I love this speak and would read it again and again.
Simple words, delighting view, very true.
1.YOU
CAN ONLY WORK FOR PEOPLE THAT YOU LIKE.This is a curious rule and it
took me a long time to learn because in fact at the beginning
of my practice I felt the opposite. Professionalism required
that you didn’t particularly like the people that you worked
for or at least maintained an arms length relationship to
them, which meant that I never had lunch with a client or saw
them socially. Then some years ago I realised that the
opposite was true. I discovered that all the work I had done that
was meaningful and significant came out of an affectionate
relationship with a client. And I am not talking about
professionalism; I am talking about affection. I am talking
about a client and you sharing some common ground. That in
fact your view of life is someway congruent with the client,
otherwise it is a bitter and hopeless struggle.
2. IF
YOU HAVE A CHOICE NEVER HAVE A JOB.One night I was sitting in my car
outside Columbia University where my wife Shirley was studying
Anthropology. While I was waiting I was listening to the
radio and heard an interviewer ask ‘Now that you have reached
75 have you any advice for our audience about how to prepare
for your old age?’ An irritated voice said ‘Why is everyone
asking me about old age these days?’ I recognised the voice as
John Cage. I am sure that many of you know who he was – the
composer and philosopher who influenced people like Jasper
Johns and Merce Cunningham as well as the music world in
general. I knew him slightly and admired his contribution to our times.
‘You know, I do know how to prepare for old age’ he said.
‘Never have a job, because if you have a job someday someone will
take it away from you and then you will be unprepared for your
old age. For me, it has always been the same every since the
age of 12. I wake up in the morning and I try to figure out
how am I going to put bread on the table today? It is the same
at 75, I wake up every morning and I think how am I going to
put bread on the table today? I am exceedingly well prepared
for my old age’ he said.
3. SOME PEOPLE ARE TOXIC AVOID
THEM.This is a subtext of number one. There was in the
sixties a man named Fritz Perls who was a gestalt therapist.
Gestalt therapy derives from art history, it proposes you must
understand the ‘whole’ before you can understand the details.
What you have to look at is the entire culture, the entire
family and community and so on. Perls proposed that in all
relationships people could be either toxic or nourishing
towards one another. It is not necessarily true that the same
person will be toxic or nourishing in every relationship, but
the combination of any two people in a relationship produces toxic
or nourishing consequences. And the important thing that I can tell
you is that there is a test to determine whether someone is
toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is
the test: You have spent some time with this person, either
you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It
doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you
observe whether you are more energised or less energised.
Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you
are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more
energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I
suggest that you use it for the rest of your life.
4.
PROFESSIONALISM IS NOT ENOUGH or THE GOOD IS THE ENEMY OF THE
GREAT.Early in my career I wanted to be professional, that was
my complete aspiration in my early life because professionals
seemed to know everything – not to mention they got paid for it. Later
I discovered after working for a while that professionalism
itself was a limitation. After all, what professionalism means
in most cases is diminishing risks. So if you want to get
your car fixed you go to a mechanic who knows how to deal with
transmission problems in the same way each time. I suppose if
you needed brain surgery you wouldn’t want the doctor to fool
around and invent a new way of connecting your nerve endings.
Please do it in the way that has worked in the past.Unfortunately in
our field, in the so-called creative – I hate that word
because it is misused so often. I also hate the fact that it
is used as a noun. Can you imagine calling someone a creative? Anyhow,
when you are doing something in a recurring way to diminish
risk or doing it in the same way as you have done it before,
it is clear why professionalism is not enough. After all, what
is required in our field, more than anything else, is the
continuous transgression. Professionalism does not allow for
that because transgression has to encompass the possibility of
failure and if you are professional your instinct is not to fail,
it is to repeat success. So professionalism as a lifetime
aspiration is a limited goal.
5. LESS IS NOT
NECESSARILY MORE.Being a child of modernism I have heard this
mantra all my life. Less is more. One morning upon awakening I
realised that it was total nonsense, it is an absurd proposition and
also fairly meaningless. But it sounds great because it contains
within it a paradox that is resistant to understanding. But
it simply does not obtain when you think about the visual of
the history of the world. If you look at a Persian rug, you
cannot say that less is more because you realise that every
part of that rug, every change of colour, every shift in form
is absolutely essential for its aesthetic success. You cannot
prove to me that a solid blue rug is in any way superior. That
also goes for the work of Gaudi, Persian miniatures, art nouveau and
everything else. However, I have an alternative to the
proposition that I believe is more appropriate. ‘Just enough
is more.’
