autumn tactics

Thus sang Robert Lamm for The Chicago Transit Authority in 1969. True now as it was then, but recently I’ve been thinking, “does anybody really know where their time goes?” To not be acutely aware of how one uses his time is the way of wasting it, yet maintaining the awareness of where the time does go inherently squanders it in turn, as much for the minutes of actually managing it for those worrying about how well one is managing it in the first place.

It will be a glorious miracle if I can make it to the grave without first losing my grip to self-induced dementia.

2012 is the year of management, thus I have proclaimed, so 2012 will be the year of constantly asking myself per Drucker’s instruction, is this really an effective use of my time for my priorities as they stand? I crow desperately that I must find recognition in my photography, and that will not happen until I have attained the level of mastery capable of laying the cultured masses to waste with the sheer power that elusive power, ART. But ah, from so many ill-conceived plans is born the mortal misery of mankind. I can’t even sit down for ten minutes and concentrate on a single train of thought for what I want to accomplish.

Perhaps this is the cause of all my trouble, over-saturation of information has broken my frail mind and nothing of any substance remains. At the very least I know that I have been writing less and less over the past few years, partially because my philosophy of media creation has been eclipsed by media consumption in the panicked search for validation. The path to success lies through the accruing of endless knowledge, everything from processor cache sizes to the jabberings of a hundred housewives.

I need focus, but one thing that is quite clear is that as Autumn Tactics celebrates its 10th anniversary it may very well be its last.

So, writing blog posts right before the end of the year is en vogue. This year there was a marked falloff of my blog posts, and I didn’t get to 1000 as I originally assumed. The earthquake and some big changes at home prompted this. Now I do the SNS thing a lot more, which would seem to mark me as a relater in this sense. But serious contemplation is on the down, and an over-saturation of information is definitely on the rise. This was the year of the smart phone (several at once, in fact), and the year that I started commuting via train for the first time in five years. To offset this down-tick in aerobic exercise I started running, which at first was a whim but now has evolved into full out training for a half marathon, which I will run in three months.

Art took a serious nosedive as well, unfortunately. When it came time to choose a photograph for my annual New Year’s card, I found I only had five shoots on file to pick from. There is film not yet scanned, but this is a dramatic regression from my peak years of shooting, as well as exhibitions. By chance I squeezed a small contribution to an exhibition in November as an invited artist, but the utter lack of creativity (and coupled with it my most dedicated working year to date), is something I don’t want to repeat. While I grew stronger in the body and in the heart, my soul was nearly choked out from a long march to the end of a multi-year project at work. I think my values have changed, and that’s going to alter the course of my life in 2012.

So, in short I am thankful for love, and thankful for health. I’m thankful to see the horizon of opportunities laying before me. As usual, I’ve realized that the motivation I need to grow is going to have to come from within, I’ve grown too jaded pouring my heart into neighboring fields that lay barren.

2012 will be the year of the body, and from the strength of the flesh will come the energy I need to create something bolder and more true than I’ve ever set out to. Here’s to 2012, the year for me and my love.

Wishing you the year to find your dreams,
Me

There is so much that is beyond my control that bothers me. How do I find peace from the anxiety? How much of what I suffer through comes from a lack of vision?

What is it that I want from life? How do I want to spend my time? As a craftsman? A teacher? Or an artist?

Perhaps it is not coincidence that leader didn’t come up.

Community and love as basis for my thoughts and actions are like a highway. It’s a highway that is incomplete, but as time progresses new sections are laid down in the pathways of my mind.  The gaps in it branch off to older, rural roads, rutted and narrow.  These are the avenues of the ego and intolerance.  They’re built on instinct and misinterpretations of conduct I took as truth from those I idolized.  How much of thought should be built on self-realization, and how much on dogma?  Dogma is written by others, but that in itself doesn’t make it invalid.

So the construction continues, and on those new, pristine channels my consciousness glides over, I look at the world around me without judgement, but aceeptance, and celebration.  Here’s to investing more of my mental budget to transportation.

What is it that prompts emotional growth?  For biological things, nutrients and environment are the biggest factors, along with any motivated conditioning.  But what about love, compassion, or social awareness?  If one is loved does one learn love?  If one is shown compassion is it learnable? 

Physical growth is possible largely due to physical factors.  So is emotional growth based on emotional factors?  From my experience it seems like dramatic change prompts growth, however this may only be as the change is memorable, so the events immediately afterwards tend to be catalogued with more scrutiny.  Am I able to love as I do now because of thirty years of slow, accumulated caring?  Could I have realized these things any sooner if I had diverted more resources to the cause?  If that is the case, then we do have direct control over how growth as human beings.  Our free will permits us the opportunity to optimize this equation.  So it is quite true that a man is best judged not by what he has, but how he spends his time.

This is another thing I mean to understand more fully in my heart.  If I did there would be much less guilt in my life, and much more satisfaction.  Thanks to the powers that gave me the conscience to realize this.

