With the benefit of hindsight
Quarter past three on a Tuesday afternoon, filling out a form, standing, forearms resting on the table, a bitten slice of pie, no plate, next to the laptop. At three forty I was going to have to close the laptop, even without finishing, to go pick up my daughters. Four in the afternoon was the deadline for the open call.
With all the confidence in the world, I loaded everything they were asking for, but right then I realized that to take part you had to be a resident of the city of Buenos Aires. My first thought: what an idiot, how scattered can I be. The personal blow before anything else.
In my head, the opening of "Yo caníbal" was playing, the song by Patricio Rey y sus Redonditos de Ricota, an Argentine rock band, pure acceleration, pure adrenaline. I drove to school with the phone on my lap, caught in that contradiction of wanting to make it on time versus hoping the light would turn red so I could write an email to the organizers asking for one more shot to sneak in through the window.
I had spent seven days going all in on this. I had gotten other people involved, I had put in time, headspace, drive and money to get the project in order, to make content. I worked Friday night, Saturday and Sunday, in the middle of family gatherings. I put together a presentation. I put together a video. I went to the print shop. I met up to get the social media going. I put together posts. I fought tooth and nail with multi-gig image files. I thought through the whole storytelling in a couple of days. And despite having slept little and walking around with sparks flying and anxiety tingling through my body, I got to the door of the sign-up feeling good about what I had in hand. Room for improvement? Of course. But good, and ready to defend the project if I had to pitch it.
As a designer, I confess my absolute fanaticism for Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus school in Germany, a hundred-odd years ago now. Think about this: the guy founds a school that's avant-garde to the bone right when the First World War ends. That takes guts and conviction. Give me a better example. With the benefit of hindsight we know that the creation of that school changed design, art and architecture worldwide. But Gropius had no way of knowing that at the time. He just knew he wanted to go down that path. He galloped ahead without seeing the fence.
On a smaller scale, but just as valuable to me, there's my dad's path. An aeronautics student for four years, who one day said "I don't see myself in this" and jumped into the world of sound. He founded his company, became well known in his field, and did what felt right to him because he was also a hundred percent convinced that was the way to go, as I told you in What my old man got right. Same drive that made him brilliant and successful. Same gallop toward the fence. Except in his case, the horse didn't clear it, and he went flying. He ended up on the street.
Back to me. With all this information tucked away in some drawer in my head, I realized that despite living the situation up close, in the micro, the money, the time, the focus spent, I found pure gold in the macro view: the social media up and running, the information organized, and the certainty that I'm now ready for the next step, whatever that turns out to be. And believe me, I have plenty of plans for this project.
Just like these two greats, I don't know either whether I'm going to end up on this side of the fence or flying through the air. For now, I'm riding with loose reins.
This post was supposed to go up last Friday. It didn't. I was busy, four hands deep, living exactly what you just read.
J.
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