On June 30, I downloaded the app 1 Second Everyday and began another recording project. Each day since (with one exception), I've taken a video which has been trimmed to a second and added to the previous seconds to make a record of my daily life. ESL classes at Bunker Hill, kayaks on the Broad Canal, campsite scenes from Wellfleet, fireworks on the Quincy shore, each have a single second place in the compilation film which would last something less than half a minute.
The idea is that even a second can trigger memories that can rescue our days from oblivion. Some days produce several videos I have to select from, asking myself what what was aesthetic should be chosen for the compilation, or what was unique.
In any case I'm back at intentionally scanning the flow of my life in terms for its, in this case, memory-stimulating moments.
This is similar to what I was about through most of 2014 and into this year, except that then I was looking in my life for encounters, engagements with Others and otherness, which I take to be the quanta of value in our lives. Looking for 1SE memorability moments sharpens my attention to what make each day special? Can 1SE teach anything else..
How about an app for recording our daily encounters, based on the idea of 3D-ED: discovering, daring and debriefing encounters daily. If I could make one recommendation to the world, it would be that everyone do just this--discover, dare, and debrief encounters each and every day as a deliberate life program. It's possible as I think my year-long series demonstrated.
Why would one start such a program. The question of why we do what is good or good for us is regularly debated. As I consider, for example, running, I can see at least three incentives. The first is the anticipation of the good feeling that follows a run, the new energy, the new mobility, the breath, the relaxation... Sure, there are aches and pains sometimes, but overall I feel great after a run. After a period of idleness, I'm physically and mentally peevish.
The second is my interest in the goings-on around town, first of all, the weather, then the other people out going through their morning motions. There's progress on construction sites to notice, tree and flower development to admire, new things to see which I'd missed before. Having just finished listening to Nathaniel Philbrick's Bunker Hill, I was interested, for instance, to run up the slope of Pleasant Street toward the Monument Park as the British regulars probably toiled upward toward the fortifications commanded by William Prescott.
The third incentive is my loyalty to my own commitment to run. I want to discipline myself to run under all conditions (well, almost all) for the sake of keeping myself to a routine. It's that consistency which makes the other benefits possible, thus reinforcing what seems to me a positive cycle.
I can feel the third incentive as a kind of urgency: today is the day to suit up and go.Tomorrow will also be able to refer to 'today' but that doesn't blunt the spur: it's time to go now, time to look for memory triggers now, time to discover and dare and debrief encounters now.
There are the urgencies of circumstance (often in the form of crises) and the urgencies of desire (often in the form of crescendos), but 3D-ED (three-D, E-D) depends on the cooler urgencies of obligation (especially to oneself), altogether cooler but no less real.
I think about the lastingness of my encounters in much the same way as I do the pension money I look forward to using a few years hence. I'm not worried with regard to the long term, but I do really want to make these moments I live now as rich and significant as possible, and that means hewing to a regimen of discovering, daring and debriefing encounters daily, of risking and reflecting on direct, indirect and invented encounters, of consciously channeling God-in-love wooing the Beloved other in and through the medium of the universe.
I'm not in fact as a disciplined as one side of me would like me to be, because there's another side that wants to explore different kinds of engagements to see if they can be encounters (a distractedness with fights with consistency). Then there's my resistance to the self-righteous tendencies of even self-discipline.
Still, encounters are encounters; this is not a head-game but a way of being in the world. I'm sure I'll fail, miss the mark, lapse but equally sure that, willy-nilly, encounters will happen, and that I can make their occurrence more frequent, more profound, more meaningful if I adopt the 3D-ED program.
Can there be an app to facilitate the daily discovery, daring, debriefing of encounters? Can there be a way for different people to share their encounters and so encounter each others encounters? Can this way of being alive become general practice, a source of health and hope for us all?
The idea is that even a second can trigger memories that can rescue our days from oblivion. Some days produce several videos I have to select from, asking myself what what was aesthetic should be chosen for the compilation, or what was unique.
In any case I'm back at intentionally scanning the flow of my life in terms for its, in this case, memory-stimulating moments.
This is similar to what I was about through most of 2014 and into this year, except that then I was looking in my life for encounters, engagements with Others and otherness, which I take to be the quanta of value in our lives. Looking for 1SE memorability moments sharpens my attention to what make each day special? Can 1SE teach anything else..
How about an app for recording our daily encounters, based on the idea of 3D-ED: discovering, daring and debriefing encounters daily. If I could make one recommendation to the world, it would be that everyone do just this--discover, dare, and debrief encounters each and every day as a deliberate life program. It's possible as I think my year-long series demonstrated.
Why would one start such a program. The question of why we do what is good or good for us is regularly debated. As I consider, for example, running, I can see at least three incentives. The first is the anticipation of the good feeling that follows a run, the new energy, the new mobility, the breath, the relaxation... Sure, there are aches and pains sometimes, but overall I feel great after a run. After a period of idleness, I'm physically and mentally peevish.
The second is my interest in the goings-on around town, first of all, the weather, then the other people out going through their morning motions. There's progress on construction sites to notice, tree and flower development to admire, new things to see which I'd missed before. Having just finished listening to Nathaniel Philbrick's Bunker Hill, I was interested, for instance, to run up the slope of Pleasant Street toward the Monument Park as the British regulars probably toiled upward toward the fortifications commanded by William Prescott.
The third incentive is my loyalty to my own commitment to run. I want to discipline myself to run under all conditions (well, almost all) for the sake of keeping myself to a routine. It's that consistency which makes the other benefits possible, thus reinforcing what seems to me a positive cycle.
I can feel the third incentive as a kind of urgency: today is the day to suit up and go.Tomorrow will also be able to refer to 'today' but that doesn't blunt the spur: it's time to go now, time to look for memory triggers now, time to discover and dare and debrief encounters now.
There are the urgencies of circumstance (often in the form of crises) and the urgencies of desire (often in the form of crescendos), but 3D-ED (three-D, E-D) depends on the cooler urgencies of obligation (especially to oneself), altogether cooler but no less real.
I think about the lastingness of my encounters in much the same way as I do the pension money I look forward to using a few years hence. I'm not worried with regard to the long term, but I do really want to make these moments I live now as rich and significant as possible, and that means hewing to a regimen of discovering, daring and debriefing encounters daily, of risking and reflecting on direct, indirect and invented encounters, of consciously channeling God-in-love wooing the Beloved other in and through the medium of the universe.
I'm not in fact as a disciplined as one side of me would like me to be, because there's another side that wants to explore different kinds of engagements to see if they can be encounters (a distractedness with fights with consistency). Then there's my resistance to the self-righteous tendencies of even self-discipline.
Still, encounters are encounters; this is not a head-game but a way of being in the world. I'm sure I'll fail, miss the mark, lapse but equally sure that, willy-nilly, encounters will happen, and that I can make their occurrence more frequent, more profound, more meaningful if I adopt the 3D-ED program.
Can there be an app to facilitate the daily discovery, daring, debriefing of encounters? Can there be a way for different people to share their encounters and so encounter each others encounters? Can this way of being alive become general practice, a source of health and hope for us all?
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