life

Time to Purge

May 9, 2012 by Jeff Moriarty 1 Comment

At every family function the cameras come out to take dozens of pictures we’ll never look at again. An hour of video is uploaded to YouTube every second.

We create more content than we’ll ever consume and get lost in the noise. Without intent and focus, volume rushes in to take the place of quality.

I’m the King of taking on too much. It’s not that I lack the ability to say No, but that ability is overwhelmed by knowing so many interesting people, doing fascinating things, and having a seemingly endless stream of exciting and/or screwy things I want to try.

If every single thing I was currently doing or working on disappeared, with all the other stuff I want to do but lack the time I’d be just as busy as I am now.

To compound the problem, connecting people and ideas in new ways is both a strength and a pleasure of mine. Having a million things going on leads to serendipity I wouldn’t otherwise have. Of course, it also leads to more things I want to do. Rinse, drown, repeat.

So it’s time to purge.

In the next week I’m going to gut my RSS feed, and sort out just what combination of Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ makes sense.

I’m going to get medieval on my project list and see what things I need to drop or rearrange.

I’m going to carve out time for some things that have suffered horribly – working out, reading, writing, drawing, and learning guitar.

I’m going to get back to just a few daily and weekly tasks to keep focused.

Part of this daily post writing project (I’m now 3 behind, I think) is to shake things up and help force me to reevaluate my time and how I spend it. I’m sure I’ll get all jammed up again eventually, but that’s just part of the process.

For right now I just need to get back down to doing a few things well rather than killing myself trying to do dozens of things half-way. It’s going to be painful to get there, but worth it when I do.

The power between the notes

February 5, 2010 by Jeff Moriarty Leave a Comment

I am not a person who has regrets, but one of the few things I wish I had done differently was learn to play a musical intrument as a child. I could still do it, I know, but my life is so slammed with stuff going on I don’t know where I’d work it in. Which is sort of my point here.

As a result of not learning to play and instrument, I have very little understanding of music at any deep level. Yet I’m curious about nearly every damned thing on the planet, so on my morning commute several years ago I was listening intently to a radio show talking about the way we perceive music and the structure of songs. At one point the speaker, whose name I’ve long forgotten, made the statement that it wasn’t the notes that made the shape of a song, but the silence between them.

The silence makes the song.

It is a simple thing, and probably self-evident to any student of music, but was such an epiphany for me that I almost rear-ended the car in front of me. For all the power and beauty of the notes, without the space between them – without the moments of quiet – the song itself had no shape. Silence takes a wild crash of cacophonous sound and creates the structure. It makes the order out of chaos.

We fill out lives with tasks, duties, deliverables, projects, people, and goals. Yet without the moments of silence there is no shape to it. It becomes a rush, a blur. An endless motion without form. The moments of silence in our life where we reflect, breathe, and do something quiet and personal are often the first things we sacrifice when things become hectic, but they should not be compromised. Without them, you’re simply making noise.

Rest.

The Falling Man

September 13, 2008 by Jeff Moriarty Leave a Comment

Esquire has an amazing article about the story of one of the most famous photographs from the September 11th attacks in New York City… that of a single man falling through the air after having lept to his death.

One of the most fascinating things to me was how the family of the man presumed to be in the picture refused to believe it could be him.¬† They felt that his suicide would have been act of cowardice, and his love for them would have kept him working to return to them.

I cannot remotely assume to know what it was like to be in that situation, in those buildings, on that day. Most pictures of the jumpers were censored inside the United States, but some estimates place the total as high as 200 people.¬† They fell for 10 seconds. They reached speeds of 150 miles per hour.¬† They fled a hell of chaos, terror, and burning jet fuel.

How you exit this life is an important part of how you live it. Whether those people jumped out of fear or in act of defiance, they most assuredly were not cowards.