MY DATE WITH CANCER
During February 2021, I was told I had cancer. An emergency operation followed, backed by a chemo treatment that is still ongoing as I write.
It’s hard to describe the moment when you hear THAT word - cancer. The emotions are raw and your world gets strangely real. You hold your loved ones close and find that there is a redefinition of what is truly important in life.
There’s never ‘one way’ to process such news. Writing helped. It’s amazing how life can make sense through the creation of stories.
Below is one of those creations. A six minute short story trying to get my head around this moment. It’s a little bit funny, a little bit raw, a little bit vulnerable and a little bit real. It’s called ‘My Surprise Dinner Date With Cancer’.
Feel free to share. If you need a PDF copy to pass on to others, just let me know.
MY SURPRISE DINNER DATE WITH CANCER
I met Cancer on a Thursday night. At a restaurant. The one between Mr Tilley’s corner shop and Cath’s Café. I wasn’t expecting to bump into such an infamous figure. If I had, I would’ve dressed up for the occasion. My mother always told me that important meetings required smart trousers and a pressed shirt.
In hindsight, I should’ve spotted my evening wasn’t following the typical rules of normality. It’s not every day a hooded, faceless taxi driver pulls up outside your house with a glimmering silver scythe on the back seat. I assumed I had mistakenly ordered one of those novelty rides; I’m not good at navigating new apps on my phone these days.
The taxi ride was as comfortable as one could expect. Sitting next to an oversized curved blade crafted in the fires of eternal death was never going to leave much room for my legs. Small talk with the driver was an obvious no-go; the sign on their headrest gave it away. ‘BE YE SILENT AND CONTEMPLATE THY DOOM’. So, I did just that, apart from the bit about contemplating my doom. That seemed a bit too serious on a weeknight.
When we arrived outside the restaurant, I asked the hooded figure how much the fare was. They pointed to the sign on the headrest. Aware that I hadn’t contemplated any sort of doom, I left a ten-pound note on the passenger seat and departed with haste.
My table-for-one was laid out with an extra chair already occupied. The uninvited stranger kindly informed me that….
BE LIKE A CHILD
ADULTS FOLLOW PATHS. CHILDREN EXPLORE. ADULTS ARE CONTENT TO WALK THE SAME WAY, HUNDREDS OF TIMES, OR THOUSANDS; PERHAPS IT NEVER OCCURS TO ADULTS TO STEP OFF THE PATHS, TO CREEP BENEATH RHODODENDRONS, TO FIND THE SPACES BETWEEN FENCES.
I WAS A CHILD, WHICH MEANT THAT I KNEW A DOZEN DIFFERENT WAYS OF GETTING OUT OF OUR PROPERTY AND INTO THE LANE, WAYS THAT WOULD NOT INVOLVE WALKING DOWN OUR DRIVE.
Neil Gaiman: The Ocean at the End of the Lane
In other words... be like a child.
THE THING ABOUT CREATING SOMETHING
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Here’s the thing about what we are passionate about …… it has a way of redefining our relationship to time.
“THE GREAT WAVE OFF KANAGAWA” BY KATSUSHIKA HOKUSAI
There is a famous creation by Katsushika Hokusai, “The Great Wave off Kanagawa,” It was created in 1831. This image is considered one of the most recognisable pieces of Japanese art in the world. But it took over 30 years to create. Throughout those years, he played around with his creation…
“THE GREAT WAVE OFF KANAGAWA” BY HOKUSAI AT 33 YEARS OLD
“THE GREAT WAVE OFF KANAGAWA” BY HOKUSAI AT 44 YEARS OLD
“THE GREAT WAVE OFF KANAGAWA” BY HOKUSAI AT 44 YEARS OLD
…until eventually at the age of 72, Katsushika Hokusai completed his work.
TWO LINES
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In 1960, jazz pianist Thelonious Monk shared some advice, captured by saxophonist Steve Lacy. Included in that list was the line -
A GENIUS IS THE ONE MOST LIKE HIMSELF.
In 1962, Kurt Vonnegut wrote a novel with this line -
WE MUST BE CAREFUL ABOUT WHAT WE PRETEND TO BE.
Two lines. Two reminders of the beauty and majesty that is, ‘ourself’.
WHY WE READ BOOKS
A gentle reminder from Christoph Niemann (A Velocity of Being: Letters to A Young Reader) why we read books and what they do to our spirit.
NEVER-ENDING WONDER
Worth remembering from time to time.
The never-ending wonder that lives within us; the never-ending wonder that lives around us.
PRIORITIES
I WANTED TO BE A ROCK N’ ROLL STAR WHEN I WAS A TEENAGER.
NOW, I’M 27 AND I WANT TO BE A GOOD MUSICIAN.
Billy Joel: interview 1977
REALITY REMIX
TRANSCRIPT:
Everything is a remix. Every song, every movie, every meme, every idea, every invention, every discovery. Everything we create is copied, transformed and combined from our culture.
And just like our creations are remixed from the world around us, our beliefs are remixed from what we watch, read and listen to.
And this is a disturbing idea. It’s one thing to remix a song or a story or a product, it’s another to remix... yourself, your identity. It’s like programming yourself… without really knowing it.
The number of paths you can choose from is endless and each one leads to a different version of yourself.
Our mediascape is an infinity of rabbit holes. You can disappear into any one you like, and when you awaken from the spell, you've changed. You've absorbed new ideas and they've altered who you are. Repeat this process over and over and over, and your identity can be transformed.
If you're not aware of what’s happening, you can get fooled. You can get lied to, you can get exploited, you can become cannon fodder in someone else's culture war.
