physical pleasure

If learned darkness

if learned darkness from our searched world should wrest the rare unwisdom of thy eyes, and if thy hands flowers of silence curled upon a wish,to rapture should surprise my soul slowly which on thy beauty dreams (proud through the cold perfect night whisperless to mark,how that asleep whitely she seems whose lips the whole of life almost do guess) if god should send the morning;and before my doubting window leaves softly to stir, of thoughtful trees whom night hath pondered o’er –and frailties of dimension to occur about us and birds known, scarcely to sing (heart,could we bear the marvel of this thing?) ~e. e. cummings

In praise of Manifestos

Manifestos are a powerful catalyst. By publicly stating your views and intentions, you create a pact for taking action. (Movements from the American Revolution to Dogme 95 film to the Firefox web browser were all launched by manifestos.) If you want to change the world, even in just a small way, creating a personal or business manifesto is a great place to start.
Needless to say, developing a set of principles that you believe in and constantly strive to stand by is an invaluable tool.

To spark your imagination, I have rounded up five of my favorite manifestos below.

1. The Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright
Via Gretchen Rubin, we discovered this manifesto from architect Frank Lloyd Wright, written as a series of “fellowship assets” meant to guide the apprentices who worked with him at his school, Taliesin. I particularly love number 10, the idea that working with others should come naturally.

1. An honest ego in a healthy body.

2. An eye to see nature.


3. A heart to feel nature.


4. Courage to follow nature.


5. The sense of proportion (humor).


6. Appreciation of work as idea and idea as work.


7. Fertility of imagination.

8. Capacity for faith and rebellion.


9. Disregard for commonplace (inorganic) elegance.

10. Instinctive cooperation.

2. The Marketer: Seth Godin
The always insightful Seth Godin shared his “Unforgivable Manifesto” with artist Hugh MacLeod a few years ago. His observation about the short-run vs the long-run in point 5 is particularly incisive, as is the notion that we’re all marketers in point 7 – it’s just that some of us don’t own it.

1. The greatest innovations appear to come from those that are self-reliant. Individuals who go right to the edge and do something worth talking about. Not solo, of course, but as instigators of a team. In two words: don’t settle.

2. The greatest marketers do two things: they treat customers with respect and they measure.

3. The greatest salespeople understand that people resist change and that ‘no’ is the single easiest way to do that.

4. The greatest bloggers blog for their readers, not for themselves.

5. There really isn’t much a of ‘short run’. It quickly becomes yesterday. The long run, on the other hand, sticks around for quite a while.

6. The internet doesn’t forget. And sooner or later, the internet finds out.

7. Everyone is a marketer, even people and organizations that don’t market. They’re just marketers who are doing it poorly.

8. Amazing organizations and people receive rewards that more than make up for the effort required to be that good.

9. There is no number 9.

10. Mass taste is rarely good taste.

3. The Designer: John Maeda
RISD president John Maeda’s slim book, The Laws of Simplicity, is one of my all-time favorites, with broad-reaching insights that apply as easily to arranging your living room as to designing a visionary product. In 100 pages, Maeda elaborates on 10 laws for business, design, and life:

1. Reduce: The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.

2. Organize: Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.

3. Time: Savings in time feel like simplicity.

4. Learn. Knowledge makes everything simpler.

5. Differences: Simplicity and complexity need each other.

6. Context: What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral.

7. Emotion: More emotions are better than less.

8. Trust: In simplicity we trust.

9. Failure: Some things can never be made simple.

10. The One: Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.

4. The Writer: Leo Tolstoy
While they betray a bit of the self-hating introvert, Tolstoy’s “rules for life,” originally written when he was 18 years old, do contain some useful gems. In particular, the notion of managing your energy and prioritizing based on goals (no. 5), and of managing your finances wisely by always keeping a low overhead (no. 9 & 10).

1. Get up early (five o’clock).

2. Go to bed early (nine to ten o’clock).

3. Eat little and avoid sweets.

4. Try to do everything by yourself.

5. Have a goal for your whole life, a goal for one section of your life, a goal for a shorter period and a goal for the year; a goal for every month, a goal for every week, a goal for every day, a goal for every hour and for every minute, and sacrifice the lesser goal to the greater.

6. Keep away from women.

7. Kill desire by work.

8. Be good, but try to let no one know it.

9. Always live less expensively than you might.

10. Change nothing in your style of living even if you become ten times richer.

5. The Company: Apple
When Steve Jobs went on medical leave in 2009 and financial analysts were making dire predictions, Apple COO Tim Cook boiled the company’s culture down to what was essentially an 8-point manifesto. I love that saying no is one of the key points. It’s so hard!

1. We believe that we’re on the face of the earth to make great products.

2. We’re constantly focusing on innovating.

3. We believe in the simple, not the complex.

4. We believe we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products that we make and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution.

5. We believe in saying no to thousands of projects so that we can focus on the few that are meaningful to us.

6.We believe in deep collaboration and cross pollination in order to innovate in a way others cannot.

7. We don’t settle for anything other than excellence in any group in the company.

8. We have the self-honesty to admit when we’re wrong and the courage to change.
–
What’s Your Manifesto?

Do you have a personal manifesto that you’d like to share with ?



How about a manifesto that you’ve always admired//love to hear what that is?

there seems

“There seems to be an inborn drive in all human beings not to live in a steady emotional state, which would suggest that such a state is not tolerable to most people. Why else would someone succumb to the attractions of romantic love more than once? Didn’t they learn their lesson the first time or the tenth time or the twentieth time? And it’s the same old lesson: everything in this life—I repeat, everything—is more trouble than it’s worth. And simply being alive is the basic trouble. This is something that is more recognized in Eastern societies than in the West. There’s a minor tradition in Greek philosophy that instructs us to seek a state of equanimity rather than one of ecstasy, but it never really caught on for obvious reasons. Buddhism advises its practitioners not to seek highs or lows but to follow a middle path to personal salvation from the painful cravings of the average sensual life, which is why it was pretty much reviled by the masses and mutated into forms more suited to human drives and desires. It seems evident that very few people can simply sit still. Children spin in circles until they collapse with dizziness.”
— Thomas Ligotti

no it actually does not

“It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.
It doesn’t interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.
It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain!I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it, or fix it.
I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own, if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, to be realistic, to remember the limitations of being human.
It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself; if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul; if you can be faithlessand therefore trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see beauty even when it’s not pretty, every day,and if you can source your own life from its presence.
I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand on the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, “Yes!”
It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up, after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done to feed the children.
It doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back.
It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you, from the inside, when all else falls away.
I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.”
— Oriah Mountain Dreamer

it is curious…death and a loved one

“It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things.” — Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can’t Avoid)

love hope and light

But love doesn’t always generate hope. Anyone who has ever experienced love knows that you can have too much love or two little. You can have love that parches, love that defeats. You can have love measured out in the wrong proportions. It’s like your sunlight and water—the wrong kind of love is just as likely to stifle hope as it is to nourish. it. –Kevin Brockmeier, A Brief History of the Dead