Brain Food #512
A Grand Project
Thoughts of the day
Good morning.
In a recent newsletter by Monocle magazine, its editor, Tyler Brûlé, encouraged readers who were facing the prospects of yet another lockdown to make it more meaningful and ‘start a grand project’.
A ‘grand project’ could be anything: painting one’s house, building a shed, making a gallery wall, writing a book; and in non-creative tasks, comfort can be sought in acts like watching or reading all the classics you were never in the mood for, or sorting through your photos or record collection. For those working from home, this is something to help reclaim their time beyond work, to find new delight within a repetitive environment, and from what is left of 2020.
To Brûlé’s words, I would like to add, ‘start a grand project that yields satisfaction from the mere act of working on it’. With no deadlines, and no expectations.
“It is such an agreeable feeling to be busy with something one is only half-competent to do that nobody should criticize the dilettante for taking up an art he will never learn, or blame the artist who leaves the territory of his own art for the pleasure of trying himself in a neighbouring one.”
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
But if you do decide to do some long overdue yet essential housework, you might want to check with your neighbours, first.
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