruit or veggie that does not need refrigeration.

• The variety of small canisters of tea on the shelf over the sink. We make a pot of tea every day so the contents of the canisters are always being depleted….refilled.

• A deep red metal bowl filled with small containers of daily vitamins/supplements. It holds 3-5 days so sometimes it is piled high and other times it is down to one small container.

• A stack of magazines/catalogs on the table - ready to be thumbed through and then recycled.

• A pile of books to glean for quotes (taking out the paper clips as I glean) and return to the library (for library books) or donate to a used book charity…unless I am keeping them for reference.

• A 40+ year old sewing basket next to one of my reading chairs. I do my mending there - but mending is not needed all that often. I’ve recently decided it is the best place to leave my Kindle to charge. So the sewing basket was always a positive clutter…but it recently increased its positive value.

Quote of the Day - 2/14/2012

The important thing is to do something, even if it’s as simple as making a pile of pile of pebbles. For it is always the doing that leads to the becoming, and before you know it you’re on the next stage of life. - Joan Anderson in A Walk on the Beach (2004)

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Just thinking about something is not enough even if the change you are making is mostly a mental one. While there is a concept of continuous learning - in reality, we learn in spurts. Getting to a next stage of life generally prompts a learning spurt; sometimes we experience a spurt when we discover something new and pursue it with intensity. I find it more descriptive to think about life as a series of transitions. These transitions can vary in length and importance; they can overlap. The idea is to recognize our situation (the ‘as is’) and what we want (the ‘to be’) so that we can take the actions to make it happen.

Finding a way to ‘do something’ is an accelerant to transition. Realizing this should influence how you plan ….making sure that you focus on tangible actions. In reality there are almost always multiple transitions going on concurrently at various stages of maturity; think about your plan as something that will continue as your life moves forward; some transitions will complete but others will start…it’s the nature of life.

Here are my rules of thumb for developing a personal transition (life?) plan:

• Plan a ‘something’ for every day that moves you toward a goal. It is easiest to have it be something that is part of a daily rhythm rather than a totally unique action. My current example: this blog.
• Identify a larger project that will take several months and add the time phased actions it will take to make it happen. My current example: get the interior of the house painted.
• Write it down. It doesn’t have to be fancy. I like to use a task list that includes dates and categories unless a project gets complicated enough that I need to identify relationships between the tasks (then I use something like Microsoft Project). My current example: task list in Microsoft Outlook with categories of blog, house, etc.
• Check off actions as you complete them. My current example: I look at the list every morning and, most days, mark everything complete by the evening.
• Every week/month assess how well you are moving toward your goal and make adjustments to your plan. My current example: I pretty much know how I am doing every day but I find adjustments or additions to the plan are made either weekly or monthly, depending on how quick the series of actions are.

A great periodic self-assessment is to ask yourself what you are doing differently from the way you were 3-6 months ago. The focus should be on how you have translated something you learned into how you live. It’s looking at the results of your plan from a different perspective and may help you answer the really important question - Did you move yourself toward your ‘to be’ objective?

Quote of the Day - 2/13/2012

In Western cultures adults, regardless of gender, prefer cooler tones of color: the most popular color preference is blue and the second is green. Small children, by contrast, prefer red followed by yellow of white. Around the age of 8, children begin to shift to adult preferences. - Melanie and John Aves in Comfort Colors: Palettes for Liveable Rooms

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This quote caught my eye because my color preference is different than the ‘most popular.’ I am not a ‘cool tone’ person at all. I like wearing red. If I wear blue - it is turquoise which is more bright than ‘cool.’ In my home I like warm colors - rusts or deep burgundies and very dark greens for accent colors. I like whites and beiges as the backdrop for the accent colors. We do have one room with Copenhagen blue carpet and the room always seems cool…good in summer but not as nice on cold days.

Are you color preferences aligned with the ‘most popular’ --- or different?

Quote of the Day - 2/12/2012

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better. - Albert Einstein

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The glorious complexity of natural systems…balanced…resilient to change (up to a point)…sustained. There are so many perspectives from which to ‘look deep’ and, in doing so, understand even more than the area of focus. Why does that happen?

