Sometimes I think about how writers and artists used to gather in cafés, bars, and salons. Now, almost all communities are digital - threads, newsletters, comments in timelines. It’s fascinating how disembodied it all of it is, how intimacy is simulated through a heart icon or a subscribe button. The art is still there, but the world it lives in is flatter, faster, harder to touch. Shika |
| What you do in private, shows in public. Reading shows in a conversation. Your diet shows in energy. Your discipline shows in confidence. Your focus shows in your results. You are what you cultivate when no one is watching. Prioritize your time & focus on discipline/consistency. Pabytele |
| A poster with the idea behind your penultimate sentence used to hang on my Battalion Sergeant Major's door: "Discipline is doing the right thing, even if nobody is watching." |
The psychogeographers understood a truth we rarely acknowledge: that the city is a machine designed to make you believe you are free, when its real aim is to control you. We are trained to think we can walk out the door or get in the car and go wherever we want, when in fact the urbanized space we inhabit is a labyrinth of enclosure that regulates our movement through it with almost infinite layers of access control. We stick to the sidewalks with occasional transgressions onto desire paths, stay in our traffic lanes while daydreaming of off-road adventures, experience nature mostly through simulations and screens. We see doorways and windows everywhere, but only a small number are actually open to us. We think we are autonomous agents who have chosen our paths in life, as we circulate through the city in much the way blood cells move through the body, each performing assigned tasks that keep the machine of the collective running. The landscapes we move through are manufactured ones, shaped by us, even when they are green. Maybe because the city knows that if we encountered an authentically wild and natural space, we might try to disappear into it. A Natural History of Empty Lots, Christopher Brown |