Keep Going February 18, 2014

I’m deep into 3D art, but the past two weeks had me in despair.  Our assignment was to produce a volumetric line sculpture, representative of an everyday object, using wire.  Taking my beloved Bodum French press as my model, I bent, stabbed, cut, twisted, joined and ripped out bits of aluminum and black-coated steel wire, giving up whole beautiful mornings and afternoons to the ordeal and leaving a trail of blood on my kitchen table. Really, the project seemed hopeless when I simply couldn’t get the thing to even stand upright.  But I was determined to do my best, and the earworm of my art teacher’s voice urged me on: “Keep going!” she is fond of saying. 

So, I kept going.  I twirled the dark wire into a knob, fashioned a lid out of deep aluminum loops, and made curlicues for the sieve with thin steel wire.  Suddenly, the structure was actually starting to look pretty cute, and thus bolstered, I moved on to create a fanciful sinusoidal wave to reinforce the emulated stainless bands and attached to those the dark wire handle.  A metamorphosis!  Finally, I had something that matched what I had in my mind’s eye and that I was proud of.

It was an exercise not just in creativity but also in tenacity, and a true transformation, not just of the object, but also of my confidence.  A small thing, perhaps, but an important reminder of the power of determination.  Today during critique, my teacher said, “You became friends with the wire”.  Well, that’s one way to put it.

Roads Past and Roads Future February 9, 2014

My friend and neighbor Marty – as in “The Red Car Redux” – is my age and is just about to retire from a long career as a pathologist.  On a walk together last week, she recounted a talk she had heard by someone in his mid-70s about the challenge of letting go of one’s profession-centric identity and the need to embrace an identity that is perhaps more authentic [my words].  This certainly resonated for me, as this is my struggle too, but I discovered myself protesting, “I agree only 90%.”   Our professions are an outgrowth of what makes us tick – our interests, our abilities – which is why we chose a particular career path to begin with.  I loved doing science, and I still love science.  These aspects of me simply haven’t gone “poof” now that I’ve retired, they are still very much a part of who I am.  My passionate response surprised me and made me realize that being a science geek is not just a part of my past, it needs to be part of my future.

One evening this week, Marty stopped by to return a DVD I had lent her.  As we chatted in the kitchen she said, “Today I performed my last needle aspiration,” and her eyes started to redden and tear.  It was a terrible moment.  This was it – the end, the last procedure of its kind she will ever do, and the tragedy is that she loves doing it.  She told me that what she wishes she had done was to pursue this more patient-orientated aspect of pathology.  “That would have been a career that I truly loved,” she said. 

Both Marty and I chose to retire because it was “time”, the end of long road.  Can we find a new path, maybe one that covers some of the same beloved scenery, but challenges us in new ways in the future?  

Gravity February 8, 2014

Gravity has been on my mind lately.  This all started when I read Brilliant Blunders for our genetics book club, and one section happened to be on Einstein’s “blunder” of introducing a cosmological constant into his relativity theories.  This got me to reading another short book on Einstein, called Einstein’s Universe, which the science writer George Johnson claims steered him into science writing initially.  One of Einstein’s many mind-blowing insights was that gravity – the stuff of Newton and the apple – isn’t really a primary force at all, but rather a manifestation of disruption in the space-time continuum of the universe.  Now, I don’t profess to understand this, but the notion certainly has gotten under my skin.

Then there is Gravity, the movie, in which Sandra Bullock and George Clooney are marooned in outer space, far enough away from earth, presumably, to be unresponsive to its perturbation of the space-time continuum.  I have to say, if I ever had any thoughts of traveling to outer space – and I haven’t – this movie would have quickly ended them! 

And then, in the meantime, I heard from an old high school classmate, one year ahead of me, whom I haven’t seen since his graduation, and he commented that as a student, I generated my own gravity.  I decided to take this as a compliment, and I really like his image, that each of us, in fact is generating our own gravity, or shall we say, each of us is creating a disturbance in the space-time continuum of beings and non-beings. 

Where am I going with all this?  Well, I don’t know, but I have been thinking about how I need to rein in my disparate interests – my little moons and satellites, if you will, of singing, art, writing, reading, hiking – and see if I can re-create a center of gravity, similar to that center which I had when I was still working as a professor.   I think I can, and when I do, perhaps I’ll be sucking you, too, into my orbit.