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On stage at Radio City Music Hall, I hid The Power Broker. All 1,200+ pages of it. I clutched the paperback close, under my academic regalia. On stage, helping deliver diplomas to eager graduating students at SVA, I sat behind the unmatched Robert Caro himself during a not-brief graduation ceremony where he would deliver the final Commencement address. I would ask him to sign the hidden book afterward as we walked offstage.

I knew nothing of what seminal authors did after a Commencement address or how to approach one for an autograph of a book hidden under a robe. Yet I was determined. It was 20 years earlier when I had moved to New York City, and used the subway as a reading device for the book. I wrote once about reading Caro’s book for Field Tested Books, a guide to reading a specific book in a specific place, from Coudal Partners:

I’d travel throughout the city in the molded plastic seats of the 1975 Pullman Standard F train. As I read about the making of our parks and transport systems, I’d pass the same on the subway. Sunset Park, 4th Avenue, 2nd Avenue. Two lives, two stories — one on the page, one out the window. But I never finished it. 465 of its pages are unread. Today, my neighborhood replaces chapters. My block replaces pages. My conversations are my marginalia. The city has taken me over.

As I walked off stage that day after the ceremony at Radio City, I learned Caro had been swiftly escorted backstage and picked up by car. Poof. He had left undetected, working behind the scenes as he does, to continue his work. My copy of the book: still unsigned. 

I was, then, irrationally excited to learn of 99% Invisible’s power broker book club, 100 pages at a time, commencing January. I am in.

After all this time, I admit I still have 465 pages to go, two decades after starting the book. So it’s for the best. Now I can finish it. And, like my relationship to New York City itself, my relationship with the book continues.

I grew up with a mom and dad who played music every chance they got. Most nights after dinner, one parent would turn up the classical music coming from the local station on the kitchen radio, the other retired to a room to read, while the kids each went off to practice their respective instruments. One child on the upstairs piano, one on the downstairs piano, another in the TV room practicing a wind instrument.

They took the kids to piano lessons, French Horn lessons, saxaphone lessons, flute, clarinet, whichever instrument struck our fancy. For some period of years, all kids were required to take two instruments, so mathmatically, our practice sessions took most of the weeknight evening not already taken up by homework. But the house was, interminablely, filled with “music.”

My mother was a whistler and when not actually playing the violin, she was whistling her way around the house, making certain no room was unfilled with sound. Every morning about 5AM my father would rise first and start tea or coffee, making the most of what little solitude one could find in the house. (For years, I also woke at 5AM to “keep my father company,” thinking he was lonely. Not until I had kids in my own house did I realize those early solo hours were not lonely, but intentional — a needed respite from the clamor of everyday life.)

Learning to play music is an long exercise learning to to be kind to yourself. As your fingers stumble to keep up with your eyes and ears, your brain will say unkind things to the rest of you. And when this tangle of body and mind finally makes sense of a measure or a melody, there is peace. Or, more accurately, harmony. And like the parents who so energetically both fill a house with music and seek its quietude, both are needed to make things work. As with music, it takes a lifetime of practice to be kind to yourself. Make space for that practice, and the harmony will emerge.

I like things. Full disclosure: a lot of things. More things, perhaps, than can be reasonably liked by one person. To me, rose-colored glasses have always seemed a curious concept as the world seems shiny enough without them. So I steer clear of conditions that might increase the likelihood of increasing the world’s sparklehood.

Choice then, becomes the primary tool to navigate like, as it gives each thing its priority, assigning an algorithm for liking, for doing, and for being in the world.

You see, for the like-striken, it’s hard to say no. Everyone and everything is interesting.

As I suffer from this condition myself, something a friend said to me several years ago has stayed with me:

“It’s easy to say no if you love something.”

Wrong. Wrong, I thought at the time. If you love something, say yes. Say yes to everything. Yet what did he mean about loving something, I quietly wondered. Did he mean to imply that having a focus for one’s passion also functioned as a tool to help make better choices?

