Project Blank Canvas, or 'Rumspringa!'
'Rumspringa!', Voyage Around My Room, Ansel Adams 'In Our Time'
'Rumspringa!'
'Rumspringa!' my colleague Tyler wrote to me, during last days at work when hearing of my departure. What a curious word, I thought. And I liked the excited exclamation he’d added…
I had to look it up.
Etymology is a phonetically beautiful German word 'Rumschpringe', origins Upper Rhine Valley in Germany (Wikipedia). Meaning is 'jumping or hopping around'. As I read more, I loved the spirit of the concept let alone this beautiful word. Rumspringa! I’ll take that.
But in my own words, it’s been coming out in conversations more as a mid-life ‘philosophical exercise’. To pause, to catch up and to slow down. And see what happens, then, with the stack of life lived and created over the last decades. Well, the last 47 years! A mid-life ‘philosophical exercise’, I’ve started calling it. With a smile :)
The evolution to 'Rumspringa' - from Rumschpringe - is Pennsylvanian German. The Americanized spelling Rumspringa came at the gentle hands of the early Amish, to describe the adolescent rite of passage that allows experimentation with ‘worldly’ activities on the weekends, before re-settling on the path ahead. (Worldly being the favorite description I read in different articles!).
The Amish concept of Rumspringa is a rite of passage for the youth to go do what they like, on weekends, to break out of the strictures of their faith and its avoidance of modern, technologically-driven ways. To gain full knowledge of ‘freedom’ and the chance to walk away to more usual paths and lifestyles that the world has to offer.
To 'shit or get off the pot', per the old Donegal expression, with etymology pre-porcelain rural Ireland era - and sustained into the current language era, provocatively, around about weekly, by…Dad of Donegal!
Pausing from work life to nothing - as I did on Friday 9 June 2023 - has been an exercise of which I’ve long dreamt. It must have been in my late twenties, that I stumbled on an article in the weekend papers. The FT Weekend magazine no doubt, that peachy-pink pile that remains a favorite Saturday-Sunday indulgence. (FT being Financial Times, one of the last standing ‘proper’ journalism newspapers, that’s avoided the drift to gentle propaganda for one side or the other).
The article told the story of a professional woman, in her thirties, who shunned the conventional wisdom of 'the easiest way to get a job is in a job' to instead choose to just stop. To take a break from the centrifuge of professional life. Purely to pause, to live well for a few months away from career and work identities. To replenish. And to then decide again.
Now that makes absolute sense to me, I remember thinking, especially since I idolize the idea too of not being retired out to some back paddock to chew grass, but working late into life. And, the words 'conventional wisdom' create in my head a visual signpost to think twice: what’s driving all that convention, emotionally?
As Mark Twain is reported to have said…“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”
'Project Blank Canvas' I’ve called it, to close friends in San Francisco in recent weeks, outing an expression that has been in my head for years. Take a deliberate pause from the centrifuge of our fast modern lives, with their velocity of connection and their weighty aspirations that we’ll carry in a million directions nowadays. A mini-retirement, but when you’re still in your prime.
Allow yourself to savour, and to think through some of the whispers of clues about ourselves in life, and the trade-offs we choose. A few months most likely. Or more than that…a year, even?! Or, two or three (Editor note: I can’t feel that being likely, right now…!) - per one great surf friend of old, Seth, who took his family sailing around the world (and sold me his car) from the place of a comfortable Marin life in two senior corporate roles, YouTubed it all and has crafted a re-designed path since, in Florida (see The Sailing Family).
I was the most anxious about it, for about three minutes, in a 20% anxious kind of way, on 8 June, the eve of my last day at work. Before quickly the best advice I’ve ever had came to mind. 'Back yourself', as great school friend Ben Richardson said to me in 2010 as I headed off to Bali to surf after a fund I was working on was wound down, an epoch that led to my move to San Francisco. Back yourself that it will all work out just fine. Back yourself that it might quite possibly be a very rich and important era of your life, in terms of what happens next...
