A Doing Word…

I figured out what I’m doing!

Both the Spotify and the YouTube algorithms are sometimes uncanny at finding the right media at the right time. This is probably because I feed them much more good data than anything else, but anyway, as we were awaiting our plane in Chiang Rai, YouTube suggested this video and I downloaded it at watched many times on the plane.

I watched their work years ago before the Ted talk and I didn’t really get it. I saw it as a fabulously complex Rube Goldberg machine, and those are about as opposite as you can get to my philosophy.

I was wrong. It’s a series of wondrous and surprising events strung together to tell an almost unbelievable story. Like life, or at least how I want my life to be.

They start with a sandbox which is a rough idea of what they want to do, and then get in and play. The events form a story but each is also a marvelous story of it’s own. They then do the business of making each part robust and replicable, at least for a few times.

This is what I’m doing now. I have a general idea of what I want and the world is my sandbox. I’m going to explore and play and create fertile conditions for surprise and wonder and sometimes adventure.

I’m resisting my normal urges to know and plan and instead embracing discovery and serendipity. As he says in the video, “we don’t think of these ideas, we find them”. It’s going to look fun but also somewhat random, directionless, and sometimes a little weird. That is the plan.

I have plenty of ideas about how this may come together into a tangible and fulfilling “home” and ongoing life but that all comes later.

OK Go has a lot of great videos, and also a lot of behind the scenes videos that explain how they do it. I’ve been sharing primarily the behind the scenes logistics of trips. I’ve found that the moments of surprise and wonder are so much more than just a photo, caption, or video, and so I just save those. But they’re piling up. I’ll do better.

I’ve never been so sure of my life course, determined to make it happen, or more confident that it will.