There comes a point where the mind can no longer deal with so many tasks, pressures, and concerns, and extraneous thought is all culled subconsciously. It’s no longer about winning, losing, or fighting, normal operation is put on hold to keep sanity together until the siege passes.  This is the time where you experience the most memory loss during development.  ‘Where did those weeks go?  I don’t remember doing anything that season at all.’  You do not remember anything because there wasn’t anything worth remembering, you’re just a machine that replies to emails and ticks off tasks.  I don’t know if this is what they call burnout, it’s probably just north of burnout, somewhere in the moors of primordial coping.

It’s a little bit like being on a mild depressant, novel at first in the unique perspective you gain temporarily– walking straight up, your focus drifting vapidly between objects in the mid to far distance.  There is an odd sense of calm unbefitting of such a tragic erosion or one’s most precious resource, time.

Everything outside of work is sacred, and the slightest hint of compassion almost drives you to tears.  It makes me wonder what kind of man I am to live like this.

To the artist I hope to find something beautiful and more significant than all the hours in and out of the office I spend worrying about that kind of nonsense.

To loving the rocking of a train, the dew that collects in the backs of my elbows, to some kind of magic always around me that I am too foolish to see.  To finding some meaning and something truly worth investing in.

Change comes whether you wish it or not. You can try to hold back change, but ultimately it will always best your efforts. You can try to precipitate change, and in a tangible sense this is quite possible for many worldly elements.

I didn’t really plan on things changing this fast, but they are. It’s a big change, so naturally I’m nervous. I’d probably be a fool if I wasn’t. Well, I’m a fool anyway but that’s beside the point.

Tomorrow I’m going to take my driving test. America doesn’t have an agreement with Japan like most industrialized nations that permits the simple conversion of a license. I’ve been talking about making this change for years, but it all came together in the last three weeks. Now I just have to pass the test, which is fabled among expatriates for its difficulty.

Bigger than this is that today it was also decided that I’m leaving Shibuya, my beloved home of eight years. Eight years of living in the shadow of the greatest metropolitan center in the world. Eight years of living alone, returning home each day after a long battle at work to spend a few humble hours in quiet. Eight years of making selfish decisions solely for my own comfort. Eight years of bachelorhood.

A new chapter begins June 14th, a new chapter of no longer running around with the freedom to do solely as I please with no one to answer to. A new chapter where I discover myself from learning about someone else. A new chapter where my worth is more than just what I can accomplish with my own two hands.

For a person who has spent so much of his life planning, waiting, and drawing up diagrams to explain it all, in the end the biggest changes are made not with the mind, but with the heart.

So I sit on the sofa, alone, in my quiet. With a microbrew in my hand and Music for Airports on the Hi-Fi, I start the goodbyes to the decade of my mind, before I start the welcomes to a decade of my heart.

There are many solutions to any one problem. Ultimately it comes down to a matter of cost, which is a subset of a matter of will. If only will were infinite and nor organic, then life would be simple. But will is a muscle that must be trained. To be precise it is the only muscle that really requires training. When will is supple, everything else falls into place.

To be so close you can taste it. To feel all that you’ve felt at once, somehow your whole life coming together to a tipping point where what happens doesn’t matter as much as how certain you are of something you feel inside.

I’ve thought, and thought, and thought about it, and I’m now at the point where the thinking gives way to doing. The kind of doing that gives way to done.

I don’t care what happens tomorrow because tonight is all the belief I need to live forever.

At the beginning of my first serious foray into online presence, I had three things: a portfolio to get a job, a blog, and a Friendster account. The first became largely irrelevant after I was hired and moved out to Tokyo two weeks from graduation, and the latter was fraught with a lack of relevance and style, which quickly led it to obscurity. However, the blog, is something that I’ve more or less kept at faithfully for the better part of eight years. I began writing of my explorations in this fantastic land, and quickly supplemented that with the angst of trying to figure out what the hell I was supposed to be. If it was one thing you could count on it was my endless stream of diatribes yearning for import.

Over time I began to find my place, through the kindness of others and the occasional burst of learning from my own stubborn demands that the world fit my narrow-minded vision of right and wrong. I moved from writing about stray cats and working on weekends to endless, repeated praise for trance music and what I quaintly cherished as community. Then at some point I decided to start doing something public with my photography, whether people recognized me for it or not, and thus we arrived at end of the decade. In the time since ubiquitous computing (to use a word that was en vogue with SIGCHI when I was in college), the fragmentation of platforms, portals, and people has made it harder and harder to be noticed, with each microtransaction of communication becoming far and far less meaningful, any rare original thought swallowed in a sea of chaff.