Making a life

In a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe said there are two kinds of writers: putter-inners (like himself) or leaver-outers (like Fitzgerald). These categories, like all categories, are of course oversimplified, but they still illustrate a great point. Just like saying yes, saying no creates your story. It’s what you leave out, not just what you put in, that forms a story, that makes a life.

Creative pursuits hold an inherent need for choice, whether we consider music, art, literature, dance, or design. Every great story is surrounded by white space of some kind. Blank spaces are powerful. The author and designer choose not to lay out a page with text to every edge. Its white space is part of the story it tells. What we choose to leave out creates the story.

Making a story

Consider your favorite novel. You probably don’t recall the most memorable character in the book doing the most mundane of tasks—eating breakfast, getting dressed, using the bathroom, tying shoelaces—day in and day out. The author made an intentional decision to leave these details out. He or she, the leaver-outter in that situation, crafted a story about another arc that didn’t need those ordinaries.

As a reader, you didn’t consider those absences, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. Their presence, like the silent subjects of sentences or the silent strength of typographic scaffolding, creates the supporting structure to guide the main story, the primary choices, that the author, the artist, the creator is making.

“Love and the leaver-outters,” originally written for The Manual.

The same is true in layouts in design. In pauses between crescendos in music. In absences in architectural archways. In blanks in the maps of oceans. Rather than fill the spaces with unnecessary distractions, their creators have chosen to leave these areas blank. And the blanks speak for both what is and what is not there.

Choice-makers are doers. And doers seem to also be leaver-outers.
I’ve always paid attention to and wondered at the leaver-outers of the world, so I do often come back to that phrase:

“It’s easy to say no if you love something.”

No matter what it is—be it a business, a person, a piece of art, a career, a song, a family, a way of life, or a pursuit of any kind—it’s easy to say no to all the other choices that will present themselves if you truly love something.

Finding that thing is the hardest part. But that’s another lesson.

I think a lot about what I would say to the younger version of myself if I met her again, if I met her through the still moments of all the motion of youth — when she was sitting at the piano, or if I saw her alone on the playground, or if I watched her read, voice quivering, her short stories in front of the class.

If I met the younger version of myself, we’d take a walk — the same walk I take every day — so I could explain to young me that routine and tradition are paramount. You have to choose a category header, but it’s only as permanent as you need it to be. You have to choose a theme song and stay with it. Decide. If only for an hour or a day or a week.

See also:
One equals one

If I met me, but younger, we’d talk about the value of one thing. You have to choose one thing to do for yourself every day. No matter what practice you choose — how fulfilling or meaningful — it will sometimes overwhelm you. Choose something for yourself every day. Do it repeatedly and without fail. If you do something for yourself every day, no matter how many standoffs or negotiations or letdowns you face throughout the day, no one can take that away from you.

If I met younger me, we would sit quietly and listen to music. We might put instruments we did not know how to play in our laps. “Play,” I would encourage. Younger me would stare straight ahead uncomfortably. “No one knows what they’re doing,” I would continue. “Being expert means starting. Knowing is playing your first note.” We would scratch out notes on new instruments together.

See also:
On love

If I met me, but many years before, we’d talk about love and time. Love will not be polite. It does not wait for opportune moments to approach you. It knows not your life plans or schedule or current or future intentions. It will not wait for you to be ready. There is, in this way, no time for it. If you wait for it, then, it will not come. As love — for a person, a profession, a practice, a city — comes to you. It crosses your path and is only yours to accept. It is up to you to open your hands and heart.

I used to think life was an intricate series of spreadsheets and grids, weights and balances, promotions and boardroom standoffs. As grew older I realized life is less grid and more raw data, less stop sign and more yield, less urban and more sprawl. Life passes by in seasons, not days, and best we can do is choose our category headers, theme songs, and instruments to make the most of every day. With that, we can see the world as we move through it.

Because there is stillness in motion.

First written for AIGA Centennial Voices series, September 2014.

In 1979, I sucked up a crucifix. Schlawapffk is the sound it makes, FYI, when the special gift of a First Communion necklace disappears into the head of a 1970 Electrolux Deluxe Automatic 1205 vacuum.

It was an unassuming piece of jewelry, the kind that decorates not dictates Catholicism. Its delicate 14-karat gold choker nearly invisible, letting the cross pendant do its thing.