Just one promise I made in setting out, that I’ll write along the way…
Three Postcards will share weekly pictures and jottings from a deliciously tasty era in my life. Sauntering in curiosity, writing from conversations and moments along the way, and staying in touch…
Voyage Around My Room
French philosopher Xavier de Maistre spent forty-two days in confinement in 1794 after being arrested for getting into a duel in Turin.
Somewhat parodying the emerging and grandiose narratives of travel writing, De Maistre challenged himself to write about the journey that his curiosity and imagination took him on in his room, while under house arrest!
Autour De Ma Chambre is the short often hilarious text that resulted, a book he felt too silly to try to publish, but his brother did posthumously.
To me, Autour De Ma Chambre makes the serious call-to-arms that it is an important faculty to be able to be deeply curious in whatever situation we’re in. Per De Maistre’s opening, this applies to rich and poor, adventurous and cowardly, idle or energetic!…:
“I might fairly begin the eulogium of my journey by saying it has cost me nothing. This point merits attention. It will gain for it the praise and welcome of people of moderate means. And not of these only: there is another class with whom its success will, on this account, be even more certain. “And who are they?” you ask. Why, the rich, to be sure. And then, again, what a comfort the new mode of travel will be to the sick; they need not fear bleak winds or change of weather. And what a thing, too, it will be for cowards; they will be safe from pitfalls or quagmires. Thousands who hitherto did not dare, others who were not able, and others to whom it never occurred to think of such a thing as going on a journey, will make up their minds to follow my example…No obstacle shall hinder our way; and giving ourselves up gaily to Imagination, we will follow her whithersoever it may be her good pleasure to lead us.”
Yes, true travel more easily stimulates heightened curiosity in the change of context it brings and the novelty of the moments we fall into from arrival at the airport. But we must be able to switch on this faculty in any day or context of our lives to live richly.
And De Maistre counsels serendipity too, in the art of journeying, in the early chapter describing his room, titled Latitude and Topography. He writes:
“My room is situated in latitude 48° east, according to the measurement of Father Beccaria. It lies east and west, and, if you keep very close to the wall, forms a parallelogram of thirty-six steps round. My journey will, however, be longer than this; for I shall traverse my room up and down and across, without rule or plan. I shall even zig-zag about, following, if needs be, every possible geometrical line. I am no admirer of people who are such masters of their every step and every idea that they can say: “To-morrow I shall make three calls, write four letters, and finish this or that work.” So open is my soul to all sorts of ideas, tastes, and feel{12}ings; so greedily does it absorb whatever comes first, that ... but why should it deny itself the delights that are scattered along life’s hard path? So few and far between are they, that it would indeed be senseless not to stop, and even turn aside, to gather such as are placed within our reach. Of these joys, none, to my thinking, is more attractive than following the course of one’s fancies as a hunter follows his game, without pretending to keep to any set route. Hence, when I travel in my room, I seldom keep to a straight line. From my table I go towards a picture which is placed in a corner; thence I set out in an oblique direction for the door; and then, although on starting I had intended to return to my table, yet, if I chance to fall in with my arm-chair on the way, I at once, and most unceremoniously, take up my quarters therein.”
It’s a wonderful read, amusing and lightly philosophical. And you can get the gist from the chapter titles given: “The Bed”, “The Portrait”, “A Halt”, “A Tear”, “Albert and Charlotte” (on a memory…), “The Withered Rose” and the philosophical sections on “Misfortune”, “Misanthropy”, “Charity”.
So, back to Rumspringa!
It was quite natural that Autour De Ma Chambre naturally came back to mind in the first days of this early mid-life journey.
