Author: hamishmacdonald

My sketchbook is so small — which I like, but some things make no sense in just four panels.

Today is Mom and Dad’s anniversary, so I felt like Mom and I should do something — just so she’s not on her own. We’re going to the Exhibition, the local end-of-summer fun fair. I don’t want to see the farm animals and she doesn’t want to go on the rides, yet I’m looking forward to it anyway!

A reckoning of intellect and imagination is coming: Technology has a capacity to displace the centre where locate ourselves, and in my own life as a creative person I find that dangerous. If the unexamined life is not worth living, the avoided one is doubly so.

I hope to figure this out for myself, because I’m not finding the answers I need out in the world — and perhaps that isn’t possible.

“Nice” gets a bad rap. Perhaps the harshest thing I’ve heard said about it is “If you can’t be interesting, be nice.”

But that’s a false dichotomy — a close neighbour to the awful, awful notion that you need to be a tortured soul to be creative.

I saw the best refutation of that the other night when Craig and I watched the brilliant Hannah Gadsby: Nanette — a stand-up comedy routine that suddenly transforms mid-way into a transformative, game-changing piece of non-fiction theatre.

Back to nice: Is there any quality the world is missing right now more than nice? Niceness doesn’t even require empathy; it just demands that you get over yourself enough to think for a second about the person in front of you.

Why? Just because! Because that’s the right thing to do — and if we all made the effort to do it, the world would be a much better, more functional place.

So thank you, Mom, for the gift of nice that you embedded into my personality — even if there are lapses in my considerateness like this one. I think so many of the advantages I’ve enjoyed in life are simply because I have a conscience about other people.

There are also many things I like about you that are just intrinsically you, and aren’t about me!

I decided that, for the month of August as a trial/sprint, I’m going to use my dad’s phone, to try to break that twitchy habit of filling every spare moment with a glance at the iPhone.

Yes, it’s nice to have access to all that inspiration and input, but it’s coming now at the complete cost of my inner life — I just don’t have one anymore, and for me as a creative person that’s not acceptable.

Gosh, it was a month ago today that Dad died.