I figure if I do this often enough it’ll become a habit.
(Both the writing, and the hobbies. And maybe the trains? TBD… )
Been working with a travel palette of watercolours that I brought. That, and a few other small things. We’ll see which one I enjoy most, but right now the watercolors are delightful. Being able to add a small degree of colour to a notebook beings it to life.
I think there was a guy who did oil paintings in an Altoid’s tin? The watercolors remind me a lot of that.
Oh here it is:
I’ll give the oil paints a test run first. I’m not sure how well they travel. But watercolour is inoffensive enough in a public space like a train.
Though perhaps semi-public is the way to describe it? Everyone is close, but off in their own space.
Not in the very close and not-at-all-private way that we’re used to in an airplane, or in the even closer contact you get in commuter transit.
So you get a modicum of space, of distance, and that plus the time gained from the pace of the thing, continuously moving, relentlessly forward, allows for the time needed to take up a hobby, or discover a new vocation en route.
It reminds me of the work by Matt Crawford, in Shopcraft as Soulcraft, (which of course echoes Pirsig’s ZATAOMM from decades earlier, where the space for the work impacts the work itself.
I talked about it a lot in my dissertation.
I haven’t looked at it in a few years.
We’ll return to it soon.