Concentrating, focusing. You can just as easily consider this lecture to be about concentration as about solitude. Think about what the word means. It means gathering yourself together into a single point rather than letting yourself be dispersed everywhere into a cloud of electronic and social input. It seems to me that Facebook and Twitter and YouTube—and just so you don’t think this is a generational thing, TV and radio and magazines and even newspapers, too—are all ultimately just an elaborate excuse to run away from yourself. To avoid the difficult and troubling questions that being human throws in your way. Am I doing the right thing with my life? Do I believe the things I was taught as a child? What do the words I live by—words like duty, honor, and country—really mean? Am I happy?

…

So solitude can mean introspection, it can mean the concentration of focused work, and it can mean sustained reading. All of these help you to know yourself better. But there’s one more thing I’m going to include as a form of solitude, and it will seem counterintuitive: friendship. Of course friendship is the opposite of solitude; it means being with other people. But I’m talking about one kind of friendship in particular, the deep friendship of intimate conversation. Long, uninterrupted talk with one other person. Not Skyping with three people and texting with two others at the same time while you hang out in a friend’s room listening to music and studying. That’s what Emerson meant when he said that “the soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude.

- William Deresiewicz , Solitude and Leadership 

Life is short, and we only get to live it once. I want to look back and say I did crazy things, not say I spent my life reading blogs like this while wishing I was doing the same thing.

- Nomadic Matt, Everyone says I’m running away

Hat tip to Amy B.

Like a moth drawn to the flame, Icarus pedaled up P.C. Hooftstraat. Pieter of course being a poet, playwright and historian whose name lends cachet to Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Hermes, Ralph Lauren and several dozen other status-symbol dispensaries as well as playing host to a chain of champagne-coloured Christmas chandeliers which march down the street.

Suddenly there is an insistent tug on one foot. A wise head unclouded by too much red wine elects to stop pedaling immediately. Coasting to a halt, our hero pulls on one leg only to have his worst fears confirmed. The Kermit-green shoelace of one shoe are neatly coiled around the pedal. Over-balancing, a slow motion (in bullet-time) collapse occurs and Icarus finds himself on his ass on the wet ground, shackled to his bike. Worse, a concerned matron cycling home from her lover at 1am stops to offer assistance which is just as pleasantly turned down as the hero considers his less-than-heroic predicament.

As the rain patters gently, the hero picks at the lace and manages to uncoil himself from this treacherous contraption. Minor knee grazing aside, only pride is affected. However Icarus could have died had this and that and this happened.

Bringing this public safety announcement to all long-laced shoe-wearers everywhere! Double-knot or end up in a plot.

The lamp just sat there, like an inanimate object;

Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two other sides gently compressed by a ThighMaster; and

 She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.

Hat tip to Amy B.

I have been challenged and beaten by my fellow partner in blogging crime – Oks – to break my blogging hiatus. I admit defeat, but of course one swallow doesn’t make a summer

I am going to start a little project. My project is simple, yet requires the acute observational skills of Robert Pirsig, discipline akin to the Spartans and the writing skills of a dreamer.

She came in the next class with a puzzled look and handed him a five-thousand-word essay on the front of the Opera House on the main street of Bozeman, Montana. “I sat in the hamburger stand across the street,” she said, “and started writing about the first brick, and the second brick, and then by the third brick it all started to come and I couldn’t stop. They thought I was crazy, and they kept kidding me, but here it all is. I don’t understand it.”

Neither did he, but on long walks through the streets of town he thought about it and concluded she was evidently stopped with the same kind of blockage that had paralyzed him on his first day of teaching. She was blocked because she was trying to repeat, in her writing, things she had already heard, just as on the first day he had tried to repeat things he had already decided to say. She couldn’t think of anything to write about Bozeman because she couldn’t recall anything she had heard worth repeating. She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before. The narrowing down to one brick destroyed the blockage because it was so obvious she had to do some original and direct seeing.

- Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)

Ok, enough padding already! Put simply my project is to pick one specific location in Amsterdam (or alternative city as my movements dictate) and write one post at that location. There are no restrictions or requirements other than drawing inspiration from that specific location.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions so here’s the rub: one post every Sunday evening starting this Sunday. Bam!

Travel, especially of the old laborious kind, has never seemed to me of greater importance, more essential, more enlightening.

Good stuff.

I walked past where someone had spilled hundreds of little puzzle pieces on the cobblestoned road. Stamped into the snow, they lay there as if spilled out of a box, artfully strewn hither and thither. Blue and white and purple flecks, impossible to know the intended picture. A champagne bottle, on its side on top of the frozen canal. Cast aside once quaffed and unable to dent the hard crust. I can just imagine it spinning around when chucked like a never-ending game of spin the bottle. The trees lining the canals are truly bare now. Spare, barren and kind of sad.

The light has altered. Five month ago it was a mournful gleam, waning day by day, weighing on my spirits even more than dawns when there was no light and rain uttered its hopeless patter on the tin roof. Now it becomes noticeably stronger every morning. It’s racing towards spring and I can’t wait. Already the terraces are filling up with hopefuls in the weak sun, practicing looking suave and sultry with their shades. Wunderbar!~

If thou wilt be observant and vigilant, thou wilt see at every moment the response to thy action.

Be observant if thou wouldst have a pure heart, for something is born to thee in consequence of every action.

Rumi