Man, this one is hard to begin...
It was all supposed to go so differently. Last September I started working on the house to get it ready for market. At the first of the month I tried to continue full time at work while renovating the house, but it just became too daunting. So I dropped to part time and continued the reno, but by the end of the month, I could see I still didn't have the stamina. Sept. 28th 2012 became my last day at work, ending 16 years with my employer. Putting full time into the reno was supposed to help get our house on the market and sold before the holidays. My family would be home in Texas well before the first of the year, BUT... Guess what... after two failed escrows because of a low ball FHA appraisal, we're still here.
Somewhere, in some unspoken, un-intellectualized plan I put my creative life on hold. Packing it away in bubble wrap and shoving it into Card board boxes, awaiting their triumphant unleashing upon our return home. Well that didn't work. I can see now that I've been wrestling with a bit of depression. I know I am effected by S.A.D. Seasonal Effective Disorder. Have been so for years, but cupeled with putting myself out of work and struggling with all that entails I'm afraid I have deepened the blues for myself this season.
I had dreamed of quitting for years. "FREEDOM!!!" I thought. (you know, I really tried to apply David Acuff's council in his book Quitter but I guess I am forever putting carts before horses and counting chicks before they hatch.) But are we really ever? Free I mean? And my motivation behind this post is the question, Do we really ever want to be?
From that struggle, that "Crucible" of troubles comes the motivation for our creativity. I was afraid that once I quit the day job that this very thing would happen. I would stop waking up at 4:30am to work on my art. That I would lose touch with my fellow artists. That I would waste time watching TV shows and playing stupid games, growing fatter and lazier by the minute. Take the pot off the stove and What do you have? Eventually a pot of useless lukewarm water.
In the background of it all has been growing the germ of an idea that I feel will spark the fires back into life again. Listening to my favorite Podcast this morning, Paper Wings Chris Oatley and Lora Innes interviewed Ryan Woodward Whom I mentioned in my last post http://samkirkman.blogspot.com/2012/07/motion-comics-or-interactive.html His work Bottom of the Ninth is truly ground breaking. In that interview, Ryan suggested, "follow your passion and pick the project that, in a sense, first picks you," And when we try to communicate something that is profound to us in a way that is not overstated or "Spoon fed" to our audience that it will connect. Like he said, there really isn't a formula for it, you just have to feel it and go with it.
So that's what I hope to do, keep the life in my embers, so ta speak, and share something personally profound and yet universally accessible, not spoon fed or overstated. More soon I hope.
It was all supposed to go so differently. Last September I started working on the house to get it ready for market. At the first of the month I tried to continue full time at work while renovating the house, but it just became too daunting. So I dropped to part time and continued the reno, but by the end of the month, I could see I still didn't have the stamina. Sept. 28th 2012 became my last day at work, ending 16 years with my employer. Putting full time into the reno was supposed to help get our house on the market and sold before the holidays. My family would be home in Texas well before the first of the year, BUT... Guess what... after two failed escrows because of a low ball FHA appraisal, we're still here.
Somewhere, in some unspoken, un-intellectualized plan I put my creative life on hold. Packing it away in bubble wrap and shoving it into Card board boxes, awaiting their triumphant unleashing upon our return home. Well that didn't work. I can see now that I've been wrestling with a bit of depression. I know I am effected by S.A.D. Seasonal Effective Disorder. Have been so for years, but cupeled with putting myself out of work and struggling with all that entails I'm afraid I have deepened the blues for myself this season.
I had dreamed of quitting for years. "FREEDOM!!!" I thought. (you know, I really tried to apply David Acuff's council in his book Quitter but I guess I am forever putting carts before horses and counting chicks before they hatch.) But are we really ever? Free I mean? And my motivation behind this post is the question, Do we really ever want to be?
From that struggle, that "Crucible" of troubles comes the motivation for our creativity. I was afraid that once I quit the day job that this very thing would happen. I would stop waking up at 4:30am to work on my art. That I would lose touch with my fellow artists. That I would waste time watching TV shows and playing stupid games, growing fatter and lazier by the minute. Take the pot off the stove and What do you have? Eventually a pot of useless lukewarm water.
So that's what I hope to do, keep the life in my embers, so ta speak, and share something personally profound and yet universally accessible, not spoon fed or overstated. More soon I hope.
