When I was a Secondary School teacher (please note this was a decade ago ) I used to want “easy” classes. You know, classes where the pupils were polite and enthusiastic. They did exist; classes where they’d put their hands up and waited to be called upon to make their interesting point. However, there would be plenty of classes where the pupils were chatty, called out, argued back (known as “chopsey” in Swansea) or worse, were silent and didn’t say anything. There weren’t so many of those classes but I did have a couple. The thing was, that the so-called tough classes challenged me and made me think about how to engage them and focus their energies towards learning. I learnt more as a teacher from trying to shut them up/or getting them to talk. Convenience wasn’t good for me and it was probably dull for them too.
I can think of a few idioms but they dont quite fit; “No pain no gain/ Its all grist to the mill”. I also pondered over ‘inconvenience is the cost of community’
Some inconveniences are annoying. Actually all of them are. My mouse stops working when I roll it over my mousepad. It stops me typing as fast as I would like. Many blog posts have been shorter than the might have been beacuse I struggled with WordPress. I can never decide whether using Elementor is easier than the WordPress editor.I have tried to edit and publish this post several times. I usually have one of my cats trying to lie across the keyboard. Today it’s Nellie. Yesterday it was Flossie.
Maybe rather than asking why I struggle with my PC and the mousemat I should ask why am I in a such a hurry? Why not stroke the cat? Is it because I dont actually want to be doing this? Yes and no. Writing gives my head exercise. Like going for a short walk. But I am tired. I have been awake since 3.30 am. The clocks went back last weekend and my body is still on British Summer Time. I keep looking at my watch and thinking “Is it only 11.30!”
I have closed my Creator account on Facebook and Instagram. That means I no longer have a professional page on either site, just personal ones. That way Meta cannot crawl my pages or website in order to train its AI. My paintings will be posted here and on substack, I will also send more frequent (but shorter) emails to my subscribers. Setting up on Substack is very inconvenient. There’s a lot to get my head around, I just try to do a bit and look to see what other artists have done. It’s going to take quite a while to get up and running.
But that’s OK. I am coming across a lot of interesting artists and writers. I am thinking about how I present myself to an audience that has probably never seen my work before. It’s giving me a bit of a kick up the proverbial and I probably need it.
I came across this quote “Modern man thinks he loses something—time—when he does not do things quickly. Yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains—except kill it.” (Eric Fromm’s 1956 book The Art of Loving).
Yet some inconvenience and effort are essential to a sense of satisfaction. In Art as well as writing. We need to put some effort into a thing for it to be worthwhile. If I dont exercise my brain it will get flabby and lazy.
I aim to hide the effort. When I paint, I try to hide the brush strokes. Reduce them. Dont over work the image. Muddy the colours. To simplify, reduce, cut the details. I have to empty my mind and just paint. Each painting is a failure but still I try. I never quite get there. I never will. That’s the whole point. The effort is the whole point of the thing.
o now I will attempt to publish this post for the third time. I started yesterday and lost my new and improved version. So here’s my shorter, worse version. Nellie has just arrived so I must stroke her/feed her.
Read More
https://philosophizethis.substack.com/p/how-love-became-just-another-thing
https://www.seenandunseen.com/art-being-inconvenienced
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