Big Things, Little Things and Unassociated Thoughts
Rob Oakes | January 29, 2009 3:39 amAt this moment, I’m lying in bed sandwiched between a yellow dog and a little brown and white dog and a much chewed upon stuffed witch. And it is good. It’s been a somewhat hectic day and the irritable sleepy dog on my leg is quite pleasant.
Actually, that’s not quite right (well the bit about the hectic day at least, the little sleepy dog is still quite irritable). It’s been a somewhat hectic couple of years. In that time, big momentous things have happened and my life has changed from backwards to forwards and the world spent a substantial amount of time feeling decidedly insane. Then 2009 arrived and things are … better. And while busy, life has been somewhat happy. With all that, though, I’ve spent the past several days working on a big project stuff involving the University and miscellaneous messes … and after it’s done … things will be different. My big thing will hopefully change things, and then, I’m going to finally move on and go do … whatever comes after completing big world changing stuff. Or at least big changing stuff that will completely alter my place in the world. If that makes any sense.
In the meantime, I read an interesting article at Zen Habits. While I tend to not reside within the demographic for self-help type things (I fall more more naturally into the self-beyond-help group), sometimes it is simply good to read things that sound like collections from the bottom of mashed Chinese fortune cookie bags. It thus stays in my RSS reader. Anyway … the guy who writes it asks an interesting question, “What would you do if you only had a short time to live?” Well, other than the obvious things, I think the answer to that is this: not much different.
A couple of years ago, I watched my aunt pass away from a brain tumor. She went the way I hope to go, loved and surrounded by family and friends. While she could have done just about anything, she was happy to keep doing the little things. Get up, pack lunches, help with homework, gossip with neighbors, argue with children, etc. After all, while we might despise them, it’s often the little things which make life bearable. (You know, things like lickly little dogs who steal socks.) Even when you’ve got big world changing stuff to do.
So … I think I’m just going to lie here sandwiched between a yellow dog and a little brown and white dog for a while. Because it is good.
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3 Responses to “Big Things, Little Things and Unassociated Thoughts”
It's good to have little distractions from the bigger things in life. Personally, I've really been enjoying sitting down in the evening and spending 4 hours writing 3 sentences in Calligraphy to somebody I know. It's terribly inefficient, but very satisfying.
Agreed. Beside, caligraphy is pretty! Until quite recently, I'd never quite understood the allure of writing as art. Yet, it is. In Muslim and eastern cultures particularly it nearly replaces the more visual arts. When I once asked a man from Saudi Arabia with whom I worked to explain it, he chocked it up to personal taste. After all, in his mind most Western tastes in art tended to the hideous.
I finally "got it" the other day at a fairly posh lunch in Salt Lake. A group of us went downtown to a nice Chinese place and beuatiful examples of chinese caligraphy were everywhere; the real things, not the mass produced bits you often see for sale. Like I said, until that moment, I'd never really understood why caligraphy was considered an artform. By tis not good to think that mass produced machine imitations are representative of the real thing, they're not.
Now I'm wondering if I have the discipline to learn caligraphy for myself. There are a few things that I would love to see hand lettered and hung.
How come you aren't married with kids?