Andrew’s thoughts & observations

No ground breaking thoughts from today. I spent my spare time working on my photography skills. Turns out that simple photography is harder than it looks. 

Today wasn’t so much about creating, but instead taking a beta product and testing it with audience. The product? A school assignment, the audience? High school kids of course.

Here’s the plan, 4 weeks to create a radio based skit that will be lived streamed online in the final week. The steaks are high, and that was evident wand written across the faces of the students when I proposed that we would actually stream this live, as opposed to just making make believe. 

21st century schooling should be about creating and testing ideas. This class is going to have a formal plan and test around the idea of creating a one off radio skit show. There is nothing to loose & everything to gain. One student in his business management class wants to start a clothing company, three designs. The time hasn’t been easier. I for one am cheering him on with his endeavour. A friends 18 year old daughter who loves to tinker in the kitchen, like a man tinkers in the shed on a project, she wants to create a business in that area. (That one I have no idea about, t shirts I get, food sounds hard to start small).

Let’s see where these fresh ideas go.

This evening I heard a ladies story who just recently has the experience of having to watch her brother go from top of the game health, to within half a year riddled with a rare form of cancer. The story was full of ups and downs, he started out with a rare, but treatable form of cancer, then after treatment instead of getting better, he got worse, a lot worse. To the point where the doctors basically gave him enough treatment to get him through Christmas, but after that, the hope of recovering to ‘normal’ was lost.

It was such a moving and sad story. I had heard bits & pieces along the journey, but never an end to end account. What compounded it more for me was her story had similar parallels with my story over the past couple of years. My father was diagnosed with just run of the mill skin cancer, but similar to this ladies story it wasn’t a simple linear story. At different times the doctors were saying different things, one week it was just a matter of surgery, treatment & have a nice life, then the next it was like ummm maybe your life is going to be a lot shorter than expected. Then good news, you’ll be around for many years, you just won’t be able to use your arm. At one stage he was all cleared, but then it came back. Just a really messy situation.

Hearing someone else share there story that was similar was quite profound to me. It’s as if there are others who are going through, or have gone through the exact same emotions and feelings. Yet at the same time, no body has ever felt like this before. 

In a recent podcast that I’ve been listening too, Rob Bell has been working his way through the small book of Lamentations. A book of poetry that basically complains to God & blames everything on him. He brought forth this idea of grieving, particularly when things dramatically change. The obvious place to grieve is at the death of a loved one. But he goes on to say that a divorce can be just as painful. Or a loss of job, or friends, or tribe and community. You once had the same ideas and thoughts as these people, but you have learnt something new and they haven’t & a rift is created between the two, and you become disconnected.

What does cancer and grief got to do with each other? Although my father hasn’t died from his cancer, I feel that there is a certain emotional weight that I might have attached. Otherwise I don’t think that this evenings story would have been as impactful. Before the cancer saga my parents separated, another heavy emotional item, something that has weight attached to it.

I don’t ever recall my father crying. I can only remember him in pain maybe twice in my childhood. It wasn’t like he didn’t get the odd injury, it just never seemed to phase him. My mother on the other hand showed her emotions quite openly. I’m not sure which is the ‘correct’ way. But I would say, as a poor middle class white Australian male, the cultural thing is to not show emotion, and I am quite good at that. But I don’t think that you can have selective emotions. It’s more an all or nothing sort of thing. So if you start to block out the sadness, the happiness also starts to be dulled down. I find this a challenging issue. I feel that if I was Greek, it would be possibly more culturally relevant & acceptable to show the full range of emotions. (Maybe I need to find some Greek people to be friends with). 

I don’t have an answer for how I should respond. I do however know I’m pretty good at being able to block emotion. Which is rather helpful at times. I get told I’m a claim, easy going person, whom nothing much phases. Which is true, because I don’t tend to emotionally react to things, at least not when I first hear about a situation. Why? Because on first hearing I’m only getting a tiny slice of information about the story & context. The question I ask myself is “what is the one peice of extra information which completely changes this situation?” Almost always there is something else to know, and getting upset without knowing it, just wastes energy, time & brain power.

So where is the hope? The annoying church thing to say, especially sma

The great thing about phones today, they double as a great camera. Chase Javis often quotes, “The best camera is the one you have with you”.

The worse thing about phones today, they double as a great camera. Just go to any ‘special event’ (particularly those involving kids) and there’s a bunch of people trying to capture the moment through the lens of their phone. How many people have missed being present, because they watched an event through the lens and screen of their phone.

For some reason we cherish these badly taken photos and hold on to them for dear life. But how often do we refer back to them 2 weeks after we have taken them?

Sure it is nice to go down memory lane once in a while, “O remember when we went to the beech, but it was too cold to actually go in the water?” Or “gee look at how small she once was”, but do we need to carry this photo album around in our pocket, and would we do it, if it was physically printed out?*.

I’m not sure what the solution here is. Do we get more selective about the photos we take, or maybe more ruthless with the ones we delete? Should there be a limit, you can only carry 200 photos in your pocket? Like a mini portfolio of our life’s experience.

I work for a guy who loves taking photos, I only discovered what happens when you take 10,000 photos on an iPhone thanks to him (iPhone uses, if you have noticed the numbering is IMG_0001, IMG_0002, etc). To help manage his growing library of photos we setup a Qnap NAS, this is a special box that lives on the network & saves photos from his phone to it. It has redundant drives in it, meaning if one fails, it can be replaced without losing any information. He would also like it to replicate to another device at another physical location, just in case of a fire.

All these measures are well and good, but he never actually sits down to appreciate his collection of thousands of photos, nor does he take the time to sort and organise them. The task is just too overwhelming for someone who is as busy as he is.

I think the action I need to take from today is to wipe clean the photos off my iPhone. I will however back them up first to my computer. But it will be interesting to see how many times I reach for my phone to show a now, non existent photo. I know for a while I did it a lot, not so much anymore. 
*side story, I went to a 90th earlier in the year and there was an old lady around 85 I believe who did actually carry around physical printed photos to show people a life once lived.