Fifty volumes of The Practice. Three pages in the morning, pretty much every morning of every day1 for six and a half years, since the start of 2018.
I did not plan to finish the fiftieth volume on the date of the summer solstice, but I’ll take a synchronicity when it’s offered me. The coincidence itself is meaningless, of course, but by that measure, everything is meaningless—because meaning is made, not found.
We are not pattern-recognising creatures, as the evo-psych wankers would have it. Rather, we are pattern-imposing creatures. I’m coming to think that’s actually the point of us, and the point of the phenomenon we call life: things become more complex in order that the universe might impose still further pattern upon itself, and in so doing observe and refine and further complicate that pattern. Consciousness exists in order that the universe might know itself.
(It has been suggested to me that I’m bordering on the theological here—but no one has been able to suggest which god or pantheon lays claim to the territory I’m describing, so I’ll stick with my claims for agnosticism, if that’s OK with you?)
It’s been silent running here for the last few weeks, thanks to a combination of deadlines with minor malaise, both physical and emotional. The deadlines are mostly clear, meaning I’m pretty much ready to take ship—well, train, really—to Bergen on Saturday morning, to work on the first leg of PROJECT TEMPORAL next week.
After that, the summer beckons. Lots of folk have been asking me if I’ll be taking any time off, to which the answer has been “yes, but not entirely by choice”.
Sweden basically shuts down on midsommar (i.e. tomorrow, though TBH they’ve been winding down since the start of June, like schoolkids approaching the end of term) to restart again in mid-August. Basic commerce still carries on, of course, but the state, the higher ed system and any firm of significant size basically turns the lights off, locks up and leaves a skeleton crew in charge, because pretty much the whole middle class gets six weeks of paid holiday, and pretty much everyone takes that full six weeks across what will reliably be the best part of the year, weather-wise, no matter where you may find yourself in this long, strange country.
Which is to say: there is no client work to be had during this period for a consulting creative futurist. Not in the Nordics, anyway.
Luckily there’s enough money in my firm to keep paying me through the summer, and I have not yet given up hope that some work might arrive from nations which do not take their summers quite so seriously—so if you’ve been thinking of hiring me, or know someone who might want to, now would be a great time to get in touch!
It’s not like I’m gonna be sat on my hands, though. Plenty of work needs doing, some of which has been shelved since the start of the year, when the hubris of over-enthusiasm encountered the nemesis of finite energy.
And not just business work, either. Again, I’ve been foolish in asking a lot of myself with regard to getting new (or in some cases simply revived) creative practices off the ground while also trying to steer a new business through its first year in a deep recession… but long-term readers will know that if there’s a theme to the bare-stage monologue sit-com as which one might parse this blog, then that theme is my foolishness.
(But hey, this blog has existed for close to two decades now. And while there have been a lot of face-plants and fuck-ups along the way, it does seem that on aggregate I manage more steps forward than stumblings back… which still comes as a shock, somehow, even—or perhaps particularly—to me.)
The general tenor of what I want to do over the summer is refinement and consolidation: to tighten up some of the processes and systems I’ve been obliged to throw together on the fly over the last six months, to integrate and rationalise.
I also want to sanitise, to fine-tune the inflows of information. I took a big step along this path a month or so back, when I took the shears to the unruly garden that was my RSS reader. It’s not that I wasn’t reading the stuff I removed; rather, it’s that reading it brought me neither pleasure nor utility. And I don’t miss any of it—indeed, I’m actively happy it’s gone. It has made reading what’s left much more enjoyable.
So now I’m looking for the next biggest time-drain and source of angst… and right now, that’s gotta be Mastodon. I can feel myself starting to feel about “the fediverse” (ugh—so much cringe contained in one tiny neologism) in much the same way I felt about the birdsite in the mid-Teens, when I quit it the first time.
I think my current issues with it are a lot to do with this being the year of All The Elections, but I strongly suspect that when they’re done, there will be some other thing (or set of things) that everyone needs to hector one another about2, before then hectoring them about the particular manner of their hectoring. I’ve met some nice folk there, but at the moment I’m losing too much energy and time to something that is giving me only anxiety and gloom in return.
So I’m going to go broadcast-only there for the summer season, and reassess around the time of the equinox. My suspicion is that, after a few weeks to kick the reflex of looking, I’ll not miss it at all.
There’s more to say about my plans for writing in public, my plans for this here website and the various others I have, but they can wait. It’s the longest day of the year, the sun is out, and my most immediate duties have been discharged—I’m going AFK for the afternoon.
Happy solstice to you all.
- I have of course missed a few days due to illness or travel or work, but I would estimate I’ve missed fewer than fifty, perhaps closer to thirty. ↩︎
- Yes, I recognise that it is some sort of privilege to be able to duck out of such discourse. I also recognise that there are some privileges you might as well enjoy—because it’s not like you can get rid of them, and no one would thank you if you did. ↩︎
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