But then it happened. In a moment of what I would like to remember as devout responsibility, but was in fact a young me rocking out to a boombox while vacuuming my pink shag bedroom carpet, I knocked it off the dresser. And in one fell swish of wand and nozzle, all was lost.

It took me years to get up the courage to tell my parents about that necklace. What would they think of me if they knew? Just like it took me years to tell them that our hamster didn’t just die a natural death, but fell to her death one morning when I was trying to give her a hug before school. Et cetera.

What if they found out I wasn’t perfect? What if they knew I’d lost myself in music so deeply that I got carried away? If they knew I’d loved an animal so immensely that I wanted to be close to her. What then?

And henceforth imperfect aversion began. Better if I kept these things, and all, to myself.

Imperfection protection is a training regimen that requires constant attention. Let your guard down (fall in love, get lost, be in awe, get distracted) and your guard is down, susceptible to attack. Even after years of practice, pruning, trimming, training, the armor is vulnerable. The typos slip through. The hem shows. The human is.

More years and many regimens later, I can confidently say I’ve lived the most imperfect year on record. 2013 was a year of loss and tragedy. But it was also a year of honesty. Of saying what is. And of owning up to not being perfect.

Of course, much sooner than 2013, my family learned of the necklace, the hamster. What came of it wasn’t nearly what I had expected, but instead support and a profound connection.

Like the things we intend to be, but never are quite that, the things we do, but never fall quite right, these systems are ever in motion. And the key is not to focus on what is, but to be a participant in the exploration of change. The what that is in motion. To be present through transformation.

Imperfection is a constant. Look and listen for it, as it usually means you’re getting close to perfect.

This thought was first published by The Pastry Box Project

It was a glass box. A house in deep woods. It was remote. It was designerly on the interior, animaled on the exterior. It was mine—for a summer. It was two summers ago, and it was intended for critical project studies. “I’m spending the summer upstate,” I would say, as some New Yorkers do. “To write. To play music.” “Where, again?” they would repeat, not being familiar with this particular breed of remote. They’d tick off train stations as I shook my head. No, this was not those. No, this was a remote summer alone from the city, designed to “Make Projects.”

And off I went, trailing instruments and sewing devices and writing material and dog. Yet sixty days later, I was back in the city. And just like that, it was over.

The remote remote

What people who make things know is that ideas fold you in a remote space–inside a cabin, at a writer’s corral, inside your head, at a coffee shop–then ideas press you back out into the world, rubbing your eyes on your behalf. To have an idea is, at some point, to retreat into quietude. With you is the material of the world, the people, their exchanges, the sound of footsteps, the thing people do when they get together, their life sounds. You fold those into your pocket as you fold yourself into your space. And the making begins.

The road leading to the summer house was windy, punctuated with weathered signs. “National Scenic Bypass,” you could make out, barely, on the days it wasn’t raining. The signs, proud proclamations once, were threadbare from weather, as this particular bypass of beautiful that I had chosen to live on was cursed with weather. The deep-mountain woods kind.

Expansive river views, long motorcycle roads, sunsets and rises, farmers’ markets, endless woods—these quickly lose their charm when it rains. Particularly for weeks at a time. Satellite internet, too, loses its certain magical property once rain and storms come. And power goes down. So many days, I would sit, “making projects,” with neither power nor internet.

Making projects

Within a week, the project became just surviving. “Light!” That was a project. “Survived my first tornado…” “Rattlesnake!” These “challenges,” though, as challenging as they were, may not have stood between my creative project-making so distinctly if I had been listening.

Rebecca Solnit:

To hear is to let the sound wander all the way through the labyrinth of your ear; to listen is to travel the other way to meet it. It’s not passive but active, this listening. It’s as though you retell each story, translate it into the language particular to you, fit it into your cosmology so you can understand and respond, and thereby it becomes part of you. The word empathy originally meant feeling into, and to empathize is to reach out to meet the data that comes through the labyrinths of the senses. To enter into, we say, as though another person’s life was also a place you could travel to.”

