Boredom = fate worse than death. Being too ambitious is a bit boring.

Sometimes, insecure practitioners can decide to weaponise their expertise, and its implication of ‘design authority’, against other people involved in their projects, or their professional lives. Anyone who has been through architecture school has seen this phenomenon, and sometimes it can sneak out of the academy and into the studio.

That’s not great when that happens, contrary to creativity, team harmony and positive production. 

Interestingly, and very reassuringly, I have rarely seen it in twenty years of design journalism, a milieu where one might expect to run into the odd inflated ego. Not really so.

I have interviewed more than 150 architects, interior designers, product designers and even the odd ceramicist or craftsperson since 2001. In that time I have met very few toxically ambitious, egotistical or self-deluded people at the peak of the profession. Actually, the term ‘peak’ is misleading, because it suggests a sharp, singular point, occupied by the few. I define the peak as a broad, encompassing, multitudinous place, occupied by many and varied people and teams who are actually, and generally quietly, getting on with the business of creating accomplished, good works.

That is the good stuff: it really is an optimistic and encouraging observation, one that I have never really been conscious of until just now.

I wish to talk about something equally appealing to me, and hopefully, to you. 

I wish to talk about desire.

We can desire a lot of things, and desire can be good or bad. It’s pretty contextual, and it’s a really big topic. 

So let’s narrow our scope. 

Specifically, I want to name and speak about the aching desire for an accepting, settled state of what might be called Not Knowing: of a happy, restful ignorance that is delightful anathema to the ambitious professional. This desire is itself quite desirable, if only for its ability to de-weaponise and disarm the knowledge of the over-entitled, over-valued, protected ‘expert’.

To say to oneself, and to thoroughly accept the statement, ‘I do not know’, is fundamentally liberating.

With the guidance of meditation teacher Jeff Warren, who publishes guided meditations on calm.com, I have been exploring a meditation practice around the cultivation of what can be called ‘Don’t Know Mind’. This is apparently a Zen concept (although that might need to be fact-checked, I am not an authority on Zen.) This practice is where one responds to emerging feelings, thoughts, emotions and urges to control outcomes and devise endless strategies - anything, really - with the repeated, simple, internally-voiced statement: 

‘I don’t know. I don’t need to know’. 

If you can stick with it, calmly accepting whatever messy, distracted or flawed state of mind one experiences while you do the meditation, it can be a fantastic, settling experience. 

Equanimity and acceptance are both a big part of meditation. In the interests of using meditation to improve one’s life it is always good to draw these elements ‘off the cushion’, as they say, and into everyday life. I am not very good at this yet.

So perhaps I will stop there, go peer at a cloud, and breathe in and out deeply for a bit. 

Sounds like a plan.

I’ve been thinking.

This website is my biggest project to date. It has about 13 years of my efforts invested in it if one enfolds the previous incarnations, theflawedmind.com and theinkshot.com. This is my digital home, my personal channel and creative vehicle, and my most direct medium of communication and thinking.

Such a thing requires constant tuning, and I have been doing some thinking about the structure of my web presence here.

This blog site, marcusbaumgart.com, is currently comprised of two blogs: the personal blog, and the so-called ‘New Project’ blog, also known as the Book of Uncertainty, found in the menu link above. I am rethinking this split.

The original intention was to keep the Book of Uncertainty as a thing - a separate feed, a quasi-literary undertaking or composition, separated from my random personal musings. The model and inspiration for this is an actual work of literature, the Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, as I have cited on the secondary blog’s front page.

While I am inspired by Pessoa, and unashamedly seek to emulate his work in some way, things have moved on since the early 20th Century. Perhaps Pessoa would have had a blog, rather than scribbling fragments and leaving them in a trunk to be discovered after his death? Who knows.

So I am questioning this choice, to divide the feed into two blogs.. I no longer think this is the right approach. I think it might be unnecessarily artificial, not to mention diluting, to separate so-called personal writing from what is really equally personal but annoyingly aspirational semi-literary writing in this way. So expect a restructure in the coming days.

ONE BLOG.

Not two, but one. A singular repository and vehicle for whole-of-creative-life musings, thoughts, propositions and observations. Visual and textual records. Images, photographs, scans, writing, sketching, drawings and text.

Let’s see how that goes.

The least we can do is literally deface this butcher. Or perhaps I mean re-face. A bit of eyeshadow, lippy, so much the better.

Unfortunately for most of us, we think that this is the most that we can do. So: rather than feeling powerless and defeated by these terrible events, donate to the Red Cross.

I know it’s not the only charity helping people in Ukraine, but in the current crisis it is really hard to separate the good operators from the conspiracy theorists, alt-right profiteers, freelance nazi battalions and outright scammers.

Maybe stick with the Red Cross (make up your own mind though). And, if you will forgive the language, Fuck You, Putin.

AND while we are on world events, let’s not forget the US track record with violently overthrowing democratically elected governments for ideological reasons. Argentina 1975: one of many. Look it up. Start here but go elsewhere.