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Deux baigneuses au bord d’un étang - Léon Lhermitte (1893)

While in Rome some time ago I had an idea that I should dedicate an entire year to working on a single project. Typically I have a lot of ideas for different things that I would like to do. Some of these ideas I get started on in some meaningful sense, a few I might even finish eventuality, while many more never make it past simple notes or occasional musings that around the old noggin. I like my ideas sometimes and I wish that I was better at executing on them. It is for this reason I thought it might be a good idea to dedicate myself to a single project with clear goals so that I could focus on completing it step-by-step. This kind of structuring is helpful for me as I will discuss later but lacked a key factor: motivation. And so, despite coming up with a framework and setting goals to get started on one of these year long projects I have yet to begin working on it in any meaningful sense.

There is something about being on vacation that motivates me to work though. Not work as in go to my job, try hard to please my boss, and get a promotion. More like do the kinds of creative work that I don’t feel that I normally have the time or energy to do but which I believe would be more fulfilling and which would I would actually be motivated to do if I did. There is an obvious irony here. If I’m not motivated enough to make time and work on these things as it is, what makes me think that given the time I would be motivated to do it then? The free time I have when I’m on holiday is just enough to allow me to come up with the ideas. I tell myself if my whole life was like this I could follow through on them all.

I often think enviously of the writers life. The writer works mostly from home or from some other comfortable place but they can work from anywhere really if needed or desired. Maybe there is a time when they prefer to write but ultimately it is up to them when they do it. Of course I imagine in order to be a good writer you must spend an awful lot of time doing it but one would hope that you enjoy it most of the time. It is very appealing to me the idea of going on holiday somewhere and finding a nice vantage point to work on your writing between other activities. I am reminded me of what was a pretty good time in my life. In my early twenties finally finishing my degree at SFU and while working on projects that actually interested me. I did have classes and such to go to and my part-time job(s), but in general I was very free to work whenever I wanted. Having some (but not too much) deadlines, structure, and someone telling me what to do was helpful for me. I think the total lack of that is part of what makes working on personal projects now such an inconsistent endeavour.

Of course it’s not just a question about the economy of time but the kinds of activities I do that inspires me to work. Going to museums, reading a book, watching a movie, being in nature, movement and activity are inspiring to me. It was doing the former in Rome, along with the preponderance of free time, that gave me my first idea for a still nascent year long project. I like seeing depictions of bathing in art. There are many great examples of this in painting, film, and photography. I personally love to bathe and I find the many forms that bathing takes to be intriguing and worthy of exploration. The final outcome of the bathing project is to be determined but the was that I would start just by reading, collecting, and experiencing as much as I could. Projects are not necessarily just about producing something, but more so about cultivating the ground from which a creative project could bloom. This process was also something that I enjoyed about university. I liked reading papers on all kinds of different subjects and being enriched by them. This was not a passive process. Synthesizing disparate ideas through craft such as writing or other art forms is a deeply satisfying process. The reification of my foggy mind also trained it to think more clearly and pursue more doggedly the nourishing endeavours that led me there in the first place.

Around this time last year I came across the route for the Paris marathon while out shopping. In that moment I was inspired to sign up to run in this years edition. I do like running but would have described myself then as a fairly casual runner. I am not quite sure what it was that inspired me to sign up. Lately I had been thinking about how it would be nice to be able to run a long distance more so as an adventure than as an end in an of itself having watched some YouTube videos of people doing this kind of thing. I suppose at that moment I had the opportunity to choose to take a concrete, no-going-back step towards this goal. One of the benefits of having goals in the first place is that they make choices for you. Anyway, 9 months went by and I had continued my casual running but it was now time to start getting serious. I got started on a Hal Higdon training plan and quickly found that I enjoyed the process of training quite a bit. It was evident early on that there was a lot for me to learn about training and about running. It was fascinating to wade through the information online about the subject and I was very glad to see that nearly all my questions had answers somewhere. Eventually I graduated to reading books in order to get more holistic single viewpoints on the subject. I liked the routine of waking up 4 days a week and going out for a run before work or using the weekend long run as an excuse to explore places that I had never been to before. In the end I did my big run and now that I’ve learned the basics of how to train and what to expect from the experience I intend to continue and do another next year perhaps. The marathon had everything that I could want out of a project. It had structure, a deadline, and lots of learning and discovery. It was physically and mentally nourishing and encouraged me to make time. It taught me something about projects and what it takes to complete them and what that even means. It is only the first step in the ill defined project “run a really long distance as an adventure.” It is something that I intend to develop further in the future.

Thank you for reading my first real blog post. I am not a very good writer. For example I don’t know about style or structure or clarity and I’m terrible at spelling. In general I like to work intuitively and so these kinds of things will probably take some time to develop. This blog itself is a project and I’m not certain about what kinds of things I will end up using it for. Most likely it will just a place to synthesize the thoughts that burble up while I’m running or in a museum. See you next time.