Change over time

There are some things the rational mind is good for and others where it falls short.

Like how someone can maintain the same personality and yet change over time.

With each breath, meal, encounter, thought, or word, we release who we thought we were and enter into a new space.  This may not be obvious over a day, but over a month you start to see it.  Over a season? Most definitely.  Over a year?  The change is hard to verbalize.

These are the thoughts I have after seeing this image by John Maeda.



I love creating and making new things.  I didn't know this in my youth or in my teens.  I started to get a glimpse of it in college.  When I met my wife and as we traveled  lived in the city, and now in the suburbs, I know I love creating things with computers and definitely with my hands.

Dinosaur King Gen 1 and Gen 2 card readers and cards made for my son, Max. : )

What I failed to realize is with each creation -- be it code or collage -- the person who I was before making the thing says sayonara.  Now as someone who is reborn, I sit with the thing I made from yesterday, staring back at me, along with an ever present desire to create.

This is most pronounced when I'm experiencing someone else's creation.  I can explain to you how I learned a piece of software added a plugin and learned how to render.  Or how I watched 2 seasons of Dinosaur King with my son and used cardboard, tape, and markers to make a dinosaur card reader for my son.  But when I hear Radiohead's Pyramid Song... it totally floors me.  I am quite detached from Thom Yorke's experiences leading to this song and even though I've heard it 50-60 times, it still moves me in a profound way.

The song is profound enough to take the worries I had leading up to each listen those overwhelming emotions and pressures tucked in my chest shove them off into nothingness... helping me stand up a as new person.