A few weeks ago, I was treated to another quiet morning with some beautiful reflections on the lake close to my home.
The picture below reminded me of the power of compounding and, just like the Force in Star Wars, how it has a light side and a dark side. Life is rarely stagnant. Most of the time, this powerful force has us either spiraling up or spiraling down.
Some people spend more time spiraling up, others spend more time spiraling down. This is one of the key reasons for the vast inequalities in our society.
The word “consistency” is a regular on this blog. It’s generally associated with good health, personal finances and productivity. But believe it or not, it also has an art connotation.
“Consistency art” is anything where you do some small action consistently over an extended period of time to eventually create something beautiful.
There are many possibilities. With 10 minutes a day over a couple of months, you can come up with a very cool painting, composition or sculpture. Something like a perfectly shaped Bonsai tree is another example of consistency art.
My recent interest is long-term timelapse photography. I basically just take a photo from the same spot every once in a while and then add them all together later on.
The first attempt is shown below. It’s a nice illustration of the changing weather patterns in Norway.
I’m really looking forward to the change in seasons. Such a series of photographs should look very cool over the entire green-orange-brown-white-brown-green seasonal transformation in Norway.
The main challenge is getting the images to line up well. It seems there is no software that can do this automatically at present. Manual labor is therefore the only way, which is fine if the number of photos is small enough.
I’ll be exploring this a bit more over coming months. Let’s see what comes out of it eventually.
Have a pleasant weekend and I’ll see you on Monday!
Another weekend, another little bit of Amateur Creativity 🙂
Every once in a while, we get a beautiful still day with no external forces causing emotional turbulence in our lives.
This Tuesday was one such day for me. Fittingly, it started with a beautiful still morning that caused no turbulence on the lake close to my home.
After this lovely walk around the lake, I returned home and worked for 11 hours on a new paper. It was one of those precious experiences of “flow” where you get a lot done without any mental strain.
When these days come, we need to embrace them fully and use them to kick-start momentum. Indeed, the next three days delivered another 30 hours of deeply focused work with very limited mental fatigue. I sent the finished paper to my co-author last night 🙂
We can’t all live next to a beautiful lake. And my lake very rarely looks as pretty as this. But we’ll all do well to be more aware of the beautiful things in our lives. They can bring out the best version of ourselves.
If you had an awesome week, I hope these reflections motivate you to keep building the momentum.
If you had an awful week, I hope these reflections remind you that beautiful days will cross your path again.
I plan to publish something creative each Saturday. It certainly won’t be high art, but I hope it will bring a smile to your face 🙂
Aside from providing some light entertainment to start your weekend, it will also be an interesting experiment:
Will it be easy to do something creative every week?
Will my mind become more open to the opportunities for creativity all around us?
Will people enjoy my distinctly amateur little creative projects?
I hope to find positive answers to all these questions. This first week was certainly positive for the first two. Indeed, the time-lapse video below took just a little bit of awareness and a single minute to set up the phone.
It came out a bit uneven, but I still think it’s a fine summary of the Norwegian summer: 30 minutes with two showers and even a couple of rare sun sightings!
Enjoy and don’t hesitate to share some links to your own creative projects 🙂
See you tomorrow!
