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I love this picture (You may be familiar with it if you are a fan of the band Blur):
Every time I see it I get inspired in a different way. What is so special about it? Why does it have this effect on me?
I can look at it and try to figure out the reasons to justify what I already felt instantly just by looking at it for a fraction of a second.
What makes it so brilliant? Such things as, the angle it was taken from, the expression on the faces of the two guys (joy), who was that woman diving in the ocean? (a mystery), was it actually a woman or a man? (intrigue), the irritation and the splashing made by a motion of the body entering the water (disruption and chaos), why did she have to jump at that moment in particular? (spontaneity), how cold is the water? (a feeling), the ocean itself (a symbol of freedom), the color of the water (clarity), the clear sunny sky (warmth). It’s a still picture with a lot of motion. It inspires, excites, and calms you down simultaneously.
The point is I don’t have to think about all these things. I just have to look at the picture and get overwhelmed with a multitude of feelings simultaneously. A brilliant picture. A brilliant album cover that invokes emotion.
Another picture I like a lot is the one below:
Why do I like it so much?
It reminds me of a time I was super engaged with something I was working on.
I took this picture in a small hotel room in Tokyo, after a 16-hour flight, at a time I was working on an online project which I had no clue how to build. I was reading anything that looked remotely relevant to what I needed to do. I stumbled across many articles that were not relevant but while filtering through them, I still found valuable and useful information I could use in other areas. I collected all the notes in one place and tried to link them and make sense of how they might be related. Trying to make sense of something that not so long ago I knew nothing about. Bringing pieces of a puzzle together.
The idea of immersing yourself in totally new surroundings can be the exact thing that you need to get that sense of flow that can make or break it. In this case, the place (Tokyo), the fatigue (from the long flight), the inspiration (from new surroundings, excessive reading), the sense of progress I made (filling out those empty pages with notes I’ve collected, how I was able to incorporate them in my project).
The end result is that just by looking at this picture, all those feelings come rushing in at once. And I can use it to put myself in an inspired state very quickly.
So back to the title of this post. Yes, winters here are tough. And as you can see, they make me think about random pictures and how they make me feel. To the point where I need to write about it : )
So I will continue to add pictures to this post and write about them as a way to measure how a winter really is.
A+