ben ning

Our desire for efficiency and productivity lets us focus and shut everything out so we can zone in on a few things. We want to do well, we want to get ahead in life, we want to achieve great things and zoning in helps us do that. But could we live in this state of focus all day, all week, all month, all year, all life long?

It is very easy to forget the scale of what our concerns are – especially in comparison to all that life has to offer. It is very tempting to dive headlong into squabbles between friends, workmates – get lost in the deep hole of politics at home and at work – get consumed by our emotions and feelings, making us think that whatever we are going through means the end of the world for us…

But we forget that life ticks on in a beautiful and grand fashion. It really is not the end of the world… There is a world outside our immediate conflict zones, where the sun shines, where the music plays, where there is celebration, where people are finding Life, where life is finding its first breath in a body of a baby, where people are finding love, where meaning is being forged in the presence of eternity in a sunset, where families are hanging out – all outside the walls of petty politics and petty concerns. More often than not, our career, our problems, our concerns, our politics are not everything they seem to be, though sometimes we are led to believe they mean “the world” to us.

Even if we had run out of these “worlds”, there are many more worlds happening around us. Life in its infiniteness is full of grace for us to start again, to stumbling in to, to find a new thing, to find a different subject of focus.

We love to preach. We love reposting inspirational quotes. We love saying the right things and looking the part. We love to be seen as good. We love to teach others. We love drawing life lessons. We love pulling sermon illustrations from anything that happens to us.

We are all teachers. But do we do?

It’s great that we have a great heritage of teaching especially when you have a spiritual background - but can we be all talk and no work?

Too many teachers; not many doers.

Too many talkers; not many creators.

When did art become so preachy?

Art can be whatever it has to be. Art is the expression of humanity and a manifestation where we are as a culture. And currently, it is at a place where art is trying to appease our monsters and our dark selves.

We all know how dark we are as humans, the thoughts we are capable of coming up with, the deeds we are capable of doing when left to our own devices.

We seem to have come to end of our ropes, and because we deny the possibility of God (or a Being beyond humans) as the source and guardian of absolute truth, we are now scrambling to come up with alternatives - love, harmony, peace, tolerance, beauty, etc while awkwardly being reminded that all of this is subjective. Someone’s act of love can be an act of hostility to another. Someone’s peace can be at the expense of terror for another. Someone’s idea of beauty can be another’s idea of tastelessness. It’s just so awkward.

These are just attributes, they’re not absolutes. We cant rally around these things.

And the way we are dealing with these through art. Art has become so obvious. The lines that used to be blurred - which made art art - have been dissolved and now the artist is screaming at you. He is preaching to you and telling you what to think.

Art is not preaching. Art is blurred lines, and I am aware of how ‘wrong’ that sounds. Art is grey the area. Art cannot be too obvious.

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It is very easy to analyze and speculate the soul and meaning away from art.

Art is to live in and experience and be immersed in; not to sit as a spectator and write critical essays about from a distance. It is to swim and be taken by its currents.

What a waste it would be to take these short, precious, eternity-charged years that we are given and squander them in cocktail chatter when we can be, like Jeremiah, vehemently human and passionate with God.

Believers argue with God; skeptics argue with each other.

Our society is saturated with empowering messages to be strong, to fight, to not give up, to not be bothered by what others think. With the abundance of platforms that social media offer us, we feel empowered to do anything we set our minds to. This appears to be the golden age of self-awareness and self-empowerment.

There is nothing wrong in wanting to have the power and strength to do something. Wanting to bring change is a beautiful quality that is God-given and we must never become cynical about it.

But we also should know (just as much as we cringe to read this,) that almost every human interaction is about power struggle. Power is the ability to affect change. For example, we hope that the conversations we have with someone will change the person. We hope that the time and energy that we are investing in to an activity bring about an impact. These are great desires to have. But it becomes a little scary when we decide that we must bring change, no matter what it takes because we know it feels like adrenaline rushing through you. We rarely want to admit it, but we crave for power, in our own ways. 

The cities and communities we live in (yes, especially the online communities we participate in, like it or hate it) are filled with strong people – very strong people – people empowered and confident, yet making a wreck of their own selves, their friends and family and the communities they call home. It is not enough to be strong, to be opinionated, articulate, smart and able to communicate in engaging forms. If we don’t have the wisdom to shut up, to stop ourselves, to not lash out just because we are strong and able, then we are a threat to ourselves and to others. 

Real strength is shown by restraint, self-mastery and not having to win all the time. Strength without wisdom is dangerous.

How did we go from there to here?

“There” were evenings and mornings of unknowns peering into our future as though we couldn’t wait for it to arrive already. “Here” is thousands of miles from the smell and sounds of where we grew up.

“There” were dreams and books of the big world, of Landour, Paris and Edoras. “Here” are dreams and unwritten books about the small village, the towns and the schools, in sepia tones.

I unpacked a few magazines that I have been collecting over the years for a project we are working on. And going through them made me think:

There are blogs and photoshoots that go online on your social media, there are Instagram captions that we spend hours coming up with – they’re all great and they are no doubt genuine forms of art – representative of the landscape we live in today, aka mostly digital.

But then there’s something about having your work, your writing and your artwork on your hand concrete and tangible – a physical expression of what was initially an idea in your mind.

