The Other Dave Cameron

Tag: inspiration

  • Darkness Into Light

    The cold clear sky is still dark and full of constellations when I first look up through the kitchen skylight in early morning, the great ladle of Ursa Major emptying one final scoop of stars across the slowly fading darkness as dawn arrives. This is the period of longest nights, my favorite solstice, especially in the early morning.

    I always find something still and hopeful about reaching a maximum of darkness, knowing that you’ve reached the end, and now you can prepare for the journey back to light. I only recently realized that stillness – the sense of slowing to a halt, a pause in movement – is actually inherent in the word “solstice,” deriving from the Latin sol for sun, plus sistere meaning “to stand still” which is what our sun appears to do during any solstice, pausing at it’s most northern or southern limit before heading back the other way. It’s like that brief millisecond pause of weightless stillness at the top of a swing, just before you begin to fall back toward the ground, and your feel yourself float for a suspended moment off of the seat.

    Apogee. Nadir. Interpret it how you will. I like this idea of being at the top end of an arc, a pendulum swing about to be pulled back in the direction it came. Metaphors can be clunky sometimes, but really what I’m connecting with in this moment is the stillness.

    Apparently this idea of stillness, a pause across the Earth, is not limited to Western roots of thought or culture. The Winter Solstice has been part of Asian culture for over 2,000 years, particularly in China with Dongzhi festival which marks the “extreme of winter.” Philosophically, it is the end of the yin phase of the year, representing darkness, cold, and stillness, and thus celebrates the return of yang energy, the ascendence of light and warmth, and hopefully prosperity.

    Nowadays, Dongzhi is a traditional day to get together with family and friends and eat a lot of dumplings, and any occasion to eat a lot of dumplings seems like a good way to celebrate on a cold night. And so maybe that’s the best thing any of us can do today: eat some dumplings, say farewell to the darkest days, and look forward to the return of sunlight and warmth and blooming life. It is all ahead of us, just as before.

    I will focus on this feeling of hope and renewal and festive love. I am blessed with a lot of positive reinforcement around me right now, and I have a buffer of good vibes protecting me from the bummers of the world trying to take up worry space in my mind. I am keeping them at a distance for now and focusing on love instead. I have love to give, love to receive, and I hope that we will all see love reflected around us even more in the year to come.

    Today is the darkest day. It will get brighter in the weeks ahead.

  • Spring Training

    We’ve had a run of unusually sunny days this week, and the college campus where I work has sprung to life in the warmth of it all. Just a few days ago I heard a sound in the distance that always sends a little ripple of joy through my brain: the distinctive dhoiiinng! of a metal bat smacking a baseball. Ahhh…. spring has arrived.

    Cue the birdsong, cue some remixed Vivaldi, cue the mud and budding trees. When the college baseball team begins batting practice outdoors, I know that’s my cue to begin some spring training of my own.

    Even before it has officially begun, just the thought of spring inspires thoughts of new beginnings. I try to channel that energy the same way a baseball team does—stretching, examining my swing again, and reevaluating my tools and skills. Is there something I can do to improve this year? Small adjustments I can make, or new techniques that will improve my performance?

    Spring training is not just about warming up, but also rebooting. It’s about reconnecting with your teammates, and recommitting together to the work ahead. Work you do because there’s something about it that you all love, that you all contribute to in special ways, and that you all want to improve.

    We all want to go out there and win every day, but that doesn’t happen without regularly reviewing and training ourselves on the fundamental skills. That’s what spring training is for.

    And now the days are getting longer, and warmer, and the scent of new growth is in the air. There’s no better time to lace up your shoes and get moving. It’s time to play ball again.

     

  • Dear Eric

    It has now been one year since you died. I’m not sure we’ll ever know what happened to you, only that you were alone when your car left the road late at night, hit something at high speed, and you weren’t wearing a seatbelt. You didn’t survive. You were only a little more than a year older than me.

    In some ways I’m surprised it’s only been one year since the accident; so much has happened in the past twelve months it feels like your death happened in a whole different world than where we are now. But emtionally, this anniversary is touching something raw within me, this first loop around the calendar back to a date I had pushed away from my mind. I think it was the suddenness of it, the shock, the seeming randomness of your accident that knocked me off balance.

    (more…)

  • Make (Up) No Little Plans

    Make (Up) No Little Plans

    There’s something about the arrival of spring that brings with it a desire to throw out the clutter and the noise of the old and to start anew. I’m filled with a desire to get organized, build something lean and bold; something simple, smart, and effective.

    I first came across this quote years ago, but only recently has it spoken to me in a way that feels inspiring:

    Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty.

    It’s attributed to the architect Daniel H. Burnham, who is most famous for his 1909 plan for the City of Chicago. But “attributed to” and “a quote from” are not the same thing, and it turns out it’s really difficult to find a contemporary source for this quote in anything written or spoken publicly by Burnham himself. In fact, it’s almost easier to find blog posts and magazine stories pointing out this misattribution than it is to find where the quote actually did come from.

    In an era when it’s easy to assume that the source of every famous quote is available at our fingertips, I was surprised at how enigmatic this particular quote seems to be, and yet also how often it has been used as a source of inspiration and even as a rationale for desicions.

    As a college-educated person who learned the difference between primary and secondary source material a long time ago, I’ve always tried to take attribution seriously. Even when it’s just a blog post, I think it’s important to provide links to the orignal source of where a quote or image or idea is coming from if it’s not my own. So in that spirit, here is the closest I’ve come to figuring out the true origin of this quote, as summarized in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations, edited by Suzy Platt, which attributes the quote as follows:

    While Burnham expressed these thoughts in a paper he read before the Town Planning Conference, London, 1910, the exact words were reconstructed by Willis Polk, Burnham’s San Francisco partner. Polk used the paragraph on Christmas cards in 1912 after Burnham’s death in June of that year.—Henry H. Saylor, ”Make No Little Plans,” Journal of the American Institute of Architects, March 1957, pp. 95–99.

    While I discovered it is possible to find a record of that historic 1910 Town Planning Conference which includes transcripts of remarks and papers shared by the guests, I was not able to get my hands on a copy from any local library, nor do I have the disposable outcome to order or even “rent” an e-book version of the full volume just so I could look for this quote.

    Because ultimately, what does it matter? Our history and culture are chockablok with misattributed quotes and untruths we take for granted. What matters is what we take away from it ourselves, and what it may inspire us to do.

    Architecture critic Paul Goldberger says as much in his 2009 piece in The New Yorker marking the centennial of Burnhams’s Chicago plan,

    “Burnham is famous for the line ‘Make no little plans, they have no magic to stir men’s blood.’ There is little evidence that he really said this, but everything he did suggests that he believed it. If Theodore Roosevelt had been an architect, he would have been Daniel Burnham.”

    I think that sums it up perfectly. In the end it doesn’t matter. This quote will live on regardless of who said it, and just like any good writing, if it speaks to you, than that means it’s worth appreciating line by line.

    Make no little plans.
    They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized.
    Make big plans;
    aim high in hope and work,     remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency.
    Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us.
    Let your watchword be order
    and your beacon beauty.

    Think big.