Figure eights
Blink and time is gone.
The older I get, the more I begin to understand why those older than me frequently say to enjoy the times while I can. Things happen quickly and if you don't live in the moments while they're there, you can be standing later wondering what happened.
My honest truth... I've spent the last four months going in figure eights. Not visibly of course. From the outside, the work looks consistent. I'm blogging monthly, I'm creating videos weekly, I work my day job, train, and socialise where I can. But inside, something is circling without landing, particularly with Lweno & Co. The fire, the desire, is quieter than I'd like. Taking too long on things really can do a number on you.
Over the last 3 weeks, I've been back in my journals. Something I'd avoided the last 6 months. Not to find inspiration or a so called creative exercise, but to remember my why. Who I am when nobody's watching and nothing is working (or more so what compelled me to do what I did and what gives me that spark). There's something about re-reading your own past thinking that's hard to describe. I recommend journalling to everyone. But until you're at least one year in, you won't begin to see patterns.
Any how... with re-reading, you see the same questions appearing across years of pages. The same obsessions and the same imagination trying to make sense of the same kinds of things happening in and out of your control. And what strikes you (or me right now) isn't how much you've changed, it's how consistent the thread is.
That thread, that specific, stubborn, recurring pattern of how my mind works, is the thing that can't be replicated. Not by anyone, not by any tool.
You know, I've been curating things my whole life without calling it that. From playlists to events, films, newsletters and more. Every recommendation I've pressed into someone's mind or physical hands and said "you need to see this", it all came from the same place. My own weird, yet unique taste, preference or we can even call it imagination, picking its way through the world, keeping what fits and leaving what doesn't.
For as long as I can now remember, my mum tends to her garden each year. She does it quietly, regularly, without anyone asking her to. Now that we're in Spring, she replants, de-weeds and waters her garden. The pots and plants kept in a certain order with the subtle yearly changes.
I've walked past her garden hundreds of times and never really paid attention to the art of it all. Never really taken the time to see and appreciate it. This month, or so far this year, I am. It might be because she's asked me so many times to water the plants that I'm now beginning to enjoy it, seeing them come back to life after the winter period.
I realise that this is what curation actually is. God, how much work it all takes. The pruning, the de-weeding, the watering before anything blooms — that's the part nobody sees. But if you want that fresh, well-kept look in the summer, you have to go through the boring, unglamorous work. The silent, ongoing work of keeping the right things alive. The daily watering, pruning, de-weeding.
You don't notice the upkeep until you're the one doing it. You see the flowers. The vision of what they could be, and you watch them fade in and out of season.
You don't see the hours.
The whole process makes me put two-and-two together with the same concept about me and my journals. I've been tending to the same ideas for years. The same questions about creativity, identity and work. Coming back to them even when they felt circular. Even when they feel like I'm going in figure eights.
But looking back through my journals, I see the garden growing. Only through looking back, do I see the collection growing, this whole time.
I'm reading a book at the moment: Open to Work by Ryan Roslansky and Aneesh Raman, about designing your career in the age of AI. One of the things it keeps returning to is a set of four questions: who am I, why do I work, what do I uniquely do, and where do I want to go.
Simple questions, yet hard to answer honestly as I still feel like I'm learning and figuring it all out in my 7 or is it 8 years now, post education?
What do I uniquely do?
I'm still figuring it out to be honest. This one still keeps me wondering.
I don't offer a skill or a service, but a combination. The specific accumulation of everything I've experienced, read, noticed, built, lost and rebuilt — that's what I do.
Throw in the early years in Tanzania, coming of age in the UK, experience as a Diaspora, education in broadcasting, freelancing, and work internal comms. Team sport, individual accolades and the introspection. And let’s not forget the logo I helped design for £20 for my first client and was too embarrassed to ask for more, the clients since and the ones still to come.
I am uniquely all of it and not just one thing.
All that has been collected, spun around and put between my two ears. Nobody else can deposit a body of work with all that experience at hand — my experience.
What I now attempt to do is find the best source of distribution, building the long tail, while storytelling remains the edge. And the story only works if it's actually mine.
I don't have a neat conclusion to offer this time round. The fire for the business is coming back, slowly, and the figure eights are starting to straighten out a little. But I'm not going to pretend the last four months were a tidy journey from doubt to clarity.
What I know is this: the journals reminded me that I've been here before. In the circling. In the quiet, the doubt. And every time, I've found my way back. Not by adding more, but by returning to the same imagination I started with.
Seth Godin said: relentlessly change tactics, but never the big idea. The big idea hasn't changed. It was there in the earliest journals. It's here now.
I just have to keep tending to it.
Like what you read? Follow along.