Ten Years. Almost to the day.

So, as stated previously, I'm running through my pictures, sorting out a lot of them. Posting some of the fun ones, the ones that will make people look at them and go "OH BLOODY HELL, I REMEMBER...!" Something to bring them out and show them the good times we've had.

But I've also come across a lot of instances of something I've never liked. Photos of me.

Now I've never, even in my slim and trim incarnation back at the beginning of uni, particularly liked being in photos. But it's made me think a lot about how our outer shell affects who we are. For once, I will not dance around the point.

I am the same being, travelling along, evolving and developing. I appear different at various times throughout my life, but inside is the same fire that has always, and will always drive me. Inside is still the same love for all of you that I have always had. The same spirit of random and the same desire for adventure. I will not let the shell change these things. In fact, I will use the shell to augment these things and to keep their spirit alive for as long as I can.

A photo of me in 2003.                                        A photo of me in 2013.

Judge as you will. It matters not to me, and nor should it matter to you how you physically change over the same time. You have the inner fire and drive to be anything you want to be, to experience anything you want to do. This is just a convenient shell. In my case with dreamy tiger eyes and questionable hair style...

AGE IS NOTHING.

 

Go on. Post something of yourself 10 years ago, and enjoy it.

Taking stock. Photos, that is.

Looking through photos can be a laborious process for me. It isn't that I don't enjoy doing it, you understand. Actually I love it very much, because it brings out old photos that I remember and love for the situation they remind me of and the feelings that go with them. Looking through them can evoke the strangest things, such as my friend from UMIST who had magic powers to levitate a football... (Hi Andy)

Or David doing a Dr Zoidberg impression in a coach, in the middle of leaving our Iaido seminar in the mountains of Ozu (Island of Shikoku, great nation of Japan)...

No. It's the fact that there are about 37000 photos on my PC now (and yes, they are backed up). So going through them is incredibly amusing, but takes a while.

But I've decided that I need to start going through them, organising them and more importantly pick out my favourites to put together into a portfolio. Now I'm not trying to do this to make myself into a photographer, or to make money out of it, but for my own edification and to prove that within those 37000 there are many really stunning shots. You know, at least 5. I may even be stupid enough to look at a website with an improbable name, so stay tuned.

But in the meantime here's some I like from my dig today.

Oh, and here's another daft one. Hi Gaz.

The complexity of the simplest things

Last weekend I had the pleasure of relaxing by a pond for a while. It's a very simple thing for the most part, and I like nothing more than being able to relax by the water and watch the goldfish and koi drifting through the water, watching the reflections off the water ripples. The whole experience is one of relaxation, the most strenuous activity being watching the pond skaters do their simple dance.

But being, well lets face it, a geek means that when faced with even these simple, serene moments I tend to see layers underneath the obvious - complexities that lie under the simple state of things.

So, lets have a look at it. On the face of it all, its just a pond. Water, fish, plants and sunlight.

But there is so much more over, around and underneath the obvious. Let's take a few examples. Here, is a pond, a very lovely pond, with very lovely fish.

Ah, but don't just concentrate on the fish, lovely as they are. Look at what else is there as well. Look , oddly, at the debris for instance, floating away on the top. Look at how much there really is. There are organisms living their whole life there and dying in front of you. There are chemicals reacting, gases bubbling, convection circulating the water, fascinating physics at work.

 

But it's not just overtly interesting situations such as this. You can see the complexity in anything if you look at it with the right mindset. Lets take a wall. A simple brick wall.

 

 

For the moment, it seems like nothing more than just... a wall. But you're not thinking about what this actually is, what is has been and what it will be. Think for a moment about who built it. Not just who built the wall itself, but who made the bricks, what they went through, where the materials came from. Think then about what the wall is now, the physics of it as it sits there holding weight, holding wind or just existing.

 

But one of the other things I love to look at is what the wall meant in peoples lives. How many young couples enjoyed an embrace against it, how many desperate pedestrians used it to shelter from the rain, how many children played football against it?

 

A wall is never just a wall.

 

Let's take something else. Lets take a fountain. Now this fountain is part of an array of fountains that just a spray of water that comes out during the day, and kids enjoy running through them to see if they can do it without getting wet. You know the ones.

 

But stop.

 

And look. Look properly.

 

Take a close look and a true mental snapshot, and you see that it's never really as simple as your eyes might first show you. This is one of those fountains in the process of reducing its flow (click on the pic to enlarge).

 

 

Startling, isn't it? Look at the complexity of that shape. Now you have surface tension, viscosity, inertia, density changes all at work in different ways. Here you have not just a prism, but a prism of such a profoundly complex and imaginative shape that you could spend every waking hour looking at the patterns it produces and still never truly understand what is in that water.

 

And you can't even see the half of it. That water is full of chemicals, microbes, bacteria, grit, dirt. It looks like crystal, but it is a working, evolving environment of its own accord. And think of the number of people who have encountered this fountain, the number of children who danced through it in the sun, the number of days it made complete and hell... even the number of drunks it gave a soaking.

 

Think of all the lives it has touched, all the things it could have seen and encountered. It's working, its design...

 

It goes on. But its sheer complexity is there for you, if you'd like to see. And it doesn't matter what aspect you see, or how it affects you, so long as you see it.

 

So. I'm going to give you a little challenge. Next time you're sat somewhere and you're bored, pick something around you. Spend some time. It can be anything; any damn thing you like.

 

Don't just look at it.

 

SEE it.