For me, it happens in several ways.

• Nature is a system of elements so closely linked that a change in one has a ripple effect in another. For example - once I start looking closely at my garden, I notice not only the plants but the insects and frogs and (argh!!) the deer. There are so many threads to follow and explore….to understand.
• Looking deep into nature also encourages me to think more deeply in other areas as well. Being outdoors - having a ‘green hour’ - is stimulating and calming at the same time. It is like a clearing of cobwebs. Understanding grows when we give ourselves time to think!

Quote of the Day - 2/10/2012

Of social life, I had, and still have, almost none. I have never had a talent for acquaintance, only an enjoyment of intimacy. People who have more than 3 or 4 friends whom they wish to see often, who come and go to dinner parties and so on with a wide circle of acquaintances whose company they enjoy although they do not know them very well, fill me with envious admiration. - Diana Athill in Instead of a Letter: A Memoir

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Are you naturally an introvert or extrovert?

Diana Athill’s words describe someone more on the introvert side - someone who values depth in relationships over numbers of relationships. There may be more natural introverts out there than seems obvious since introverts are often quite intent on what it takes to enable professional success; ‘networking’ is a kind of prescription to apply as needed to make contacts to advance a career. But - always - people retain their natural inclination.

The publicity around the emergence of social media implies that everyone should want lots of connections. A good portion of the population may be OK with that idea for professional acquaintances but their optimum for the number of connections for truly social reasons - the deeper relationships - is quite small.

Quote of the Day - 2/9/2012

Every person is a dam between the past and future. - Yehuda Amichai in Open Closed Open: Poems

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As we get older, the reservoir behind our ‘dam’ may get larger and larger. Contemplate how you keep a healthy focus on the present by tending that dam --- drawing from your reservoir of experience to make the best choices and take the best actions to keep the gurgling stream of your future full of exciting potential.

Quote of the Day - 2/8/2012

Over the course of the next few years the house changed into a ruin. No one tended the garden, either to water it or to weed it, until it was swallowed up into oblivion, birds, and wild grasses. The blind statues and the singing fountains filled with dry leaves, bird droppings and moss. - Isabel Allende in The House of the Spirits: A Novel

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In the early years of my daughter’s life there was a house we noticed on the way to her favorite park. It was a two story white farm house that seemed misplaced near a heavily traveled road. There as a large oak tree shading it, tended flower beds and a neatly mowed lawn with a grassy field behind. Over the course of the next few years, it became abandoned…was boarded up to keep vandals out…and decayed enough that it was finally torn down - well before my daughter went off to college. The big tree that shaded it was cut down and the grassy field became a staging area for highway construction.

It wasn’t as grand as the house and garden with ‘blind statues and the singing fountains’ but it had the same sort of feel about it. I often find myself wondering about the story behind that house. Was it as simple as the state claiming the property well in advance of the highway construction or a more complex story about the decline and death of an older person that has started out as a farmer, living in the house for years and years on the proceeds of selling parcels for the housing developments that had grown up around it?

It often seems to me that there is a story in every abandoned house. Allende told us about one of them in her book.

Quote of the Day - 2/7/2012

By 1935 and 1936 the American camera manufacturers and the photographic supply shops found their business booming.  Candid cameras were everywhere. - Frederick Lewis Allen in SINCE YESTERDAY - THE 1930s IN AMERICA

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When do the candid images start in your family…ones that were not taken in a studio? There may be a few from the 30s in my family but they ramped up considerably in the 40s. When my mother was a young teenager, she enjoyed using her Brownie camera; one of her more memorable pictures was of the head and shoulders of her young twin sisters looking out from the bathroom window (obviously more interested in being outside than taking a bath).

Cameras have certainly improved since the 1930s. There have been incremental improvements in the technology - black/white to color to faster film to better lenses to easier flash lighting to miniaturization to digital rather than chemical images. Many people now have a camera with them all the time (since it is in their cell phone).

