Familiar yet unfamiliar

I tried blogging daily for a while. I was on a roll about the Metaphysics of Quality till I realized that I did not really understand it entirely. So I stopped writing what I thought I knew and started reading the two books by Pirsig back to back. This time I marked pages and wrote in the margins. I feel closer to understanding MOQ than I have been.

Reading Pirsig always sends me off on a pursuit of sorts like riding a motorcycle in familiar yet unfamiliar country. The curves of the road and the sights after turns seem familiar, but are they?

I have put woodworking aside since I paused it before my wedding a year ago. My youtube channel gets comments asking when I will post new videos. I thank them and tell them I don’t know. Two videos a week was hard. That channel became about video making which I love. Woodworking lost the focus which I want to love.

Over the years I have picked up several major hobbies: bicycle commuting and advocacy, photography, videography and woodworking. To be honest, these are amateur-apprenticeships, not just hobbies. I was serious about them and I invested my time and money into them.

The simple fact is it is hard to nurture several amateur-apprenticeships if you want to make deep and meaningful progress.

To make it worse, I switch from one to another.

And every time I make a switch, I feel guilty and sad about the last amateur-apprenticeship I have left behind. These days, I am making a focused effort of doing street photography and street portraiture, something I have naturally been drawn to anytime I have been out photographing. I want to spend a day a week photographing people on the street. Maybe start woodworking on the weekends.

It feels like a ride on a familiar yet unfamiliar road again.

Dynamic v/s Static Quality

Woodworking like any trade or hobby has quality. It has a different quality to you and me.

When I first started woodworking it was difficult, frustrating, enjoyable and fun. That was dynamic quality at play. Waves of inspiration are the razor edge of the blade of dynamic quality. The blade cuts after the wave hits you. This is the first experience of quality.

When this quality sticks, it becomes less frustrating, difficult, enjoyable and fun... well I still enjoy woodworking and I think it is fun but not in the estatic way woodworking made me feel when I started. This is woodworking transferring from being dynamic quality to a static quality.

Remember when you learned to drive. You probably went through this same thing. Driving was frightening, frustrating and fun. Now it is mundane since you have been doing it for years and years.

A life in a perpetual state of dynamic quality is chaotic. Imagine a full-time globe trotter with no fixed address. I am sure it is fun for a while but I doubt anyone wants globe-trotting for ever.

A life in a perpetual state of static quality is mundane. Imagine living in a cookie cutter subdivision working at the same job and doing the same tasks only to come home to watch the same TV show, eat the same dinner and go to bed.

I think the pursuit of happiness is in finding the balance of dynamic quality events amidst a life of static quality.

This is why waves of inspiration, those cutting edges of the blade of dynamic quality are so important to me.

But equally important is the static quality left behind by the wave.

Index Card Organization

I am starting to embrace the fact that the way I live and the things that hold my attention are not consistently in my attention. Which means the things I might be into today might lose my interest tomorrow but peek out from uder the curtain and hold my interest again a few years from now.

I embraced my shifting focus well in the last ten years. What I am yet to learn is to effectively leave myself breadcrumbs to find an older focus back when I feel ready.

I have been re-reading Pirsig's Lila. In this book Pirsig talks about a way he left himself notes in case he were to have another mental breakdown and lost all the memories. He uses an elaborate and uber-analytical method of cataloging ideas. Pirsig would write his ideas on index cards and catalog them in a particular topic. Then he used a simple rule to set the cards in order. Imagine a sort of dewey decimal system for ideas.

This system can expand infinitely but still work for just a handful of ideas.

My ideas are less than a handful, and fairly pedestrian. They are in no way as brilliant and deep as Pirsig's. Pirsig pursued value and morals. My pursuits do not compare. But my pursuits are important to me. Capturing them is important given my ever changing focus.

I will write more about the system Pirsig uses and my interpretaton of it. I will be starting with a simplistic execution of the system before complications are necessary.

For now, I am going to purchase some index cards.

Training Wheels

The ability to focus is like a muscle.
It atrophies when not used.
It needs to be exercised regularly to build.
And it gets better with more exercise.

I used to be good at reading when I was younger. Reading long form articles and books happened with ease, even with non-fiction like textbooks.

My ability waned when I started working. With working came reading short form emails, and no books. I remember when I wanted to read Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It was 2008 and I was in my own apartment. I had full control on distractions.

I remember it being so difficult to focus that my mind would wander at half a page of the paperback. I wold drift away on several tangents often. The dry metaphysical topic did not help either.

Switching on music started to help. I would play some electronic music that prevented my mind from going on as many tangents while reading. It took a few months for my focus to start getting better. The music started to feel like a distraction. Just like training wheels become a bother when we learn to balance a bicycle.

That thing you used to be able to do but can't do any more?
Well, find your training wheels.
Give it a go.

Look for the Flashlight

The most commonly employed way to build quality is the find its pieces.
Build precision.
Build accurately.
Build it with features.
Build it fast.
Build it cheap.
Build it beautiful.
Assemble it all together and you get a good quality product. This approach disects quality into its known pieces only to put it back together later. Resurrecting pieces into a complete idea rarely works in a quality idea. It results in a salad of an idea.

The pursuit of quality is lost as soon as the scapel makes its first cut. The process of disecting kills quality. Yet, we are trained to look for quality by looking for its parts.

We look at specs of a computer before buying it, not at how it improves your life. Specs have some impact on the working, but not all the impact. There is an overall peace and comfort a computer can give you independent of its specs. Hence the popularity of Macs over PC.

We look at the technology of the sole and the weight of the leather and the stitching and the style when buying a pair of shoes. But they rarely tell us if they are comfortable, or if they age gracefully while staying comfortable.

It is easy to find a flash light by looking at what the beam is shining on. Don't look for the flash light by looking for the batteries, bulb, lens, switch and body. Look for what it illuminates.

To find quality, look for what quality does to you, not its pieces.

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Some of my friends will know that I will eventually default to talking about quality. Not only does quality intrigue and inspire me in its philosophical form, but that talking about quality is all we can do to find it.

My Relationship with Photography

Towards the end of 2013, I was intellectually diverging away from the snapshot style photos that I was taking since I bought my iPhone 4s. These photos were becoming ubiquitous in social media. Most people had phones with very good cameras and good photos were becoming common place.

It was also during 2013 that I was discovering my aesthetic with DSLRs. My go to set up is a full-frame Canon 6D with an old Nikor 28mm prime lens in its all-manual glory: manual focus, manual apperture and no zoom. My journey with this set-up, and with my experience taught me the emotional world captured through photography. Photographing was transcending from a documentary and social media sharing venture to an emotional exercise for me.

I think about this time often. This is one of the times I have come close to Pirsig's idea of quality -- the intersection where reason and emotion meets. The physical set-up of the camera was key, but the photos that came out of it were so much more than the sum total of the parameters of the photograph.

That time has gone. I met my now wife, Heather and switched most of my emotional focus towards our relationship. Then my lovely Laya died. Sighthound Studio finds its name from her. These things change our minds. Neither for better, nor for worse. Just change. I don't pick up the camera for photography any more. Heck, I raraly use my iPhone to take pictures. The Canon and Nikor lens set up is not just a tool to record video for my YouTube channel.

My time spent thinking, feeling, and loving photography will always bring fond memories. I am better off for having lived through that time.