You know when you’re going over a waterfall and there’s no way to avoid it? Life throws challenges at you.
That’s why this tutorial on diving from a waterfall — a real one, not the metaphor for life’s hurdles — will come handy.
Oddly enough, the figure in the how-to image looks exactly like Harrison Ford and this epic dive from The Fugitive.
Below is the classic scene I’m referencing. PS. If you’re curious about how to treat a black eye, check out this diagram.
How many of us are just acting our way through life, adapting to different settings like chameleons?
Situational elasticity lends its hand to the collaborative truth, that people inject each other with signaling serum. The slightest twang, the tinkle of dimples, the cleanest tucked-in shirt, belt, and Prada shoes – we try to demonstrate to others ‘this is who I am and this what I do.’
All life is a stage, not just the internet, with many reaping the psychological benefits of expectation, even children. Studies show that pretending to be Batman helps kids persevere.
We should follow the route that builds up the most confidence. We just can’t expect a return on a relationship should we switch off and snuggle with our natural impulsiveness.
Authenticity can lack self-control. The edited self is known to burn out, slip, and go off-script.
gif by Laura Salaberry
The medium is the format in which something works. The selection of media predetermines how content gets disseminated and shared.
The Internet is a mass medium. Newspapers are a medium. TV, radio, podcasts, and books are also mediums.
A medium is any messaging mechanism that connects people together to help facilitate communication. The medium is the fulcrum for storytelling including all its characteristics. Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase, “The medium is the message.”
But some platforms are more powerful than others. Audio, argues Alex Danco in his piece “The Audio Revolution.”
Meanwhile, the physical properties of the medium you choose will also influence the temperature of what’s being communicated. A photograph is hotter than a pencil: they both make pictures, but one makes low-resolution sketches and the other high-definition images.
What’s hottest? You might think that the highest-resolution format of all could be visual, typographic or video. But it’s not. It’s audio.
As much as we think visual-first platforms like Instagram and terse Tweets are the most compelling storytellers, it is the distribution of audio and speech that cut straight to the point.
Listening to George W. Bush galvanize firefighters on top the rubble of 9/11 through his bullhorn with these words is practically a pierce in every Americans’ brain.
“I can hear you!” Bush declared. “The rest of the world hears you! And the people – and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.” The crowd firefighters and crew responded with prolonged chants of “USA! USA!”
One doesn’t need to see the footage to feel the aura of the speech.
Writes Danco:
Audio is how you communicate what you really mean, straight into ears, headphones and car radios, intimately and directly. Music is good at this, but speech is even better.
Whatever it is that’s being communicated, audio will heat it up.
Your ears understand what’s really being said, and they seek hot content.
There is no content without a medium. If content is king, then the medium is its own eponymous and gargantuan device.
A step into the wilderness with no path in sight, only the certainty of the next crunch of leaves.
One can’t see the forest for the trees without first seeing a tightly sealed version of the world. Each stick of bark aggregates into a sum of parts individually wrapped and bending into each other — passing signals above the shrubby floor.
Nature holds the strongest connection.
For better or worse, it is the humans who have the elemental need to keep moving on terra firma. Unlike running water over rocks, we force progress by messing up the Earth that feeds us.
We put our minds in the void and bleed design everywhere. We build societies, unplanned, over and over again on top of ruins to get history started again. While the left brain was fixated on the individual trees, the right brain was planting new ones.
As they say, “the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.”
gif via tumblr
She ignored whatever did not interest her. With those blows she opened her days like a piñata. A hundred freedoms fell on her. She hitched free years to her lifespan like a kite tail. Everyone envied her the time she had, not noticing that they had equal time.
Annie Dillard, The Maytrees
A wonderful perspective on life and work as we go into the New Year and new decade.
To be in your own thoughts — language, like headphones, delivers a sense of privacy.
Of course, no thinking is linear. Neurons are always crashing into each other, trying to connect and build new avenues of ideas.
The whole of brain waves is greater than the sum of its parts.
But knowledge presents a key constraint in the gobbling of information — it requires a dishwasher of synthesis to make even more sense of the apparent world.
What’s most dizzying is experiencing nothing. Whatever your neurons are up to this very moment determines what you do next.