In praise of pottering

I had heard of 'pottering'; I thought it was something usually done in a garden. I may have even engaged in a little pottering without realising it. But the true nature of pottering had eluded me until this year. Now, I am a converted potterer and, like all converts, I am feeling a little evangelical about it.

Watching things grow, an intrinsic feature of pottering.

I am still working on a definition of pottering. The dictionary says that pottering is "to move around without hurrying, and in a relaxed and pleasant way." I find that a little unsatisfactory; when I am doing that, I believe that I am "wandering" - something different from "pottering" (though related). What pottering and wandering do have in common is a lack of deadlines and only vague goals. Pottering, it seems to me, is about getting things done, while wandering is about going places - both in a relaxed manner.

So pottering, in my book, is about unhurried, leisurely, work without any demanding deadlines. I can potter in the garden, potter at my lathe, potter with my cameras or potter around in the office. Pottering is discovering the joy of doing something for its own sake. Pottering can be work, but pottering is never a job. My current working definition of pottering: "work at a whim." This seems to be getting close to the whole point of pottering - doing what you want, when you want.

Here's the thing though; by deliberately engaging in pottering these last few months, more things seem to be getting done than by any previous use of goal setting, or to-do lists. Perhaps this sounds a little counterintuitive, but I do seem to be achieving more, simply by doing what I feel like doing at any point in time. It's an idea worth pondering (now there's another related word). Pottering, wandering and pondering - PWP - a more relaxed philosophy for life.

COVID-19 Life (1)

After only two days at alert level 2, the number of NZ infections has now reached 102. Today, the government moved us to alert level 3 and gave notice that we would move to alert level 4 (the highest level) on Wednesday.

At level 4, everyone has to stay at home, all non-essential businesses, schools, and public gatherings are banned and only essential service personnel are allowed to attend their workplace. The level 4 restrictions will be in place for at least four weeks. I believe that the majority of New Zealanders are behind these measures and understand the need for the vast inconvenience that they will cause. Some, of course, take this opportunity to flaunt their stupidity and selfishness by trying to empty supermarket shelves at ten times the usual rate.

I am not sure how I feel about the next four weeks. On the one hand, the thought of being at home for four weeks sounds attractive. On the other, I can’t help but wonder whether, after four weeks of virtual house-arrest, we might all get a little stir-crazy. We are allowed out of the house for exercise, provided that we keep our distance from others, but we are being encouraged not to travel further further than “local”. I guess that a ‘Sunday drive’ isn’t out of the question, provided that we stay in the car and don’t handle a petrol pump.

It is worth remembering though, that shouldering a little inconvenience is nothing compared to the five-year sacrifice made by my parent’s and grandparent’s generations. If I catch myself grumbling at any point, I hope I remember that.

One big adventure

Since the last post, Annette and I have had a small holiday and I have turned a vase. We tend to take small holidays - just a few days at a time - long enough to see and do something different, but short enough not to miss the familiar comforts of home.

A few hours drive got us to Mosgiel, near Dunedin where we had a comfortable eco cabin in the middle of nowhere. We were last in Dunedin when Bethany was having her spine straightened (about fourteen years ago) so a visit was well overdue. While there, we took the train up the Taieri Gorge and the Queen of Hearts found her throne at Larnach Castle.

The Otago Settlers Museum was well worth a visit and is a very affordable family venue with plenty for young people to see and do as well as a remarkable zero entry fee. We also enjoyed mooching around the railway station - a remarkable witness to the affluence of Dunedin in the 1900s.

Dinner with the Dunedin Prattleys rounded off the trip and the next day had us heading North towards home where, back in the shed, the lathe awaited a fresh piece of wood. Which, eventually, gave birth to this Kwila Vase. This is my second Kwila piece and I really like this timber - it is very heavy and coarse-grained, and working it feels almost like turning soft metal rather than wood.

When it's all stripped down, life is an adventure. Whether its a road trip, turning a piece of wood, making images, or simply learning something new - it's all one big adventure. I like that. Tomorrow, of course, there is another adventure waiting at the office. (It's true, I tell you. It really is!)

Raise a glass to the new Google Calendar

It had largely slipped under my radar, but Google calendar for Android and iOS has matured into a very capable calendar app. Although I had been using the Google cloud to look after my calendar and to-do list for several years, I found their mobile calendar app to be lacking in features. Consequently, our family had been using 'Sunrise' to grab and share our Google data. Now, with Sunrise about to be abandoned by Microsoft, we needed an alternative and, during my searching, I looked again at Google Calendar. Has it changed or what!

The new Google Calendar has a clean and uncluttered design that some people may think looks a bit basic. The widget (shown here), for example, has no settings, it's simply a list of coloured cards - one for each calendar or reminder entry. This simplicity is carried through to the design of the main app which supports views for month, week, 3 day and day views. In addition, there is a 'schedule' view, which is basically a continuous list of event and reminder cards with day and date markers (similar to the widget). I find myself working in schedule view most of the time. A neat feature  of all the views (on a phone) is the transition from holding the phone in portrait to landscape mode - whatever view you happen to be in in portrait, it switches to a week view in landscape - a nice quick way of getting to the week view.

A huge improvement is the integration of 'reminders' into the calendar. Reminders are not the same as the to-do items in Google's desktop calendar and won't appear in that list. Google has obviously decided to focus on a more generic reminder system that operates across platforms, devices and other apps. For example, you can set a reminder on a note in Google Keep, or an email in Inbox on your tablet, and it will magically appear as a reminder in Google Calendar on your phone. Neat. In fact, reminders are always in your face - they appear in Calendar, Inbox, and Google Now - no more forgetting! Google promises that reminders will also be coming to the desktop app soon, and I look forward to that.