Here’s a thought: Today, create something or get involved in an art form that engages your sense of touch. 

There’s something magical about producing something tangible. I am not in any way belittling the many forms of art that exist today only in the cloud only accessible through your phones or your screens. Yet, the further humanity dives into the murky world of digital, the greater the value of physical things become. There may not be as many people buying books and magazines but the value of having something physical has gone up because of it – there may not be as many audiences but the few that show up do out of pure need and love. In the past, people bought magazines and books because there were no alternatives. Today people buy magazines and books not because they need to, but because they want to.

Jeremiah 18:3-4

Being back in square one is a kind of grace. It is a chance to start again.

Square one can be a hint that Life’s not done with you. It is painful to think about starting again, and going through it all again – but when you’re at square one, there’s only one direction to go from here – upwards.

You can call it whatever you want, “square one” “rock bottom”... Our point is there when you’re there, you can’t sink any lower, you can only stand back up and move forward and upward.

The “potter” in this story had to start again; the good news here is that he uses the “same clay” to make another work of art. Simply because we screw up doesn’t mean he moves on from us. We make mistakes, we can be thrown back by life to square one, but the Potter will begin to work on “the same clay” (aka me and you) if we allow Him. 

Wholeness is talked about a lot lately. It is a buzzword. But I have a proposition to make: wholeness can never be found in ourselves. We can become content with who we are and have the so-called self-love. But that cannot be wholeness. Wholeness will involve other people. Each other. If my neighbour or my brother and sister is not ‘whole’ I cannot be whole too. We are one and part of the same body.

I drove for three hours to be here to think, to write, to pray and to spend some time on this mountaintop overlooking the lakes of the Mackenzie highlands. But currently, with a cup of Long Black and the cool mountain air on the back of my neck and face - I’m out of words. I’m rendered speechless by the simplicity and the magic of this moment - this sparkling brief window of eternity that cannot be manufactured and recreated.

It is my 32nd birthday. If life is a constant journey through a to-do list where the highest level of fulfillment comes from ticking off as many things as possible, I’d have a lot to be unsatisfied about. But thankfully, life is not about keeping up with things to get done or things to own. This is life. Just being. Just being rendered speechless by the ebbs and flow, by the rise and fall of being, by the mountains and valleys, by song and thunder... and being taken for a ride by the Universe, by God, by Destiny, by the River. Here I am right in the thick of Life, not wanting to escape it, but instead wanting to dive in further fully trusting the Waves that are taking us somewhere we’ve never been. I’m speechless but full of words.✨ - 9 August 2019, 2:45pm

Einstein considers compound interest as the 8th wonder of the world. It is something so easy and simple that can reap incredible results – almost like magic. If you did something small every day, over the weeks, months and years that small habit transforms/compounds into a powerful characteristic that ends up forming who you are. 

There are a few small things that I do every day. The best time to do these habits is in the morning. Before my day picks up and I am carried away by my to-do list I make sure that I do these things. 

Reading. Be it daily reading of scriptures or reading fiction, I make it a point to read something every day. Currently, I am reading some business books.

Writing. The best time of the day is in the morning over coffee. Often I have nothing to write about and I may more often than not be in a terrible attitude about my writing, like today. For example, I have been putting off writing this post for days and even a week just because I feel like I am in some sort of writer’s block (whatever that even means). But the good thing about making writing your habit is that you know you’ve just got to sit down and write whatever comes out of you. Most days we write stuff that isn’t worth posting or worth even reading back ourselves. But they aren’t to impress anyone (or even ourselves), writing is an art of gathering our thoughts and taming them enough to be put down on paper... the articulation – the outward expression of what’s going on inside. And this is for the benefit of the one writing, sometimes even more so than for the one reading it. 

Thinking. Thinking happens throughout the day – but there are specific times of the day, especially over coffee that I allow myself to think without agenda and purpose but just for the act of finding out where my thoughts are that day and where it will take me. And during the day I often play podcasts in the background when I am working. A lot of design work can be mindless work, and it helps to have an audio of a talk or a speech that is engaging my imagination in the background. 

Gym. I suck at the gym and I go to it because it humbles me every day. I consider working out as an important habit because it is a habit I would never have imagined myself being into 3 or 4 years ago. It is one way of proving my past-self wrong. It is also an area where I have the biggest growth to look forward to, simply because there is so much for me to learn when it comes to physical fitness. 

Creating. When you create for a living, which I have the privilege of doing, I need to make it a point to make it a habit, as my second nature so that I don’t create because it is my job to do so. Instagram is great for this as I get annoyed with myself when I haven’t posted anything original there – it’s a good way of keeping myself accountable to my commitment to myself to have interesting original creative material to share with the world through my social media. 

I am learning to enjoy the ocean. I have always found the ocean to be unnerving, to be frightening, to be beyond me. But now slowly, I am learning it really is those things that is helping me love it.

It is the unknowableness of the ocean that whispers to me that life and existence itself is unknowable. It is the beyond-me sense I get standing in front of the ocean on a beach that reminds me that mysteries of our humanity and our being here will always escape the reach of my understanding. It is the coolness and fright it inspires in me that teaches me that being alive comes with it a sense of awe and fear.

The ocean is not a commodity for me to like or unlike. It is for me to experience and participate in.