Clean Cut

Doing one thing by definition excludes the countless other things that you could’ve done in that time. Thus, joy is felt only when you feel within you that the thing you are doing right now is more important than the other things possible.

I recently learnt from the excellent book 4000 weeks by Oliver Burkeman that the word ‘Decide’ comes from the latin word decidere, which literally means to CUT - OFF. To decide then is to mean not to choose something but to cut everything else off.

So when you Cut Off, make a clean cut best you can. So that the only thing that remains is the one important in the moment. There will be countless other things equally important but you have to choose and stand by the one you have cut off.

Marching towards death

“Many of us don’t realize the moment we are born we are marching towards death” - Reinhold Messner (paraphrased from the film 14 peaks)

Living is a process, dying is its inevitable outcome. You die because you are living. What you do of your living is the only thing you have in your hand.

In the process of living there are many choices you can make with the constraints you’ve been born with. But its important to question if the constraints are actually out there or are made up by your mind. We could fear to choose something and call it a constraint, we could be lazy or too comfortable to choose a direction and call it a constraint. We can lie to ourselves long enough to make a truth up in our minds. We are capable of all these things, but what amongst them allows us to live a fulfilled life is something we need to ask. Does this act that we are doing, serve us?

Consume to create

Everyone of us wanted to make films when we were in film school, not so many once out of it. The difference I feel is that we consumed a lot of films when we were learning and it made us want to make films.

This is with everything, knowingly or unknowingly. The more you read comics the more you feel like writing/drawing them, the more you read books you have the urge to write and the more you geek out on plants, the more you want to grow them.

We are, after all, animals that have historically learnt by copying, by enacting what we see. Its only in this day and age and the culture of ‘originality’ are we seeing it as something to be restricted or avoided. The fact remains that you cannot, for a longer period, be engaged in a medium without consuming the creations of someone else in the same. Your inspirations are your own and they can come from anywhere but the act of engaging with the form is something that will always be important.