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words & images by aryk tomlinson

  • Your Reason Needs to be Rock Solid

    Are there times in your life where you signed up for something and it put you into action?

    At least for me, I need something concrete to shoot for if I am to finish anything. It’s like making meals throughout the day. If I don’t eat, I’ll die. My main motivation for cooking food is for energy to sustain myself each day of course. With other things in life, there are goals and aims tied to them.

    I enjoy creating art to a high degree, but I believe it’s important to have somewhere that it will go, such as an exhibit, or a customer’s hands. Otherwise I will make art to no end, with no aim. I might work on a painting with no shortage of enjoyment of the process, but if I have no ending in mind, no reason to call it complete, I may rework it “infinitely”

    Rick Rubin describes it as being an experimenter versus a finisher. With art, that is true, but with other things, we might just not start because we don’t have a solid enough reason to. Perhaps for health reasons, we should start being more active and eating foods that are good for us, but we might not actually take it seriously enough unless we have a health scare…

    Or one could simply sign up for a high activity event that’s happening months away. That way, by signing up, the need to prepare for the event is felt. So one will naturally become healthy in this way, and hopefully by the time the finish the active event, they are inspired to do better for the next one.

    As for art, I need to sign up for shows and exhibits in order to complete work… Yet I often don’t know about the shows until within a month of them happening. With that, my main choice is to simply create art, and hope that I see the show in enough time to finish what I began and to submit it.

    Motivation doesn’t always come at the right times, it’s so easy to put off important tasks and endeavors. Whether its a life goal or simply doing the dishes. I for one am still navigating that best ways to approach and do things in a timely manner. As I wrote about last week, I am working to simplify my life so I can more effectively tackle what is important.

    Are there times in your life where you signed up for something and it put you into action? What are some mental tricks you have to make yourself be better? …To help you future self, in other words!

  • The songs that trigger positive memory

    There a few songs that come to mind which remind me of some great (or one of a kind) experiences. The combination of an amazing song; even better if its your first time hearing it, with a good time.

    I’m writing this post because a song came on that I hadn’t heard in what seems like a decade. The memory it’s tied to happened in fall 2015. I had moved to Washington, USA and met some cool people who let me be their roommate. It was an interesting time in my life, just out of college, and simply felt the need to get out of my home state.

    My roommates friend’s parents owned a farm, and they also owned a cider press. So there were a couple cider making parties during my time there. It was a thrilling time, we drank beer and pressed thousands(?) of apples into 5o gallons of cider… in the pouring rain! All while rocking out to some good tunes.

    The song in question? S.O.B. by Nathaniel Rateliff.
    I just looked it up and I see it was released in July 2015, just a few months before I first heard it that day.

    Hearing the song come on tonight brought on some good feelings of nostalgia. It makes me want to reach out to these momentary friends in Washington.

    I think the power a song holds for us depends on what were going through or experiencing the first time we hear it. Song aren’t simply sound traveling through the airwaves… They are a whole lot more than that.

    Washington overall was a special time for me, but it was brief. Having only lived there from Late August to Early December, it was fleeting, but I had family in San Diego who invited me to live there next.

  • One Thing Leads to Another

    Perhaps this is the perfect motto to live by, so long as you regard it in a positive sense. Do good things for yourself, for your world, for your people. Let it lead to other good things.

    If something not so good happens, cut it off at the source. Don’t dwell on it- address it from a reasonable standpoint, move on and to the next beneficial action (or inaction)

    Do you see life as a series of connected events? Or is most of it separated and unrelated?

    Early in life, I think we do try to do good things for our future, but we have so little knowledge about the world that we don’t know what we’re getting ourself into. this can come to bite us, for we bit off more than we can chew.

    So in a sense it’s best to start in tiny google manageable increments when we are young rather than the large chunk (*cough* college). With the small increments, we’re more likely to move in the right direction, because with a lower “speed” we can handle and assess when to turn better. Otherwise, turning is barely an option.

    So let one little thing lead to another, in the best way possible

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