"You may look upwards in aspiration, downwards in desperation, but not sideways in expectation!"
My grandpa, when taking his police school exam many years ago, was recited this quote by the examiner. I have no idea if he made it up himself or adopted it, but I never found another source and I always liked it. Although it was dramatically relayed to me as a booming flourish on the order of 'no cheating', to darkly hang over the heads of some young, fresh rookies awkwardly scribbling their way through an important exam, my interpretation of it in my adult life has been a little different.'Upwards in aspiration' is positivity. Living can be tricky and living can be easy. You can find inspiration anywhere if you look hard enough. 'Downwards in desparation' is where you look when things get difficult, but you don't have to get stuck there, and sometimes beautiful things emerge from the dark. 'But not sideways in expectation' - this is my favourite part. Don't leave it up to someone else to do the work, find it in yourself and enact it by yourself.
From knitting with spare plastic bags in high school, to weaving waste leather offcuts from a local factory into a University textile project, and basing my final year dissertation on eco-building design, sustainability has been a growing (and mostly undefined) interest of mine. Even collating the evidence of this interest in practise has been recent; I very rarely shop for new material goods, I've been steadily switching a variety of standard and wasteful househould items for cleaner replacements, I constantly devour information on sustainable design, permaculture, biomimicry, renewable energy, urban farming, waste-management... I'm sure a smarter person would have had their finger on the button a long time ago, but I slowly and sleepily woke up to my preference for low-impact, resourceful living.
But it's on me. I don't believe that it's anybode else's job to fix the mess I'm capable of creating as a contemporary human being.
- 'The Story of Stuff'(2007) is one of the most awesome, disturbing resources I've come across so far, they have much more at www.storyofstuff.org, and they have a selection of interesting podcasts at 'The Good Stuff'.
The juxtaposition of this belief with my interest in art/design, and its potential to be excessive, has led me to some of the most interesting, innovative, traditional, holistic and futuristic living and design solutions, inspirational people and impressive change-makers. I can't go all the way to renouncing my posessions and boycotting consumerism - I like tactile and beautiful things. But I do believe that the modern human/home/business should have a degree of responsibility for their impact woven into their foundation. Consciousness should be infused into modern life, and I believe it is possible to consume well if you give it some thought. For anyone remotely interested, I'm happy to share these findings here.
Deciding to start a blog took a while. For an over-thinker, the regular self-sabotaging questions unsurprisingly come thick and fast when considering something new. 'You think you're so important that your thoughts warrant blogging? You narcissistic timewaster!' Never being one to approach the ideas of others with the same scrutiny I apply to myself, I realised long ago that I really like reading stuff that other people write. I like discovering things I haven't come across before. I like imagining their frame of mind when they put it out there. I like reading captions, notes, letters, reports, facts, drunken messages, one-word-stories, essays, books, and blogs. With interests too numerous for my little mind to cope with, I'm literally never 'bored', but I'm frequently scared of running out of time to think and talk about all the cool things surrounding me all the time, and I'm especially scared of forgetting something important if I don't have enough time to spend grinding it into my brain.
So this is is my blog. It is for sharing, safekeeping and, hopefully, a new passage to learning.
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