Photo source: Mike Warren

Have you ever tried to run with your eyes closed? I tried that today on my run, its really hard, if not impossible for me to run more than 10 steps without my eyes opening of their own accord. Even though it was along a straight path I couldn’t do it for more than 10 steps. I was really scared that I was going to hit something, to trip over something or stray onto the road and get hit by a car.

And as I was thinking about this during the rest of my run, I wondered if our faith in God sometimes seems that way. Like we are asked to run blind, “have faith”, “trust in God”, and somehow carry on believing and living out our life without “seeing” our God or the path that we are to run clearly. How sometimes when I pray it just seems like I’m thinking/saying these words… How when I sing these worship songs I’m actually trying to just sing well because I like the sound of my own voice. Sometimes it feels that way. And sometimes it seems that I scramble to open my physical eyes to “see” the path that I am running on, trying to make sense of this God and this faith that I have through the circumstances that happen around me, trying to avoid tripping up in my faith, trying not too stray too far from ‘the path’ and get run over by some evil things in this world.

But I don’t think that is true. We should not feel like we are running blind. And trying to avoid sinning is not the way to run the race that we are on to victory. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that you don’t have to be disciplined or that you don’t have to work to break bad habit and form godly ones, its just that I think that sometimes we miss the point. I know that I do, I focus on trying to not sin but end up thinking about it so much that I build up a huge amount of tension and sin anyway. and I confuse myself with the things that I think I should be doing with the things that God has told me to do. They might be good things, but as someone has said “good is the enemy of best.” But I stray from my point – which is that we focus on the wrong thing sometimes.

When I was running with my eyes closed I couldn’t stop the thought going through my mind: ‘oh crap, I can’t see, what if I fall over, what if I hit something, what if I get run over…. oh crap…’ And I think that a similar thought runs through my mind when I am not focused on God and on listening to the Holy Spirit and  on knowing what the word says – but when I’m feeling like I can’t see where I’m going its because I’m focused on that very thing. That I don’t know where I am going. And so I scramble to make plans, and to get myself involved in Church things and… get busy. And I lose sight of God and all the good things that he has done and will continue to do in my life.

Do I have to know where exactly I’m going? No, but it would be nice… I guess I’ll have to trust God that he has good plans for me (Jeremiah 29:11), that he’ll continue the good stuff he has started to form in me (Philippians 1:6), and that everything is under control. I’ll just have to keep on running, turning my eyes upon Jesus as that wonderful old hymn says, because then the things of this world will grow strangely dim, in the light of His glory and grace.

Had an interesting conversation with a guy who does the cleaning around my work about all sorts of things, and we have some good conversations about things that you wouldn’t think an old guy like him would talk about. I’m pleasantly surprised every time I have a conversation with him, as it challenges my perceptions of people. Not being derogatory in any way, as I genuinely like the guy, but I love being surprised by people being interested in things you wouldn’t think they’d be interested.  In.

Hmmmmm.

But as I was saying, we were talking about all sorts of things, and one thing that got me thinking a little bit was a comment that he made – about keeping up with technology or we would be left behind. And it got me thinking about how much of what I would like to own is because of this desire not to be left behind, as opposed to it actually being useful in my life and helping me to accomplish my goals.

And I wonder if it is that feeling of being left behind that causes a lot of panic or causes us to rush through things or makes us want to give up on certain things or even makes us want to give up some of our dreams.

I know for me that sometimes looking around and seeing where the people around me are at and what they have and own and do causes me to wonder if I’m pursuing the wrong goals in life or want to buy new things to match them or that I’m not progressing at the same pace as someone else and so I stop because all of a sudden I’m being left behind… and it all becomes a competition that is not spoken of explicitly and I get caught in comparing everything and get sucked into a value vacuum where the things that I value don’ t seem all that valuable any more. And I get depressed a little. And I lose my reference. And my peace. And my contentment.

Because I’m being left behind. In the car department. In the girlfriend department. In the buying a house department. In the fitness department. In the technology department.

But I know that down that road I will never find contentment. Because there will always be someone I know who drives a better, flashier, more powerful car than me. Someone will get a better deal on a house than me. Someone will always be more determined and naturally more fit than me. Someone will always have the latest computer/phone/gadget before they are even out in lil ‘ol NZ.

But if I keep looking around me at everything but at what I actually have, and make use of that to the best of my ability, then I don’t think I’ll ever get anywhere. And instead of being worried about being left behind because of what I don’t have, I think I’m going to try and keep moving forward making full use of what I do have. And pursuing the things that I enjoy.

So that was my random thought for the day. Tell me yours! =D

I love this post that I read this morning, about writing and telling real stories. The author quotes Buffering quoting Sonny Payne, who tells a short little story about his time in High school as a percussionist. 105 words tells a succinct juicy little story that evokes a great memory and draws us into Sonny’s world even for a second. But it also acted as a vehicle to my past allowing me to reminisce and remember my days in the jazz band. But I love the point of Merlin Mann’s post, which is to write real stories.

