Pip-Life

:: Make and Meaning : No Strings Attached

July 15, 2010


Written for the now defunct blog Make and Meaning by MEETMEATMIKES on JANUARY 13, 2010
yarn barn stack

I was just reading the new blog of my hero, Amy Krouse Rosenthal.  She’s posting weekly missions and ideas over there.  Go take a look. This week’s mission involves ATMS.  I’ll leave that to Amy to explain.  One phrase stood out as I read ‘this is meant to be a no strings attached act‘.  Hmm. I love that.  I do.  I’m going to take a leaf out of her book (not literally, of course!)

It seems to me that in this age of monetising and strategizing, it’s become an almost natural step in the process of many people to think ‘how will this benefit me?’, ‘will this get me where I’m going?‘ or ‘can I make money from this?‘ or ‘will this give me a leg-up?‘.  I’m wondering if that’s okay with you?  I mean, it’s not really okay with me.  I like the idea of doing stuff because it seems fun or interesting and then seeing what happens.  I like to keep a roof over my head and food on the table as much as the next person, of course, but I don’t think that every act needs to reflect back onto ourselves in an obvious (or indeed financially beneficial) way.  For me at least, life is not all about leverage, moving forward, aligning and other such management concepts.  I think, in fact that the surprises and the unplanned routes are one of the great things about life.  Concepts are made to be toyed with and not everything has to be tangible, mapped out or obviously beneficial to be good.  That would be boring.
crochet

Speaking of boring, I’m on Twitter, which IS sometimes very boring.  I follow a lot of people and I see a lot of tweets rolling by talking about ‘how to write for your audience‘, ‘how to get 1000 followers’, ‘follow me and link to this to maybe win this’ ‘20 ways to make money from your blog‘, ‘ten things you should blog about’, ‘blah blah blah‘.  Lots of people are obviously writing JUST for their readers. Or doing things JUST to get a certain result. Linking to things JUST because of a commercial arrangement.  Offering  to do THIS if you do THAT.   Aligning themselves with others, clawing their way up to the top of the blog heap, smattering their blogs with all sorts of widgets and plugs and offers – all for some sort of questionable gain.  It’s kind of messy, in a bad way. Why are some of us living our online lives in ways we would never live our real lives?  Can you imagine sidling up to someone and saying “If you tell Joe over there that I’m great, well I’ll tell my friend Wendy that you’re great too.  I’ll also mention you to someone else I know next week.  But only if you recommend me to your pal, Myron”  Huh?!

Surely we should write what we want on our blogs, uncompromised and free of thinly veiled commercial plugs and self-censorship.  Surely we can encourage people to read our blogs just because they LIKE them?  Isn’t that enough?!  Blogs aside,  surely in our real-life lives we can loosen the strings and let things go a little and see what happens, no payback required?  Surely?!
Wouldn’t it be great if we chucked all that strategy in, and got back to the real, kind, basic stuff?  What about just doing nice stuff to see what happens.   Or just doing good things because it’s fun?  Or just doing things because you like it, it’s what you care about, or it’s what you want to do?!
Is life so short that we need to snatch a personal, tangible, often financial advantage from everything we do?  Can we balance the ambitions we have for ourselves with a bit of free love?  Are the strings we often attach to glean a certain outcome really just tying us up in our own control-freak knots?  Can’t we be more like Amy and build little acts of kindness, hope and faith into our day?  Just because it’s nice?  Isn’t all this optimizing stuff a bit manipulative and completely at odds with our New Bohemian lifestyles?  Can’t we do things just for fun?  What do you think, dear Reader?  (Please don’t say ‘Sod off Pollyanna’!!)
xx Pip

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