Do you know one of the things I find important in life is to doubt yourself. Concurrently, I also believe to trust yourself and your instincts. I am perhaps a more complicated pickle than I would like to presume. I consistently hold diametrically opposing views in my head and both seem reasonable to me. I feel I am heading in the right direction / I am a sinking ship. I love her / I don’t know if I love her. I am determined to continue my craft/ I would walk away in a jiffy if someone paid me enough money.
And then there is this one. I understand I am the best at what I do / I am nothing and not relevant at all, who cares in the scheme of things.
And in that I find only one thing holds true despite the contradictions. You keep moving.
Life is a gift, but sometimes you kick, sometimes you get kicked (Vale Michael Hutchence). But whilst I get slapped from time to time, I also get compliments and one such one came unexpectedly last night when a man, well, he is a big wig, intensely private but I am quite sure of the kind of world he occupies, well, we finished his work and he said “I was going to go to ….. but why would I do that when I know the world’s master of bow ties?
And over the years I know he’s read so many of our emails and followed my spam, but until this week never engaged us to actually make stuff for him.
And it coincided with a very prominent CEO in Australia turning up to the Studio on Saturday looking relaxed after a Euro jaunt. He said he wasn’t happy with going to Hermes. You line up behind the gold bollards like a tool, especially if you are overseas and are nobody to the local store, then you get assigned an assistant and it takes forever to pay. Now, with respect, they still make the best silk scarves in the world, but I don’t like being treated like that, and now this CEO was saying the same thing. It’s over, it’s boring, being treated like a dumb dog receiving commands like “please wait here”. I am certain it isn’t the experience for their top shoppers, I am quite certain there must be a different entrance, but I am talking about the regular customer.
And it got me thinking and slightly egotistical. The staff might put on white gloves, ask if you if you want an espresso etc - but what experience do they have with handling silks ? Have they ever seen them being woven? Have they developed their own fabrics ? Do they know how to cut a pattern? Can they sew it ? Do they have a creative flair ? And I decided I couldn’t hold it in anymore. I do. I do every day. And I put my money where my mouth is, and I deliver. Do I always get it right ? God no. I am the kind that makes mistakes, more so in my private life than in my work, but nevertheless I make them all the time, unapologetically.
And with respect to success, I am no longer sure I want to get there. By doubting myself it keeps up my inertia to keep moving. I fear complacency. So much so that I asked my AI engine to assess my psychology after having submitted rounds and rounds of requests as I tried to map my way through my work, private life and future goals. It was an interesting thing is spat back - it said after assessing all the data, I think I had loaded 600,000 words I can remember it telling me. - which is a proper tome - it said the fear it had for me that I would never be content, and it referenced the amount of times I had tried to render a sketch or where I had asked it to help process an element of my photos or artworks or for example, how much I had grilled it about the Golden Ratio.
Do you know what else it told me, on the side, it said I wasn’t as intelligent as I thought I was. Isn’t that cool! I loved that. It put me in a bandwidth that was humbling.
I suggest you try all this anyway. You will be fascinated.
In the end, being an overthinker, ruminating perhaps too much, still finding myself decisive but doubting the very decisions I was decisive about, is a double edged sword. Because you can apply intellect to anything, go over it again and again, but in the end life is a felt experience, waves of emotions and circumstances that push us forward towards something that mostly in the scheme of things is merely personal, perhaps inward, perhaps external when you integrate it, but as Shakespeare once wrote ‘a poor fool who struts his hour upon the stage and is heard no more. A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’. As you look at photos in black and white, some grandmother of someone you knew, prior, during, or just after WW2, young, bright, hopeful, then, no longer.
So what to do with your time in between? What I do. Serve, create, design, engage, be useful. And maybe make enough money to pay for my daughter’s school fees and sundries. Maybe, maybe, as to that part, I continue to rely on your patronage.
Thank you if you made it this far to the bottom of the email, I know I can waffle on, but I do find it cathartic.
Oh, and what do you think of the new Golden Ratio silk with homage to Mondrian ?