Please use that keyboard to talk about your life sometimes.

Your real life. Not just the canned version of life on which we slap adhesive labels like happy or sad, poor or rich, employed or unemployed, “eating lunch” or “hatin’ life”, “it’s complicated” or “serial entrepreneur,” “meh” or “whatever.”

Tear off your f**king labels.

Pontiac.

Tell me something that happened. Use the names of people you’d forgotten about, and say what you’d thought would happen but didn’t. Write down what part of the song was playing when you slammed the door only to realize you had to go back inside for your car keys. Can you remember when you were still little enough to hide under the kitchen sink where it smelled like ammonia and Comet and old sponges? What was the color of the clunky old car your Dad would let you help steer. What brand did he smoke?”

My Dad smoked Winstons, from a red and gold pack that never seemed to empty. Lots and lots of Winstons. And, I loved when my Dad would let me help steer the vomit-green Pontiac with the plastic seats down the maniac curves of Boomer Road. I’d sit on his lap in this giant, ridiculous automobile, with cigarette smoke swirling around our heads and out the cracked window, listening to a Reds game on WLW, laughing and steering.

My Dad had the same name as me and he never should have smoked as much as he did. And, I swear to God, thirty-five years later, I can still see his big hands on the wheel, and still smell those Winstons, and still hear Joe Nuxhall’s call, as Pete Rose stretches another double into an impossible head-first triple, and as I type this, I’m just remembering that whenever we were pulling out of my Grandparents’ driveway, my Dad would always flip the vomit-green Pontiac’s lights on and off three times. Blink. Blink. Blink.

That’s how we said goodbye.

I love that.

Our dad had a slew of Nissan Sunny’s during my childhood, old boxy cars, a yellow one, followed by a red one with patches of other colours and then a white wagon which I loved to crawl and climb all over. I loved the feel of the cheap fabric seat covers, the warm plushness of it as little fingers sank into them.  One warm summer day Dad was cleaning and vacuuming one of these cars I climbed into the drivers seat and being the great driver that I was, at the tender age of under 5, I started to pull all the levers and push as many of the buttons as I could. I think I got to the hazard lights before my father found out and was subsequently smacked.

I never did that again.

Hmmmmm. And now I have an urge to write some jest about how that might have thus emotionally scarred me so much that I failed my drivers test three times, and now have a subsequent fear of pushing all the buttons in my car lest some form of physical punishment happen… but I would be lying. And it would lose the poignoncy of the memory, reducing it to some cheap joke. Because its not about the fact that I got smacked, or that I was a curious child, but its about the fact that this actually happened. And I think what Mr. Mann  is saying is that we need to celebrate these moments more. Perhaps.

I could be wrong. But I like that thought. What do you think?

One day at work a colleague was talking about his plans to try his hand at roasting some duck – Peking style. And so he mentioned this to his father, who subsequently handed him a plastic bag with webbed feet poking out a week or so later. Which led to his next dilemma… how on earth was he going to pluck the duck? Having never done it myself I had no words of wisdom to offer, except for the observation that whenever I had seen my Grandma pluck the feathers off of one of the chickens that she had just slaughtered, she would boil them feathers and all before giving them the pluck.

So my colleague does some internet research and talks a bit more about it with our neighbours at our little deskgroup. The internet revealed all sorts of options and methods – dipping it in paraffin wax, boiling, plucking it in a large rubbish bag etc etc. And my colleague then proceeds to debate the pros and cons of each method with our neighbour who had expressed an interest in his endeavours to roast some duck. This went on for a couple of days resulting in no plucking action, after which our slightly exasperated neighbour just told my colleague to “Just PLUCK the duck!”

This made him stop and realise that he just needed to get on with it, and to stop complicating what could have been a simple process.

This filtered into our work process the other day, when we were discussing an aspect of our project and the best way to proceed forward. We threw up all sorts of angles and ways that we thought would work and then picked them all to bits again. This went on for a little before we realised we were not getting anywhere really – and that we just needed to “pluck the duck.” To get stuck in and get our hands dirty in the process, not to just talk about it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that you jump into everything blindly. Although you would learn a lot, you would also potentially make the same mistakes that someone else did. But what I am suggesting is that it is important to realise that there is a point where you have to muster up the courage with as much information that you have been able to scrounge – little as that may be – and just get plucking. Words of wisdom that will now be a phrase that will always conjure up this story.

So are you all set to “just pluck that duck?”

There was at an event recently where a small group of designers presented their work. One of the presentations really caught my attention as the young professional started talking about his philosophy or point of view on some of the things that we as a society do.  It was a brief comment and I cannot remember the exact wording but it was along the lines of this: that our generation is quite happy to show everyone else how smart we are, perhaps at the loss of a bit of generational wisdom. I could be wrong but it seems that our generation has a lot of smart people, but not a lot of wise people.