A dental surgery meant a week avoiding speaking ('try to keep talking to less than twenty-four words in twenty-four hours…'). And I used that to set a rough 'theme' for the first month of Rumspringa: clearing the decks of life admin (US and UK tax returns, US health insurance), running a full spring cleaning at home (streamlining boxes of books in my garage into piles of 're-read, keep or donate'). And, putting a pause on open loops of professional connections with gentle explanations of “not now” whenever in a conversation when the words “opportunity”, “deal”, “investment”, “career” and “what next, Kevin?” are foisted on me. The first week was almost entirely taken up with coffees and discussions that led me to realize I needed to put a pause on all the ideas and “next steps” these will create. I found myself coining in my head an apt, personal new American acronym, richly opposite to the anxious Zeitgeist sales and venture capital cultural expression to get investors to sign over their money with “fear of missing out” (FOMO) > “HTMO”
While sauntering in curiosity, I have to be “Happy to Miss Out”…
Ansel Adams 'In Our Time', and a Backcountry Ski Trip Flashback
I froze seeing this image, a friend’s mother next to me in the first week of Rumpsringa! An immediate memory of standing in the Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite Valley with my own mother.
And that moment back then, in the gallery, with Mum, had wooshed me back to a moment stopping in the trees with Pete and Keara on an overnight backcountry ski tour to a hut in Whistler. It was my first such trip, and in the first such hours I had gone from anxious (as Pete taught us how to assess snow for avalanche risk) to smiling inside in glee at the beauty and quiet of empty fields of snow. And just us, and just the sound of the ‘skins’ on your skis, schussing gently uphill through the sparkling crystals of white.
The awe of majestic landscape is in my blood and bones and spirit. And the way these memories will pop up will make me freeze for a moment like I’ve been set in stone.
That day, in the Yosemite Valley Ansel Adams Gallery, Mum bought me a since cherished book, Ansel Adams Letters and Images 1916 -1984, I think it was back in 2013 or so in early days in California.
This compilation of Ansel Adams' letters to friends and business acquaintances is a glimpse into the early days of photography's growth in the 1920s and 1930s. Adams’ letters give us glimpses from what the painters thought, to use in politics, to the rapid adoption by the advertising industry for commercial ends (and artists’ view on that too).
And, the Letters are a reminder that (it seems to me) any successful artist comes paired with onehelluva promoter. For Adams, that person was Alfred Stieglitz, a photographer himself who stepped forward as the US promoter that drove photography’s acceptance as an accepted art form. I remembered being surprised to learn that Stieglitz - being such an astute commercialist - was married to Georgia O’Keefe, famed for abandoning New York for Santa Fe, New Mexico and a favorite female artist*.
* A sidebar on Georgia O’Keefe: Best known for her intense swathes of colour, O’Keefe’s most well-known paintings are portraits of the inside of flowers from close-up (like this, with a hat tip to the wonderful 'reader' website The Marginalian). O'Keefe's approach leaves the viewer with the feeling of almost being in the flower - a hat tip to the close cropping technique of photographers at the time. I’ve adored O’Keefe ever since an adored friend at Epsom College focused on her style of painting on the easel next to me during A-Level Art in 1992.
From the early letters, I had (extremely naively) just assumed that the distribution of Adams’ work just took off on its own in the majesty of his stark black and white depictions of Yosemite Valley.
So it was a pleasure to visit the 'In Our Time' exhibition at San Francisco’s De Yonge Museum, with a friend’s Mum visiting for a month from near Frankfurt, Hessen in Germany.
The exhibition was a juicy juxtaposition of several era of Ansel Adams work, placed alongside both the photographers that influenced Adams at the time and the contemporary photographers that he has influenced today. And, the chronological placement of Adams’ work brought insights into his life, which all started growing up in San Francisco in a quiet home in Sea Cliff looking out over the Pacific (might I have turned out as Ansel Adams if I grew up in a quiet home in Sea Cliff, I remember thinking…).
And, and…you can’t beat celebrating the start of a period not working with an afternoon in an art gallery.
Highly recommended…
Sources and Mentions
Autour De Ma Chambre by Xavier De Maistre and the Gutenberg Press English Translation Voyage Around My Room
Ansel Adams: Ansel Adams In Our Time exhibition in San Francisco, Pine Forest, Snow and “Letters 1916-1984”
@myphoneart for Rumspringa! photo…and more along the way…