This is the first page of Hendrik Willem van Loon’s The Story of Mankind, published in 1921. Van Loon wrote and illustrated the book with his own pen drawings — in two months — and it was the first winner of the Newbury Medal in 1922. Helluva way to start a story.
I will not argue with strangers on the internet
All advice is autobiographical. A reader tweeted this page from my own book this week:
You’re going to see a lot of stupid stuff out there and you’re going to feel like you need to correct it. One time I was up late on my laptop and my wife yelled at me, “Quit picking fights on Twitter and go make something.”
I still fail at this at least weekly, but to quote Jules Winnfield from Pulp Fiction, “I’m trying Ringo. I’m trying, real hard.”
Perspective
Travel doesn’t relieve your problems, it throws them into relief.
You can be woke without waking up to the news
A friend of mine said he didn’t know how long he could wake up to such horrible news every day. I suggested to him that he shouldn’t wake up to the news at all, and neither should anyone else.
There’s almost nothing in the news that any of us need to read in the first hour (or two or three or four…) of our day.
If you’re using news or social media to wake up, try this instead: When you wake up, don’t pick up your phone. Head to the bliss station, play with your kids, write in your notebook, draw, pray, meditate, take a walk, eat breakfast, listen to Mozart, get showered, read a book, or just be silent for a bit. Even if it’s only for half an hour, give yourself some time in the morning to not be completely horrified by the news.
It’s not sticking your head in the sand, it’s retaining some of your inner balance and sanity, so you can be strong and fight.
You can be woke without waking up to the news.
(This post turned into a section in my book, Keep Going.)
What is not machine-like
“REJOICE IN HUMANNESS! Machines can’t make mistakes. If you compete with a machine on its terms YOU LOSE! So don’t reduce your writing to be like type. YOU ARE NOT A TYPEWRITER! Admit mistakes, correct them, & go right on.
—Jacqueline Svaren, Written Letters
Andy Warhol said, “I want to be a machine,” but we’ve been there and done that, and besides, he was delight-full of crap, like all great artists, because when I stood in front of those big silk-screened flowers last week they sure didn’t feel like they were made by machines. You could sense the human behind them…
“These are not yet automata.”
—Studs Terkel, Working
I remember a few years ago how triumphant I felt when the Twitter spam account @horse_ebooks turned out to be a human pretending to be a machine. Some were disappointed, but the feed seemed too weird and beautiful to me to be completely random. I was happy to see a human behind it.
“The next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”
I like my machines just fine, but I’m not interested in turning into one. I’d like to remain a person. I truly believe one of the most subversive things you can do today is spend as much of your time as possible nurturing what is not machine-like in you.
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