Impermanence

A good friend of mine died recently.

It's always tough to know how much of my personal life I should share here. This has always been a bit of a personal branding exercise. This is not to say that the things I share here are not genuine, but there is a lot that gets filtered out.

I was writing my newsletter and this thing poured out of me. It's a significant thing in my life and saying nothing felt dishonest in a way, but pouring my heart out wont help anyone.

So I wont dwell on the tragedy. But I will share one lesson that life keeps teaching me. Maybe this way it will stick a little better.

There is a festival I often attend - Africa Burn. It's like Burning Man, but with biltong. It's held in the Karoo desert in South Africa. Artists build massive wooden structures and then burn them down. It seems like a waste to many people, but there is a lot gained from the experience.

I helped build a few big structures, the last one was about 22 tons. It was a lot of work. Hard, physical labour. Splinters, mistakes and lessons. When the work was good it felt like a dance.

The process of building something temporary connected me with a lot of people I would never have otherwise met, some of which are now good friends. Some of us don't have very much in common at all, but the experience of struggling forward together, dancing our dance, built something inside us and between us.

When the artwork was done it was surreal - a massive structure looming over the desert. It was powerful to look at and to know "we built this".

And when it burned, tears were shed. We knew it would burn, that was the point. We knew it would end.

If it was permanent it would not have been as beautiful.

For me, the festival is a celebration of impermanent things. We can only appreciate our art, and the art of others, for a short while. So we look closely. We revisit the details. We see the clever things and the shortcuts, the flaws and the genius. The humanity in the wood. Then we say goodbye.

We pour effort into making something together, knowing that it will end an go away. We live differently for a while, connect differently, express differently.

Then we go home and sink into our distractions and illusions of permanence. We tell ourselves that there will be time.

None of this will last.

What is life was art?

What would you prioritise? What would you look at closely? What details would you come back to again and again? Where would you slow down? What would you treat as urgent? Where would you have a little more courage?

What would you build if the value was in the building, in the trying, in the learning and collective effort?

What would you throw away?

What if the people around you were art?