The cultural change the candid images of the 1930s initiated is still with us and now the ease with which images can be shared with a very broad audience (i.e. the world via the internet) is causing another cultural change. Our lives can very easily become a lot more public than ever before.

Do we understand the world better with the increase in images? We expect more visuals now in just about every aspect of our life. It is easier for us to absorb but there is no guarantee that we understand what we are seeing. A picture is only worth a 1000 words if we understand the context and content of the picture!

Quote of the Day - 2/6/2012

Mothered by the same earth, dust and dirt have different fathers.  Dust – finer and more discrete – belongs as much to air as to earth. Dirt – bigger and clumsier – is identified with soil. - Joseph A. Amato in Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible

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I like Amato’s distinction between dust and dirt. In addition, they both can be transformed by human activity; we may still categorize them as dust or dirt but they are potentially quite different. Will the new nanotechnologies produce a new kind of dust? Is an oil puddle leaked from a car in a parking lot a kind of dirt?

In our homes, the battle with dust is constant although there have only been gradual improvements over the past 50 years. Filters on heating/cooling, vacuums, and dust clothes are still our primary tools. There are many more kinds of filters now and vacuums come in all shapes and sizes. Dust clothes can be rags or coated fiber fluffs (like Swiffers). Endust and Pledge products have come and gone over the years. Our houses are sealed from the outdoor air more frequently now than ever before. The battle continues. Maybe I’m noticing it more at the moment because I am cleaning out boxes that are almost 30 years old and the cardboard is breaking down; it is producing and holding dust at the same time.

There are very few times that I actually have dirt in the house. Occasionally we track it in from outside or a potted plant gets spilled. Doormats and leaving shoes at the door reduces the first type. The second is just part of having plants indoors.

What are your dusty challenges today?

Quote of the Day - 2/5/2012

Flagstone floors can present us with a…picture of harmony between contrary forces. There are floors in which large, obtuse stones have been persuaded by a mason to take their place within a methodical grid. One senses how the excesses in the character of these stones was tempered, how they were educated out of savagery still evident in the craggy cliff-faces from which they were heaved….we can appreciate order without danger of boredom and vigor without the shadow of anarchy. - Alain de Botton in The Architecture of Happiness (Vintage)

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There was a flagstone floor in the central hallway of the oldest building where I went to college. I always felt that the floor had more panache than the whole rest of the building. The irregularity of the cut edges of the stones and the slight unevenness of their surface always caught my attention as I made my way to class. The cleaning crew must have spent a lot of time on that area too because it was always spotless. It seemed that the floor would last longer the building - like it was on a different time scale than the cinder block, linoleum, and sheet rock. When I found the quote above, I realized that that floor was one of my most vivid memories of the architecture of the school. Perhaps the ‘order without danger of boredom and vigor without the shadow of anarchy’ of that flagstone floor is what made it so.

Quote of the Day - 2/4/2012

Love me or hate me, the desert seems to say, this is what I am and this is what I shall remain. - Joseph Wood Krutch (books)

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Our surroundings leave an impression. Krutch gives us one for deserts - “Love me or hate me…this is what I am and this is what I shall remain.”

What impressions do you have about the place you are right now --- or places you remember? Here are some ideas to get your brain storming started.

Forests say “We’re better as a diverse tribe.”

Plains say “It’s best to see things coming from a long way away.”

The mountains say “While being closer to the sky has its challenges, it has the advantage of being above the fray.”

The shores say “Ending and beginning are often combined; the boundary can change.”

Quote of the Day - 2/3/2012

Newborns are like cats, they have no emotions and no memory. - Isabel Allende in Daughter of Fortune: A Novel (P.S.)

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Newborns and cats…maybe it isn’t exactly that they have ‘no emotions and no memory.’ Maybe those things are just reduced enough that we perceive the difference and/or the difference is magnified by inability to communicate effectively.

We watch our newborns for signs of developing emotions and memory. I remember years ago watching my baby in REM sleep. She made a series of facial expressions from smiling to frowning in her sleep; she was practicing the emotional feedback our faces provide to each other. A few days later she smiled at me and her father for the first time. It was a milestone both for showing emotions and memory.

