Following the lead of others requires little effort and less courage. “Innovate and iterate” while a route to financial success and often a means of improving our efficiencies rarely produces genuinely new and imaginative things. To strike out on your own requires conviction and courage. To pursue your own goals wherever they might lead demands trust in yourself. Better to get lost having set out alone into parts unknown, than simply to tread an established path to some recognizable destination. So too in things creative.
Winter has happened this year, or at least February has already been properly cold and snow-filled. We’ve had some wonderful days of blowing, bitter snow storms. A thick layer of snow covers the ice on the local pond. The storms keep people inside, and so naturally I’m compelled to be out, wandering the streets and parks and open spaces. Even through the haze of snow and the monochrome winter afternoons, the promise of spring lurks in the tree branches tinged with yellow. Soon they will explode in the fresh growth of a new year. But not yet. Today winter still rules.
Often I want to be alone, to avoid the company of others. I am no misanthrope nor do I aspire to be a hermit, but the constant din of daily life does little for me. I much prefer solitude, the restorative companionship of quiet, both in an acoustic and in a psychological sense.
But it’s hard to be alone. Robert Frost, I think, understood the desire to be alone. Yet he acknowledged the futility of that desire. I too seek, as often as possible, similar opportunities, moments where I can choose the less certain, the less worn option. My initial excitement, however, soon mixes with a sense of melancholy as I come to see that I have not succeeded in avoiding the company of others. There seems always to be traces of predecessors; I can’t help but see evidence that I’m little more than the latest follower. And I know that my passing can’t help but encourage others to follow.
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That wet afternoon I had hoped to be alone. The cold rain and gloom discouraged others from intruding on my peace. But I wasn’t alone. I saw in the path I followed the evidence of those who had passed before me, some recently had left footprints in the soft dirt others more remotely had helped to beat down the grasses and to shape the path itself. I could almost hear the echoes of their footsteps, whether lightly landing on hard, dry soil, or tramping through the soft, wet mud. I stopped regularly to listen to the water falling onto the leaves and from there dripping onto the grasses. I lingered for a moment.
Then I turned and set off into the thick. I struggled to make headway. Soon I was drenched from pushing through the undergrowth. Finally, after considerable effort I came to a small clearing at the top of a rise. The dense woods sloped away in front of me, seemingly impenetrable. I looked down and saw a shard of glass, the remnant of an old bottle. Even here I was not alone.
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Originality is, I think, just another form of seeking to be alone. And it is equally difficult to find. Somebody has been there before me; somebody will come after.
For me, creativity fulfills its purpose when realized in the creation of something. I am not particularly bothered if nobody likes it (either in the traditional sense of like or in the social media sense of like). I don’t take pictures, make photographs, collect moments and scenes, or write words either hoping for approval or fearing disapproval. I create when I want to create something. It is an act of thinking, of reflecting, of musing, of imagining. I create for an audience of two, an audience both intimately familiar and entirely foreign. I create for my present and future selves. Each photograph, each paragraph a souvenir, a memento mori, a requiem.
A cold wind whistled through the branches. The winter wind is different. Not simply frigid, though it is surely that, even the slightest breeze produces a haunting, lonely sound. I stand at the edge of a meadow listening to an arboreal death rattle, frozen branches creaking as dry air wheezes through a bronchial network of branches. The winter wind is bitter and unforgiving. But to confront that wind, to feel the biting cold on your exposed skin, to shiver as it steals inside your collar, is to experience life. The cold is a reminder that you are alive.
Pause. Look around. Look closely. What have I not noticed every other time I’ve passed this spot. Whether mundane and dull or extraordinary and beautiful. Somewhere around me right now is a detail I’ve not seen before. Find it and add it to my “Museum of Overlooked Details.”
On a typical weekday afternoon, a line of cars stretches down to the stoplight at the bottom, often twenty or so of them stopped on their trip home. On the other side, cars that have recently come through the intersection careen home. Crossing, even in the marked crosswalk, is a risk.
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This afternoon, I enjoyed walking down the center of the street without a car in sight. It was a moment. My camera allows me to collect life’s moments, the quiet ones, the daily ones, that tend to escape notice. Life’s moments, whether mundane or profound, are worth collecting.