Of course, all the normal settings for repeats on both events and reminders are available and new entries are made by touching the '+' badge that floats in the bottom right of the Calendar screen. All up, it's pretty obvious how things work and the app just gets out of the way and lets you get on with organising your life; something some of the other available calendar tools could well take note of.

So, if you need an excuse to have a drink, the new Google Calendar could be it. Cheers.

Bringing it home

When I bring home a photograph, I bring home something that has accurately mapped the shapes, colours and light that I saw earlier - arrangements of photons, stored up and measured out with a mathematical precision that has its own corpse-like beauty.

Lying on the mortuary slab of the computer screen, the photograph looks like the scene I saw before, but it has no life - it sits there silent and still; life reduced to numbers.

It's the work of a taxidermist to bring apparent life to dead creatures: It's the work of a photographer to bring the appearance of life to the maths of dead photons.

Counter-intuition

When I was first told that I could expect my life to be shorter than I had anticipated, my reaction was to think about how I could cram in all the things I still wanted to do with my life - before it was too late. Now, five years on, I have come to realise that this 'cram in as much as possible' attitude is quite wrong. Life is much too short to rush through it.

It's a quality versus quantity thing; yes, I can cram all this stuff in, but does that make my remaining years better? Short answer; "no". Slightly longer answer, "no, it just makes them busier". Life really is too short to rush - even without a deadline. Rushing causes us to miss so much of what is happening; we need to pause, mid-stride, to feel the moment, to enjoy the act of moving and sense the wonder of being alive. And, yes, to us 'busy doing stuff' people, that is totally counter-intuitive.

Last evening I dawdled on the way home from the office. There was no other traffic, the sun was shining and the beauty of the countryside that I pass through several times a week was calling for my attention. I cruised the road between the trees, enjoying the dappled sunlight, looked up at the ever-changing parade of lumpy green hills on my right and the endless vistas across the green of the Canterbury plains on my left. I rode the switchback road as though it were a fairground rollercoaster experienced in slow-motion. I thought it wonderful, I thought it beautiful, for truly it was both of those things, and I wondered at the good fortune that had brought me here and has allowed me to call this place 'home' for over twenty years.

This morning, I met an elderly, one-eyed lady. She spoke about her long-dead husband, and how she worked the farm on her own when he had gone. She told me about the kingfisher that lived up the track and the birds that come to her garden when she is hanging out her washing. She told me how she speaks to them and how she is sure that they have started to mimic her voice. "I'm probably a bit daft", she said. That's when I realised that I was speaking with someone who had learned to live in the 'in between' spaces of life. She was HAPPY in a way that many of us seek and fail to find.

These gems of happiness are found in the in-between, mid-stride, spaces. They are hidden beneath the surface, they are the things we miss when we are in a hurry. Life is much too short to rush; dawdle some, discover some of the 'happy' bits of life.

Living the dream

When I started this blog in 2011, I used (and still do) the tagline "A rather indirect ramble through the aft end of life". However that's not been strictly true; in the last four years the blog has mainly been about my ramble in relation to photography and picture making. Yes, making pictures is a big part of my life - there are three cameras within arm’s reach (not including my phone) even as I write this - but there is more to this ramble than pictures. To be honest, I've been a little afraid. There are other dimensions to this back end of life ramble, but they tend to be more personal, more about the vulnerable 'me', the 'me' that would feel safer if it remained in the background. Those other dimensions might also be of no interest to others and bringing them up might only confirm that I have just become another 'boring old fart'.

Yet, unless I flesh things out a little more, the record of the ramble will be missing all the peripheral aspects that inform and motivate even my picture making. Life is so much more than a series of stationary images; what fills the gaps between? If the pictures are the 'what' everything in between becomes the 'why'. So, from here on, I'll still be posting the pictures but I'll try, when I am aware, to talk about the 'why' of things too, starting with this ...

Back in 2008 I turned 60. At the time I wrote “Sixteen or sixty” an upbeat reflection on why I was making pictures again:

“Sixteen or sixty?  Say both words with less than perfect enunciation and they can be mistaken for each other.  And if, in my sixtieth year, I look at my life from the corner of one eye, I can almost believe that I am sixteen again.

“At sixteen my passion was photography. It was a passion played out on a budget, with cobbled together darkroom equipment in a bedroom blacked out with plastic sheets and prints rinsing in the bath.  It was a passion that I wanted to be a profession.  Perhaps I didn't want it bad enough but, in 1964, no one wanted an apprentice photographer and so I became a draughtsman in the construction industry and, eventually, migrated to the IT business. It paid the bills and served me well. “Somewhere along the road I married and, with the advent of a family, I lost the darkroom. As the family grew, my camera bags began to shrink and, as the equipment and spare time shrunk, so did my passion for the art of photography.  Then, around 1998, I laid hands on my first digital camera.  After a thirty-four year downward slide a ten year climb back started and now, in my sixtieth year, I am producing pictures again - perhaps not great pictures but good enough to be much better than those from 1964.
“In his "Last Lecture", Randy Pouche talked a lot about realising one's childhood dreams. He realised a lot of his before he died and he helped a lot of other people realise theirs.  And the point is this - its never too late - my dream may have had to wait for more than forty years, but it feels like I am sixteen again and loving it.”
Back in 2008 life seemed to be all glitter and endless possibilities...

to be continued ...