I’ve become… no, that’s a lie. I am getting pretty good at multi-tasking. It took me a few days to grasp hold of how to do it properly but I’m getting there. The key is figuring out what’s ‘manual labour’ and what’s not. Here’s a great example. A week or so ago I challenged a friend to this (today is day nine):
That’s a manual labour kind of thing - so what can you do while that’s going on? Today, it’s accompanied by Joe Rogan talking to Brian Greene (theoretical physicist, mathematician and string theorist - sounds dull but far from it). Push-Ups don’t take too long though (though some days, it seems like they do and I don’t expect it to get any easier) so that’s followed up with Tai Chi. Probably not ideal background noise for it but after a while, you could do your Tai Chi on a building site because you do get good at separating what you’re doing physically from what you’re doing mentally. I think so long as you do take some time out to do it in silence or whatever your music of choice is, then that’s OK. Doing it at home rather than in a class is more about ironing out the things I’m doing wrong or tweaking them to be better - or at least it is for me.
Air-bud in the ear - just the one - Mr Rogan comes on the dog-walk. It’s weird out there at the moment. The people we sometimes stop to talk to are keeping their distance but the dogs could care less, so that’s a good thing. Sometimes, Rogan comes with us, most days though, it’s music... which also doubles as time for learning lyrics. I have a real hatred for anybody playing live and reading lyrics off a sheet. It just seems wrong.
For some reason, I don’t get on with audiobooks on dog walks. Not sure if that’s my fault or the narrator but perhaps it has something to do with pacing.
The dog walks have been long lately too. An hour and a half is not unheard of. Might not seem a lot to some of you dog-people out there but we go and do the same thing again about 3 o’clock which clocks up about 6 miles a day. That’s a lot of lyric learning while you’re doing something else.
By the time we’ve done the dog food thing, the coffee thing, the breakfast thing and whatever other satellite things there are to take care of, it’s pretty much noon - which is the time I like to start work. Why anybody would want to start work before this I have no idea. From what I recall of the normality of 10+ years ago, people just zombie around doing nothing before lunch.
Not a bad morning so far. They’re not all the same but that’s the kind of groove I’m in. There’s also some space in there for clearing the decks too. Throwing washing in the machine takes about two minutes and the point of that is how much it clears out the day of junk so that I can get on with things that are important.
Which is what? My mag died back in February which left me with some time on my hands to say the least. I kicked back for a couple of weeks and as I came out of that, the world started to get weird. It was pretty strange having your identity as a magazine editor stripped away (and then it just got stranger) but it also seemed like a good time to move things around and put things in place for whatever comes next for both me and the way the world will be.
It begs the question of exactly what it is you want to do with your life and you should really try and answer it because it’s your life. I came up with a simple list and though it would be great to only want to do one single very important thing, I don’t think the world is geared up for that kind of laser focus anymore. So my list, contains two or three things that are all related:
Write the books I want to read
Write songs only I can write (lyrically speaking)
Design books I would pick up based on the cover
Write songs for other artists
And that’s pretty much it - and they are all the same because they all start with a pencil and a piece of paper, sometimes this means also picking up a guitar or booting up InDesign, but mostly, for me, it’s all the same thing with different tangents.
And as much as I loved my job, it made me lax at doing the things I wanted to do because there was no urgency. There never is all the time you are being paid and your existence is being taken care of. As bad as it is out there right now, it does provide a monster of an opportunity to grab a hold of your life and get moving. If you want to be the new Ray Harryhousen, there’s time on your hands to get moving - that’s a good example because I can’t think of anything else that takes up so much time whilst it appears that you’re not going anywhere very fast at all… and any opportunity I have to introduce his work to somebody who may not know who he is, I’ll take it.
More tomorrow.