Technology has its place!

Super typhoon Megi 'biggest in 20 years'

I'm very impressed with technology. Obviously that is why I work with it every day. What I've seen as a trend over the past ten years is how much we as a global community want to become dependent upon it for EVERYTHING. This doesn't impress me. Five years ago I wanted technology in everything everywhere. I've more or less become a hypocrite because my stance on having technology used in everything has changed. My opinion has shifted to a level where now to automate everything is an awful choice. It has gotten to where I was beginning to resent what perverse way we as a race have used technology. To make it a crutch to distract us from living and to become a race of disconnected  beings. Until now. Like anything else there is balance in this grand scheme of life. Technology has benefited us and this article (above) is a prime example. Technology warned these people and instead of having hundreds possibly thousands of dead so far there has been one reported causality. Those numbers are a far cry from what these headlines would have read twenty even forty years ago. A hundred years ago I venture to guarantee the numbers would have been in the hundreds. So technology if anything has allowed us to save lives in adverse weather conditions which in my book is worthwhile and appropriate. On the opposite side its teens texting for the sake of texting because they don't know what else to do with themselves I say is damaging to our youth. There has to be that happy balanced healthy medium out there somewhere. I pray we all find it.

Rekindling of an old relationship.

                Rekindle of an old relationship?  No I’ve no plans on leaving my wife I’m very happy with her.  This is a story about something that is a part of me I’ve left behind because I had to. To put down my sword and make peace in the land of Jim ‘The Parent’. My artistic endeavors had to be put to the way side for the moment and I had to raise a child with special needs as well as a child heading quickly into ‘tweendom’. There are many hurdles in parenting as any parent out there would share with you and my full attention needed to be there rather than contemplating the conclusion to an artistic piece I’ve been unraveling for the past few weeks.

                This decision seemed clear to me until I met a woman raising 5 children and still managing to run a gallery and churn out workings in metal as well as painting every day. Granted this IS her full time job but still managing to raise five children on top of all that is amazing to me. This more or less told to my heart, sorry, man up, if she can do this you’ve no excuse to not do this part time. So I let go of my excuses and the past bad memories of my last showing and became willing to put myself out there yet again.

                Some might say big deal. Well it is a big deal to me because I came to this fork in the road many years ago as a career path. I was leaving college with a BFA with little hope of ever pursuing anything more than a JOB so I could do art in my spare time or taking a stab at it full time and hoping for the best. Problem at that time was I was asking my wife to spend the rest of her life with me. I asked myself did she REALLY want to be tied down to a tortured artist the rest of her days or someone with a 9-5 bringing home the bacon type of guy who wasn’t ready to go on a binge after the next critic ripped him a new one. The choice was clear then to do the ‘responsible thing’. So I thought. Lessons learned here are after twenty years of walking down a path that isn’t satisfying as far as careers go is to follow your career/souls path first because you’ll be helping yourself grow with the person you’d fallen in love with the rest of your days.

                It is you who has to wake up to that face in the mirror every day. You’ll keep asking yourself can I get through another day of lying to myself telling that face reflecting back you are truly happy and what you are doing and it makes a difference in this world?  Eventually you’ll wear down and become a wandering soulless shell of a person who missed an opportunity to take a shot at what might have been. So what does one do with that?

                If life has taught my spirit anything (or the other way around if you were to follow the teachings of NDW) you’d discover that God has you right where he wants you at all times. The choices were always yours to make of course but you end up where you should have been eventually and the soul wasn’t meant to wander aimlessly around being tortured all the time. You learn to let go of the pains of what might have been and learn to live for the moment of now and what you decide to do with it. As I have come to understand it I stop trying to entertain instead I sit back and look to be entertained by life. It’s a movie playing out before your eyes just sit back and enjoy the show. Yes occasionally you’ll have to do something and play your part in it but for the most of it I observe and am entertained by what I see. The key here is defining what entertains you and if it doesn’t move on to something else. In a world FULL of distractions there has to be a channel you’d like to stay on and watch somewhere.

                I was trying so hard to make it all happen around me. To micromanage every aspect I could get away with. That is where I fell apart inside as well as out. I constantly felt an itch I couldn’t scratch. This made for an uncomfortable life within my own self and probably made others believe I was out of my mind. I constantly felt as though nothing I did measured up.  So after years of this one might just say enough already I’ve tried it my own way now I’ll try it His way. There has to be a way to live day by day as He intended making the choices is my part in all of this but there has to be a way to live this mortal existence in peace. How? Then the answered arrived.

                You cannot entertain Me. I made all of this to entertain you. Be entertained and enjoy everything.

                So when that arrived I took it serious. I made a commitment to what I was meant to be and to remain entertained. To listen to and to be where He wants me to be on my mark for this grand play orchestrating in front of my eyes, and to speak the lines He wrote for me when they are meant to be heard.  To start a career in art and accept whatever comes my way and to always remember to use silence (can’t watch this movie if you are running your mouth) and watch what is unfolding before my eyes. The definition of peace is subjective to each soul out there. I choose this as my peace. My challenge to you is to define yours.