Wouldn’t it be nice…

“Wouldn’t it be nice….” Sounds like the advertising jingle for ‘dark matter’, some random chocolate brand I don’t like.

In fact it is a sentence which describes well this segment I’ve started to write, instead of calling it “my utopia” or some such thing, it is simply “wouldn’t it be nice”. Thus giving me some room to throw stuff out there.

These rants, lamentations and wishful thoughts can be found under the category called “Wouldn’t it be nice”. Those who wish to, or have made a pact with me to, follow it, can find it relatively easily there.

I have a few people to thank already now, before I’ve even started. No need to wait until the end of this, what ever this ends up being, to thank them.

First I wish to thank Karl, who is a fellow student, he is one of the super clever ones, at the Sydney University philosophy lessons.

Over the breaks we have discussed outputs as work of art versus life as work of art. Over the years I have placed my heart, soul and some grey matter to many outputs, which are like crumbs along the way. I love to avoid categorisation, even in the way in which I dress and I live with curiosity and openness. This has meant that over the last some years my life is where the work of art is found . Although the business I am working on now could just tilt the scales again in favour of outputs.

From this discussion with Karl on where the art is, we carried on, very gently getting to the topic of writing. Karl writes poetry – he has not made it public to where his work is so I won’t elaborate on it here.

Towards the end of our chat I said I would love to write other than churning the business plan. I know there is much writing to be gotten into in the space of my company. However there is more.

When I challenge my physiology by walking a 100km in the Sydney bush I learn about my strengths, I learn about my way to behave when things get really hard and similarly I learn about others. In the same way I think writing “wouldn’t it be nice…” will clarify for me my thinking about the many subjects I will discuss so that in the end I have a view of the kind of world I’d like to see and why it is so.

When I next saw Karl he just said: “So when”. “So when what?”, I answered, being slow. “When are you going to write? “ “Oh I am not sure exactly but it would be good to have a schedule and someone who’ll ‘cheer’ me on, or more like check up on me”.

So Karl persisted: “Where are you going to write? How many words are you going to write? At what time will you write? What will the writing produce, is it poetry, essays or a book?”

“I really don’t know but I would not have a clue how to write poetry although some things might be best said in a poem, I am so afraid of the rules of poetry, it all seems so strict.” “Nah”, he says, “just do it.”

We came up with a schedule of writing, which fits nicely with my perfect day plan schedule, a location, which I have avoided so far due to rain and terribly sore muscles from a 25km walk I did on Sunday.

Today is Tuesday and I was supposed to start on Sunday. My mum arrived on Saturday. Then we did that walk and work writing took over and Monday is not a writing day for me yet. Sound familiar 🙂 ?

In the end I could not decide one way or the other in terms of the form of my writing. Perhaps it will be a little bit of everything. If you are reading this, just so you know I am not, initially at least, aiming to get my point across quickly or do those wonderful and important things in good writing. I am sharing a piece of me with a few people who care and I can guarantee one thing, I’ll ramble before I can duly assemble the worlds I see.

The second person I wish to talk about is my friend Jane with whom I had a chat lamenting the loss of great words from our vocabulary due to over use or other abuse. One of those words is nice. Some people hate that word with a passion. I had lost the taste of it too. I was not sure it meant anything very nice anymore and I still use it carefully. Nice is on a pedestal of sorts. I am now much more prone to use such totally over the top words like awesome, brilliant and fabulous or plain old great, good, well done, I like that and so on. Jane believes nice should be reinvigorated.

“Wouldn’t it be nice” just would not be the same without the word nice. That’s about five times nice in a row, anyone seeing red yet?

The writing schedule is rather harsh and Karl is watching but I set it so let’s just see how that goes. I promised to write 2000 words on Sundays and 1000 words on Tuesdays, Thursday, Fridays and Saturdays. This amount of words may shrink to less when published, one thing I definitely need to do is noodle on these words.

This is what I think I might be writing about: life, love, grief, joys, institutions, systems, humanity, future, philosophy [just dabbling], entrepreneurial life, some areas of technology although after 20 years of mobile device, IT and telco stuff without being an engineer does not make me excited about tech for tech sake, so more about the impact on businesses.

Instead of creating a separate space I’ll just slot these into the blog stream under a category called “Wouldn’t it be nice” to distinguish those blog posts, which have to do with my thinking on how a great world could be put together.