Splash No. 223 - Process
Process
Everything comes from a process. To get coffee beans, you start with a coffee plant, taking its fruit and extracting the raw coffee beans, which are dried and have their coverings removed before they’re roasted. And from there, there are dozens of other processes by which the coffee beans are turned into coffee, from espresso machines to pourovers to aeropresses and dozens more. Everything we consume in life from the water that has gone through the water cycle and water treatment plants to the pseudo-intellectual newsletters from a San Francisco resident that have traveled through cyberspace to reach your device must be processed in some means or another. Even art, in its variety and strangeness, is the end of a creative process.
I had these thoughts upon reading this passage from Lisa Olivera’s newsletter:
“No one else can do my work because no one else is me. And no one else can do your work because no one else is you. When I write, I write with my entire being: my lived experience and history, my genes and blood, my vision and longing, my grief and hope, my path and where I come from, my vantage point and opinion, my heart and soul — things only I have that cannot be replicated. Similarly, only you can do the work you do — whether it’s parenting or creating art, working on cars or computers, gardening or running, performing or teaching — only you can do what you do in the exact way you do it.”
In a way, we are complex machines that are constantly taking in new inputs that alter the outputs that come out. Our lives and everything that we experience are continuing altering the inner machinery, changing our outputs in the face of similar inputs. Even two nearly identical days are dissimilar in some sense, since each day we change as a result of some input that we may not even perceive. And thus, every act that we do is a sacred one — one that has never existed before, that has never been done in the particular way that we are doing in any given moment.
I’ve been consuming some podcasts with various successful people talking about how to replicate their success in non-traditional careers. They often speak of looking for a balance of what interests you, while also looking for something that people will respond to, since that’s the only way to build an audience and become more popular. I’ve been pondering this for a few days, wondering if I should try to make this newsletter “about something” rather than the weekly woolgathering about whatever topic enters my head. Perhaps I would focus on writing about writing or dive deep into different types of trees that are out there. And as I failed to find any particular angle that seemed that interesting, I wondered why I felt the need to do such an exercise at all. Was I really hoping to build a huge audience when my small circle felt perfectly cozy?
There’s some uninteresting explanation there about capitalistic ambition and its ability to keep us from having hobbies that we don’t monetize or optimize. I’m sure that’s true, but I also question why everything has to have a purpose. If we are like machines, do we ask cars why they move when powered? No, we know that they were just designed to do that. Do I write for a purpose? Or do I just write because I was made to do it?
Drops of the Week
PLAYLIST - september 22 - good mix of hip hop, EDM, pop punk, and r&b
ARTICLE - "Stone Skipping Is a Lost Art. Kurt Steiner Wants the World to Find It." by Sean Williams - fascinating piece about the world's best stone skipper
POEM - "Red Language" by Heid E. Erdrich - if your words came back / gray and kind as mild winter / believe me I’d still understand
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Certainly,
Nikhil