Our indoor cats have bursts of emotion (cat fights, acceptance of short duration cuddles with lots of purring), but most of the time seem very self-contained, even introverted. Clearly they are dependent on their ‘people’ but they are intent on not acknowledging it any more than absolutely necessary. They are very stoic almost to the point of not showing any emotion most of the time. And on the memory front - our cats have been known to re-discover an old toy and play with it as if it was ‘new to them’ even though they played with it the same way just yesterday.

How endearing newborns and cats are - even without emotions and memory!

Quote of the Day - 2/2/2012

The nation at war had formed the habit of summary action, and it was not soon unlearned. - Frederick Lewis Allen in Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s

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Wars result in more than just winners and losers…changes in country boundaries. They are disruptions that often change life in fundamental ways. The quote today is about the impact of World War I on the US - pointing out that the pace of life had changed significantly. The faster pace of the 20s must have seemed quiet alien and not even the depression damped it back to the pre-World War I level.  It was a step increase rather than a more gradual trend that has happened since.

World War II set the stage for college education being opened to a much larger portion of the population. Prior to that time, the people that went to college were mostly from elite families that could afford to subsidize their children into adulthood. The GI Bill meant that almost all men could earn the opportunity to go to college. It took a while for the trend to spread to women but it did. Again - it was a step increase initiated by the war and then a gradual increase in availability and accessibility of college education after that.

Think back on your family history and talk to family members that remember the time before World War II if you are fortunate enough to have them with you. How did the war change the lives of your family?

• Did fewer of them remain farmers?
• Did they migrate from wherever they were before? How many ended up on a ‘suburb’?
• Where were babies born (hospital or at home)?
• What kind of school did the children go to (building, size of classes, type of teacher, school sponsored activities)?

Did the Korean, Vietnam, and 1st Iraq Wars have an impact that was significant? Perhaps these conflicts should have taught us more than they did.

It is probably too early to determine the most significant change the Afghanistan/Iraq war has had on our nation. Based on the amount of time and the lives lost, we should expect that there is something.

Perhaps it will be our acceptance of a dramatic reduction in personal privacy initiated by the increased surveillance in our lives (for example, airport security checkpoints). Of course, the advent of social media and data mining on the internet has happened concurrently and that did not happened because of the war. Taken together the ‘step’ erosion of privacy is probably already a reality.

Perhaps it will be our use of surrogates - drones flown by remote pilots or computer controlled vehicles - that will change things over the long haul. It depends on how the technology is translated from the military world into the day to day lives of people. Certainly driverless cars on our streets and highways would change our day to day lives.

What else might be the most significant change from the Afghanistan/Iraq war?

Quote of the Day - 2/1/2012

There is something astonishingly satisfying about holding in your hands a physical object that didn’t exist until you made it. - Diana Athill in Yesterday Morning: A Very English Childhood

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I agree with Diana Athill. Making a physical object can be very satisfying. In our everyday lives there are lots of opportunities for us to gain this kind of satisfaction. It can be rather ordinary -

• A batch of muffins,
• A contorted paperclip to hang the calendar from the arm of the desk lamp, or
• An arrangement of baskets and silk flowers on top of book cases

Or quite elaborate and time consuming -

• A cape made from old drapery material,
• A tile made to be a stepping stone in the garden, or
• Blocks of wood painted with milk paint to be given as a gift to a young child.

What have you made today?

Quote of the Day - 1/31/2012

Knowledge, if it does not determine action, is dead to us – Plotinus, 205-270 CE

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Data

Information

Knowledge

Wisdom

No matter where we are along the continuum - action is required to translate our understanding into reality. Simply knowing is not enough. Today - think about how you can more fully leverage what you know to hone what you are doing.

Note: This is a widely used quote. I ran across it in a book by Philip Armour (The Laws of Software Process: A New Model for the Production and Management of Software) which proposed that software development should be viewed and managed as a knowledge acquisition activity. The author provides a thought provoking perspective on the history and future of the way we capture then transfer knowledge.