Is it possible to have too many passions?
I find myself asking this question a lot lately. I love photography and writing. I practice yoga and martial arts weekly. I enjoy the occasional book on business, religion and philosophy. Am I stretching myself too thinly or am I enjoying what life has to offer?
In a world of finite time and attention, should I dive deep but narrow into one subject and become an expert or should I allow myself to explore my interests and let them intermingle to create interesting combinations?
When I was younger, a fortune teller repeatedly warned me that a fatal flaw in my personality was the tendency to scatter too much of my energies and not focus on any single thing. I worry about that because, years later, I can see how true it is. Yet, that same curiosity has helped me taste a variety of experiences in the last ten years, from coaching to design, from post-production work to writing, from blogging to CSS, from writing to photography, from traditional Japanese martial arts to reality-based self-defense, culminating in a unique tech writer who can critique with a designer’s eye, cover an event from an entire multimedia slant, speak to a group when he can find his tongue and even defend himself if need be. How diverse. How strange.
I know how lucky I am to be paid to write. I know how lucky I am to live in a beautiful, peaceful, modern country. I know how lucky I am to enjoy the friends and family I do. I know it. And yet it’s one of those days when everything I want feels a million miles away.
What do you do when you don’t want to do the work you love anymore? When what you should be doing feels like what you shouldn’t be doing. When you look back at all you’ve done and ask “so what?” What now?
I wish I had an answer for you. All I know is that even this is part and parcel of living the creative life, that some days you will feel really bad about the work you do or don’t do, and there doesn’t seem any way forward except to get on the treadmill and trudge on, again and again, one weary step at a time.
My girlfriend was looking for a new place to stay, but instead of having her rent a room, I convinced her to come stay with me (yeah I know, big life change right?). It meant I had to completely re-design my room, which was really set up for just one to stay and work, not two.
I had two main goals for the re-design, which informed everything:
1. It had to comfortably accommodate the living and working spaces for two.
2. It had to be as simple as possible, in form and function.
The Old Room
This is what my room looked like prior to the re-design.
The wardrobe and single bed were really set up for only one.
The main anchor of the room was this bookshelf which took up the most space and attention. Unfortunately, I realized from the beginning that it had to go, it was taking up way too much room and I couldn’t maneuver anything new around it.
I also realized that no matter how much I tried, the new room wasn’t going to fit everything I already had and still have space left for hers. That meant I had to go through a heavy, nuclear-level de-clutter.
De-cluttering my books took the longest time. I pared down my collection to the ones I absolutely wanted to keep, and these were transferred to a temporary shelf in the living room (it was interesting how few books were really essential and how obvious which ones they were).
Imagine having the power to traverse the multiverse, alighting onto any planet, stepping into any reality, becoming any person you want.
That’s what books are to me. For a moment in time, you are transported into another person’s mind, you see the world through their eyes, step on roads you’ve never seen, tasted foods you’ve never eaten, feel like you’ve never felt.
That’s why I love bookstores.
I can’t fly to the stars and step on alien worlds. But every book in every store is a whole new world in itself, just waiting to be explored. It is delicious flirting, the almost having of ideas, right at your fingertips, with the promise of wisdom’s love in the air; of becoming something more at the end of a book than before it.
I can’t live more than one life. But there are scores of books that, for a brief moment in time, let me get as close as I can get to doing that.
I’m in my car as Alicia Keys sings. It’s cold. Raindrops fall on my windscreen, my eyes defocus as I wait out the jam. It’s dark, but not late enough in the evening for the streetlamps to come on, and even gloomier than usual.
I have no idea what to say as I head to the hospital.
It was just a simple visit to my girlfriend’s home, a week after returning from 14 days in Japan. Her dad turns around and they speak in Cantonese, I don’t understand a word. She looks shocked. She says an old family friend, whom she met the week before flying to Tokyo, has just passed away. In his sleep, of his first and last heart attack. No chance to say goodbye.
3 weeks ago, alive, jovial and joking. 3 weeks later, gone.
She texts me out of the blue last week, hadn’t seen her in months and didn’t think she’d be back from overseas so soon. Her mom has cancer, she says. They just found out the night she got back, and the morning I call, the doctor tells them she has two to three months left.
I’m in my car as Alicia Keys sings. It’s cold. I step on the accelerator bit by bit, inching closer to my destination. Take these material things, they don’t mean nothing, it’s you that I want. All at once, I had it all, but it doesn’t mean anything
, now that you’re gone…