Polaroid Wisdom
“Writing a first draft is very much like watching a Polaroid develop. You can’t — and, in fact, you’re not supposed to — know exactly what the picture is going to look like until it has finished developing.”
- Anne Lamott
Polaroid of St. Anne’s, July 2024
Things This Week:
Two colonial style homes for sale in Harrisonburg you should check out: 1134 Sumter Ct & the 911 Ridgewood Dr.
I have a new found love of newsletters. Here are some I look forward to each week.
Austin Kleon: I’ve followed Austin for years. He wrote Steal Like An Artist and introduced me to Blackout Poetry. I like watching how creatives develop over the years. He's a consistent source of inspiration even as what he does morphs and changes. Highly recommend.
Isaac French: This guy built a micro-resort in Texas and created quite a stir. His weekly newsletter is about all thing hospitality. I like his approach of hospitality as a calling as well as a business. Great for anyone running an airbnb or service business.
Hans Lorei: I stumbled across his Instagram. He’s an interior designer and I’ve enjoyed his weekly newsletter on design and creativity.
Spectator Bird Patreon: A delight to get a new song and newsletter straight to my inbox. Lindsey & Rachel are sisters, friends, and my friends. I am not impartial and neither should you be. If you’ve never had the pleasure, let me introduce you to the song that makes me cry every time. Lindsey has the ability to use humor to disarm you and then smack you right in the face with love and grace and the human experience.
I’m rereading Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. It seems like a book about how to write but it’s really a book about how to live and pay attention. Lamott talks about how creating a story is like watching a polaroid develop. As you write, the characters and plot start to come into focus. And really, aren’t we all like a developing polaroid? We really don’t see the whole picture. And we can’t rush it.
Practice: My life prior to 2020 was very rigid. I woke up very early. I had a plan. I had a goal. But that went out the window after the world shut down. And it wasn’t a bad thing. Rigidity can cause things to get brittle and break. Taking a mandated break allowed me to examine why and I couldn’t think of one reason. So I stopped getting up early. I stopped having a plan. I didn’t stop caring. I just let go. Being all or nothing for me has been an experiment in trying to find the middle. I swing one way, hit that radical in-between and then past it I go. Perhaps like Buddha, I’m just trying to find nirvana. I think it’s the tension between both/and. As Caleb Stine puts it,
“Happiness comes from making the hard, healthy choice over and over again, until it turns from a chore, into a practice, and then into a joy. You will never regret turning the things your heart loves into daily habits. You will never look back and say, I’m not glad I wrote or drew or ate fresh food from my community. And yet, how many daily habits do we have we wish we didn’t do?”
I’m looking to start some practices. Daily. Intentional. I’m looking to find what I lost when I wanted to be an adult: the art of play. Technology has really ruined my idea of it and I want to get back to the tactile. I want to relearn how to love being quiet. Quiet = no phone or device near me at all times. What have you found to be your best practices?
I love them and so should you. Here some Airbnbs including mine: