2010 Resolution

On the train this morning I was just mixing thoughts in my head and I resolved to treat each and every day as a complete fresh beginning in itself, no matter how well or badly each turns out. It felt such a simple thing- a resolution that is easy to remember and fun to keep. It's bizarre how the more familiar you are with the world/locality/routine/people around you the more subtley you are distanced from it. Things slowly become automatic so that you can feel like you are living your life in a kind of dream, you don't see the world as keenly as when things are new like it is to a child or a traveller in a totally different place. A child has perceptiveness but lacks understanding and wisdom, and adult often has understanding and sometimes wisdom but often the perceptiveness is blunted. A music and visual artist called Laurie Anderson, said to be an artist is to pay attention. She said that it's fun to be an artist and everyone should be one. I think the phrase "paying attention" can conjure the image of being in a classroom and concentrating but it doesn't work in when it comes to taking the world in because you can't do that when you have tunnel vision. However lightening yourself from the illusory concerns of the of the past and future lets you be alive to the present rather than going through the motions like driving a car until you park up at the end of the day. Anyway I was mulling this over when I saw an article in the internet edition of The Independent about new gadgets that will be available in 2010. One was called a Life Recorder, it's a pendant to record images, sound and conversation around you as you go through the day like a personal black box. If I hadn't been thinking about being connected to reality earlier, I would never have understood why someone would have decided to market this tool. In my opinion though, it's a bad name and therefore not the best way to market it. By implication, to buy it is to accept life is a confusing haze to be pieced together at a later time, that life is so hectic we may as well give up being in sync with it. Instead, it could be pitched as a super-handy recorder to store thoughts and things which strike us and emerging ideas. Of course to do that, you have to pay attention or be alive to the new present in the first place (which I find slows time down!). It's not to record the now, it's to record what you made of the now.

Life Recorder to record everything does have value for some people. A guy in America called Studs Terkel, a humane man in the US who has sadly passed away used to record everything and treated everyone as new and valuable. When he came to talking to people he made sure he encountered people who were ignored, people who history does not record. He recorded everything for 40-60 years. It is interesting to hear how sounds change and how people speak changes over time. His work is immense and of great renown and a museum has opened to house it.