But even more importantly, you can fool yourself. You can repeatedly choose more and more extreme rabbit holes and fall deeper and deeper into an illusion you chose, into a hall of mirrors where what's reflected back is your own darkest fantasies.
Many of us are plummeting into crowdsourced nightmares about Bill Gates or 5G or the deep state.
How can we prevent ourselves from getting lost in the funhouse?
To keep a grip on reality, you need to be aware of how you make sense of media and the world. Having awareness, whether it's of your habits or your emotions or your biases, gives you back some power and lets you make wiser choices.
And the first thing you need to be aware of is where our sensemaking starts. It starts with patterns.
What media does, all media, is shrink reality way, way, way down into a digestible size. You can’t drink directly from the firehose. Each media outlet features stories it feels are important and from these selections we spot patterns. Vox gives you one type of pattern, Breitbart gives you another, PBS Newshour gives you yet another. And when you use social media, you're making the pattern yourself, with each click, with each follow, with each like.
These patterns feel convincing, they feel real. But they're actually just repetitions you spotted from a tiny selection of events.
You then set about distorting what these patterns mean. You turn them into little stories that help you understand and remember.
And in the process you sensationalize them, you turn them into juicier stories. You generalize and exaggerate. You strip away nuance and contradictions, and you add conflict and drama. Then you share these stories based not just on their truth or their importance but based on what they make you feel, and much of the time that feeling is anger.
This process of simplification and distortion then produces a master narrative. It produces an ideology. You turn into some version of conservative or liberal or libertarian or progressive or increasingly now, we’re turning into conspiracists.
Your ideology, this highly imperfect contraption that you remixed, probably without even being aware of it, then molds what you see, it puts a spin on everything. Different people can see the exact same thing and draw opposite conclusions.
Ideology is like a program you’re now running. We like to blame the media for programming us, but we’re just as responsible. We develop our ideologies ourselves over the years and decades, based on what we choose to watch, read and listen to.
By just being aware of this process, we can see how meager and lacking our perception of the world is. Our ideology is a simplification of a simplification of a simplification.
Knowing this can help us be more modest and less defensive. It can make us more willing to learn from perspectives that contradict ours.
But most importantly of all, it justifies us having some small measure of doubt about our own beliefs. Critical thinking isn't just about doubting everybody else. It's about doubting yourself.
Conspiracy theories and nonsense and extremism and lies cannot tolerate doubt. They can't absorb criticism and grow. The truth defeats or incorporates our doubts and grows stronger with time.
In the end, the truth wins… eventually.
INNER CHILD
CHILDREN KNOW SOMETHING THAT MOST PEOPLE HAVE FORGOTTEN…
A FASCINATION WITH THEIR EVERYDAY EXISTENCE.
Keith Harring
(Matthew Burgess: Drawing on Walls)
There’s something magical about our inner child.
Maybe Peter Pan was right; the cycle of childhood adventures never leaves us, regardless age, we just need to learn how to fly again.
WE SELL IMPERFECTION
This three-minute short film captures the beauty of craftsmanship.
Its imperfection.
Its illogical approach to speed and efficiency.
Its gentle assurance of a place within the fabric of time.
ANYTHING THAT’S MADE BY A CRAFTSMAN IS IMPERFECT. SO, A HAND-FORGED NAIL WILL BE IMPERFECT — EVERY ONE WILL BE SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT. HANDMADE PAPER — EVERY SHEET IS SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT. SO IF YOU WANT PERFECTION, IF YOU WANT UNIFORMITY, THEN IT HAS TO BE DONE BY A MACHINE.
I OFTEN TELL PEOPLE THAT WE SELL IMPERFECTION, THAT’S WHAT WE DO.
SOMEONE MIGHT BE LOOKING AT A PAINTING ON A PIECE OF OUR PAPER IN A COUPLE OF A THOUSAND YEARS TIME. IF WE’VE DONE OUR JOB CORRECTLY, THAT PAPER WILL HAVE THAT LEVEL OF EXCELLENCE TO IT.
MAKING STUFF WORK
There is a famous story about Issac Newton - not that story, the other one, about the plague.
On Christmas Day, 1664, London reported their first plague death. By April the following year, people feared its unstoppable reach. The famous diarist Samuel Pepys captured the emotion well. “Great fears of sickness here in the City… God preserve us all.”
Newton, during this time, was studying in Cambridge. He had worked hard, with a few intriguing hacks here and there, to get his foot into that exclusive door. But now, Cambridge was on lockdown - the country was on lockdown - and it was clear his best-laid plans were falling apart.
His emotional state wasn’t great, and so he headed back home and made himself a DIY study. With a notebook he nicknamed as his ‘Waste Book’, Newton filled the pages with reading notes, observations, learning and questions.
History records this moment as his turning point. Some even term is as his transfiguration. But here’s the thing about this type of ‘moment’ storyline - it can be slightly overdramatic. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and it can make sense of a timeline in a way that those living within that moment struggle to understand.
The reality of Newton’s life-changing moment? IT WASN’T DRAMATIC.
Most of what Newton did was boring, tedious and frustrating. He wasn’t energised every single minute of the day, neither did he lock himself away in the study morning, noon and night. Newton’s transfiguration came within the mundane of having to ‘make stuff work’.
The story of Newton is a reminder to us all that the mundane is boring.
The mundane is frustrating.
The mundane is a hack and DIY job.
And that’s what makes it transformative.
KEEP MAKING GOOD ART
A little note of encouragement from the very excellent Neil Gaiman and Chris Riddell.