It is probably quite obvious why this sparked something in me, made me take a second look at this young freelance designer who was only a little older than myself.

And it got me thinking. We are a very smart generation of people. But are we losing touch with the wisdom of previous generations? There has been very many changes in the world over the last hundred years in the way information is stored and passed on. Writing has been around since 1800 BC and since then civilizations have been recording experiences, knowledge and  wisdom down in a myriad of materials from papyrus to vellum to books. The ability to record sounds and then capture moving pictures on film and combine the two together have created a medium which utilizes most of the senses so that you are fully immersed in that experience. But this information, these experiences conveyed are not always that easy to access and interpret.

Then the Internet came into being and the world changed yet again. What has it meant to our societies now that almost unlimited amounts of information is available at our fingertips? The sharing phenomenon and storage of information in such social ventures of knowledge such as Wikipedia (which I have used as a reference *slaps his hand) has changed the way that we respond to spontaneous questions that pop up in our daily conversations. Well I find that I reply to questions with an attempted answer followed by “…just Google it.” or “…but what does Wikipedia say?” Its not that I don’t have confidence in my replies (which sometimes I don’t…) but I find it easier to just to ask them to check out what the Web says. And this is the thing – it is more convenient to let the information stay on the Web and I’ll look it up when I need to. Our society is definitely about convenience, from the number of fast food outlets around us and their drive-throughs.

How we learn has changed a lot too. A lot of eminence is given to University degrees and acadmic courses, while other types of education such as Polytechnic courses and trade apprenticeships are seen as somehow inferior. I know I used to think that way but I wonder about that. There is a lot that you learn with your hands – by trying things and learning from your mistakes. Coming from a design background we were encouraged to try wierd things and experiment and to make mistakes. This is something that I firmly believe in doing and try to practise it as much as I can on design projects, but in general there seems to be a bit of a taboo on trying something that you know will probably not work. But I think this is changing especially as design becomes more understood as a creative practise.

But I wonder, what does it mean to be wise? I always think of old men with long flowing beards… but is that just an image that Hollywood has taken and embedded in our image of society? Is wisdom something that comes with age? Do you have to know a lot to  be wise? Or is it more about knowing who you are, your values and living them out in such a way that they are attractive to other people? Hmmmm.

No answers on this one but I would definitely enjoy hearing anyone’s take on wisdom. So speak!

“Wisdom is knowing what to do next; Skill is knowing how to do it, and Virtue is doing it.”
~David Starr Jordan

Queenstown, NZ taken by Silas Siew

This is my first post and I should probably record what I want to do with this blog and the point of it. This ramble should hopefully explain some of what I am thinking, and why I have chosen this theme. This is probably more useful to me than it is to you, but hopefully you find it interesting to see where this all started.

I doubt many people know me on the world wide web, and of those who do know me just probably know me as Silas. Some will know that I am a designer who designs masks for people with Obstructive Sleep Apnea. But only a few will know that I am just a simple guy who (a couple of years ago now) joked with a friend that I should start calling myself simple Silas. It had a ring to it.

What does it mean to be simple though?

My understanding of what being simple meant a couple of years ago has changed somewhat. Back then I had a yearning for a less busy life: where I would have more time to do things, escape the hubbub of a life in the city, the expectations of University, part-time work and a social life. Call me strange, weird or nutty but I actually wanted to go and live a more rugged life where you would work physically for your energy sources, hunt for your food, be self-reliant and be more connected with nature. That seemed more simple than the back to back assignments, late nights, juggling part-time work, and events at Church.

I thought that this was what it meant to be simple.  I still yearn for a simple life but no longer like the one described.

And so as I was thinking about the things that I should write about in this new blog that I have set up, whether I should start gathering scoops on cool furniture and things all about design, or whether I should just kinda blab on about anything at all in my life I came across a proverb found in the Holy Bible:

‘Wisdom has built her house; she has hewn out its seven pillars. She has prepared her meat and mixed her wine; she has also set her table. She has sent out her maids, and she calls from the highest point of the city. “Let all who are simple come in here!” she says to those who lack judgement. Come, eat my food and drink the wine I have mixed. Leave your simple ways and you will live; walk in the way of understanding.’

This really struck me.

It really just made me think I should start writing about things, use this blog as a kind of sounding board for things that I don’t understand and record them down as I try and unravel the many mysteries that I encounter in my life. And lately as I have only just started my job, moved to a new city, and have really experienced a lot of new things in the last year and will most likely still continue to experience things that I don’t understand – I guess I am like that simple person who lack the ability to make judgements or assesments on things due to a lack of experience or understanding. And so I felt the need to write this down, was prompted to record this thought and explain away with words at 12.30am on a Thursday night.

So I guess I feel like I’m a simple guy on a journey to find wisdom in all her fullness, to talk to her, to eat with her, to drink with her and to start walking through life in a way that I gain understanding. And this is the start of me recording this journey.