Rather than listening to the city, I left it. I didn’t meet the urban data halfway, making it part of me, but packed it up and moved its shells upstate. As it turns out, my material is urban. It’s loud, and it’s messy. It has feet and wheels and voices and opinions. It’s anti-pastoral. And without it, I have nothing to create against.

Ideas need material to draw upon first, and a place to draw them out second. And to take hold, ideas, like people, need a home.

This thought was first published by The Pastry Box Project

Frank Chimero and I came together over a shared commitment to jazz. But not only exchanges of music. We emulated the form. He would write a blog post. I would respond. I would improvise one of his hunches. He would iterate one of my posts. A call-and-response approach to a developing friendship.

We wrote like this alongside one another without ever meeting or speaking directly – much like many of us: we never meet the people we admire from afar. We read their stories. We watch their videos. We inspect their work. We make up the in-between parts. We improvise. Frank’s stories became my stories, our stories. This book is, partly, about making things out of stories, and using them to help us live well.

Without warning one day, a mail from Frank appeared in my inbox, introducing himself:

You know what I love about jazz and improvisation? It’s all process. 100%. The essence of it is the process, every time is different, and to truly partake in it, you have to visit a place to see it in progress. Every jazz club or improv comedy theater is a temple to the process of production. It’s a factory, and the art is the assembly, not the product. Jazz is more verb than noun. And in a world riddled with a feeling of inertia, I want to !nd a verb and hold on to it for dear life.

See also:
The book started, in part, as a terrific talk, “The Shape of Design” at the Build Conference.

My conversations with Frank began to draw a line between the adjacent systems in the world and our own design process. Jazz. Tools. Art. Pizza. Announce a noun, and Frank helps trace its mutable shape to something more active. A verb! The adjacent process.

Deciphering and designing these systems is hard work. Done well, and one gets there “the long, hard, stupid way,” as Frank frames it in the pages to come, nodding to the gap between efficiency and the effort that compels us to make things with pride and compassion. Our process will vary, but steeling ourselves to persist is what Frank gives us the tools to do.

See also:
“Do things the long, hard, stupid way.”

In that way, this book is not unlike a more ubiquitous tool and platform, the U.S. Interstate Highway System. Today, we take it for granted, mostly, but its numbering system at one point had to be designed. At a time when telephone poles lined dirt trails, Bureau of Public Roads employee Edwin W. James and committee were asked to come up with a more expandable system as roads were growing in the 1920s. They designed what we know today as the Interstate Numbering System. Prior to that, people relied on color codes for direction. Telephone poles ringed with color bands lined highways, corresponding to individual dirt trails across the country. As trails expanded, telephone poles became painted from the ground up, sometimes fifteen feet high, so trying to distinguish among colors became dangerous.

See also:
The Shape of Design is a book by Frank Chimero about the Whys of Design.

E. W. James changed that. He decided that motorists would be able to figure out where they were at any time given the intersection of any two highways. North/south highways would be numbered: with odd numbers; east/west with even numbers; and numbers would increase as you go east and north. The Interstate Numbering System was designed for expansion, anticipating the future contributions of people, cities, unexpectedness. It’s a tool. It’s a platform. And it’s still not done nearly 100 years later.

See also:
Stunning shapes of design in the Shape of Design shop.

If you wish to use this book as a tool, by all means, put it down at any time. Leave the road. You will find your way back as the intersection of two points will serve as your guide. Then wander back. This is the point of any road or system after all: to take you to a destination in a time in need. Or, consider the book as a platform and musical score: respond to a passage, to a chapter. Consider Frank’s call your opportunity to respond, and each sentence your opportunity to create. That is the reason they were written.

I’m honored to say that since that original mail, there have been many Frank mails in my inbox. Later:

I see a platform and it tells me two things: first, other people’s contributions are important. Second, the world is not done. Wow. If I want to believe anything, it’s that.

Start improvising.

The following is only an excerpt from The Shape of Design, a book by Frank Chimero about the Whys of design, published here with permission. It was delightful to be part of the shaping and will be responding to it for years to come. Hurry off immediately to read it in its entirety, bring some into your home, or just follow along.