Sheepishly I now realize that I’ve probably driven away the three or four actual people I had reading this public journal with the advent of my adoption of that watered-down sinkhole of information exchange Facebook. I say so much more often so much less, that it leads me to wonder in twenty years’ time will my children find interest in reading my journal or my tweets? The answer is probably neither, but just the same I’m glad I took the time to sit down and actually think about what I was doing before six months went by and I was scratching my head why 2011 felt so much more empty than any of the other years in recent past.

It’s most likely not a coincidence that the speed and density of my current background music, The Plateaux of Mirror, is likely nearly half that of the floor-rattling trance I usually have on at this time of night. Thank you Mr. Eno for helping me collect my thoughts and appreciate the last forty minutes a little more.

Now the real irony is I started this entry meaning to write about love… but there we have it, the attention span of mankind pared to a millisecond.

Five years go by, some things change. Some don’t.

“I didn’t want to admit that it was over. I always thought that we would get together again. And then she was gone. You think you have all the time in the world, until… Yeah…“

The mind feels safe when presented with simple, everyday concepts. There’s probably a lot of entry level psychology behind that but let’s let it be and accept it as fact. (There, it’s working already, don’t you feel good?)

So, complicated things are best explained in analogy until the pathways are paved to freeway levels of delineating this is why ancient religious texts speak in parable. Something as ethereal and co,plaited as divinity or the human soul and how to care and feed it needs some concrete metaphor that the ignorant human mind can digest. Sure, I may say that I understand the concept of Kharma but flicking off someone on the highway or fantasizing about my friend’s wife doesn’t usually carry the immediate causative feedback as touching a hot iron kettle. So we start with the esoteric “Dharma” and immediately liken it to an eight-spoke wheel. Why? Because there are eight basic elements on the road to Enlightenment and we needed an unmistakable positive symbol (the most primitive icon of technology, the wheel) to associate it with. With the wheel comes progress and balance in it’s eight spokes. All good things… see, you’re on the road to nirvana already.

Hatreds never cease by hatreds in this world. By love alone they cease. This is an ancient Law.
–Dhammapada

To change the subject, let’s talk about suffering. Suffering, Buddha teaches is inherent of mortal life and unavoidable. One may only break free from the suffering of mortality through entry into Buddhahood, breaking the cycle of rebirth.

Leaving aside the belief in Buddhahood or rebirth, there is practical wisdom (read: easily digestible metaphor) in the way one approaches suffering. To be among men is suffering, for one is constantly confronted with their imperfections in everything from their character to the devices they design and build. Take for instance this bus I’m riding in. It gets me a long distance cheaply and more quickly than most means. However, due to the limitations of infrastructure it is built to seat someone seventy percent of my size, has poor circulation, is hot, shakes violently, etc. So the physical discomfort of this bus is one of many kinds of suffering my mind and body must endure. If I were extremely wealthy, I may have a helicopter or private limousine which is relatively much more acceptable to the human body. However in that meager improvement to my physical comfort I’d be alienated from my fellow man, the empathetic disadvantages are incalculable. This brings me, finally, to my point: which is that everyday suffering is a blessing for providing a culture foundation for strength of character. Focusing on the suffering is an opportunity to grow; a start towards deeper connections with people.

Notice how missionaries always speak of how kind and compassionate natives of remote and inhospitable environments are? They have been through so much suffering every day of their lives, they are truly grateful for the simplest elements of human life: water, food, shelter, health, and fraternity. Pity the isolated prince who knows not the suffering that surrounds him. This has been many men as it has been you and I. As it was also Siddhārtha, the Buddha.

Some things seem over the years to lose meaning in a sense, things like Christmas. As a beloved childhood memory, Christmas was a glorious five weeks starting with Thanksgiving and ending with the trip to my grandmother’s house on Christmas Day. The songs, the lights, the decorations in town. The magic of everyone being kind and considerate to each other, the different crackle in the air. But as I grew older and focused on increasingly daunting pursuits, that magic seemed to fade, like a dream after waking. Christmas changed from a season to a couple of weeks to detox from the stress and bustle my 180bpm lifestyle, punctuated with a couple customs to share with a significant other. As much as I didn’t want to lose the magic of Christmas, I stopped seeing it and wondering what that meant of my soul.

Rooted in religion, commercialized by the 20th century America, adopted by the world’s shopping malls, Christmas means so many things that it’s become fettered in my mind with cynicism. But beyond language or divinity. But beyond language or divinity, the message still rings true with me, like a lone candle left burning after a storm. Peace on earth. Goodwill towards men.

Time flows like a river, my consciousness for long times submerged. Occasionally I hit a bend, or get a tenuous grip on a large rock, and I see the scenery around me changed. Far upstream, on the shore, a glimpse of yesterday, of perhaps a piece of myself I lost, reflected in the sad eyes of another.

時間を掛けたら、全部のものが腐敗。愛のもの、情熱のもの、ちょったした美しいもの。

心酔したものの一つが腐敗してる。心酔したの一つは成熟してる。

最初から気に抜けた僕はどう信じたらよい分からなくなった。