6. STYLE IS NOT TO BE TRUSTED.I think this
idea first occurred to me when I was looking at a marvellous
etching of a bull by Picasso. It was an illustration for a
story by Balzac called The Hidden Masterpiece. I am sure that
you all know it. It is a bull that is expressed in 12
different styles going from very naturalistic version of a bull to an
absolutely reductive single line abstraction and everything else
along the way. What is clear just from looking at this single
print is that style is irrelevant. In every one of these
cases, from extreme abstraction to acute naturalism they are
extraordinary regardless of the style. It’s absurd to be loyal
to a style. It does not deserve your loyalty. I must say that
for old design professionals it is a problem because the
field is driven by economic consideration more than anything else.
Style change is usually linked to economic factors, as all of you
know who have read Marx. Also fatigue occurs when people see
too much of the same thing too often. So every ten years or so
there is a stylistic shift and things are made to look
different. Typefaces go in and out of style and the visual
system shifts a little bit. If you are around for a long time
as a designer, you have an essential problem of what to do. I
mean, after all, you have developed a vocabulary, a form that
is your own. It is one of the ways that you distinguish yourself from
your peers, and establish your identity in the field. How you
maintain your own belief system and preferences becomes a real
balancing act. The question of whether you pursue change or
whether you maintain your own distinct form becomes difficult.
We have all seen the work of illustrious practitioners that
suddenly look old-fashioned or, more precisely, belonging to
another moment in time. And there are sad stories such as the one
about Cassandre, arguably the greatest graphic designer of the
twentieth century, who couldn’t make a living at the end of
his life and committed suicide.But the point is that anybody
who is in this for the long haul has to decide how to respond
to change in the zeitgeist. What is it that people now expect
that they formerly didn’t want? And how to respond to that
desire in a way that doesn’t change your sense of integrity
and purpose.
7. HOW YOU LIVE CHANGES YOUR BRAIN.The
brain is the most responsive organ of the body. Actually it is
the organ that is most susceptible to change and regeneration
of all the organs in the body. I have a friend named Gerald
Edelman who was a great scholar of brain studies and he says
that the analogy of the brain to a computer is pathetic. The brain is
actually more like an overgrown garden that is constantly
growing and throwing off seeds, regenerating and so on. And he
believes that the brain is susceptible, in a way that we are
not fully conscious of, to almost every experience of our life
and every encounter we have. I was fascinated by a story in a
newspaper a few years ago about the search for perfect pitch.
A group of scientists decided that they were going to find
out why certain people have perfect pitch. You know certain
people hear a note precisely and are able to replicate it at exactly
the right pitch. Some people have relevant pitch; perfect pitch
is rare even among musicians. The scientists discovered – I
don’t know how – that among people with perfect pitch the
brain was different. Certain lobes of the brain had undergone
some change or deformation that was always present with those
who had perfect pitch. This was interesting enough in itself.
But then they discovered something even more fascinating. If
you took a bunch of kids and taught them to play the violin at the
age of 4 or 5 after a couple of years some of them developed
perfect pitch, and in all of those cases their brain structure
had changed. Well what could that mean for the rest of us? We
tend to believe that the mind affects the body and the body
affects the mind, although we do not generally believe that
everything we do affects the brain. I am convinced that if
someone was to yell at me from across the street my brain
could be affected and my life might changed. That is why your
mother always said, ‘Don’t hang out with those bad kids.’ Mama
was right. Thought changes our life and our behaviour. I also believe
that drawing works in the same way. I am a great advocate of
drawing, not in order to become an illustrator, but because I
believe drawing changes the brain in the same way as the
search to create the right note changes the brain of a
violinist. Drawing also makes you attentive. It makes you pay
attention to what you are looking at, which is not so easy.
8.DOUBT
IS BETTER THAN CERTAINTY.Everyone always talks about confidence
in believing what you do. I remember once going to a class in yoga
where the teacher said that, spirituality speaking, if you
believed that you had achieved enlightenment you have merely
arrived at your limitation. I think that is also true in a
practical sense. Deeply held beliefs of any kind prevent you
from being open to experience, which is why I find all firmly
held ideological positions questionable. It makes me nervous
when someone believes too deeply or too much. I think that
being sceptical and questioning all deeply held beliefs is essential.
Of course we must know the difference between scepticism and
cynicism because cynicism is as much a restriction of one’s
openness to the world as passionate belief is. They are sort
of twins. And then in a very real way, solving any problem is
more important than being right. There is a significant sense
of self-righteousness in both the art and design world.
Perhaps it begins at school. Art school often begins with the
Ayn Rand model of the single personality resisting the ideas
of the surrounding culture. The theory of the avant garde is that
as an individual you can transform the world, which is true up to a
point. One of the signs of a damaged ego is absolute
certainty.Schools encourage the idea of not compromising and defending
your work at all costs. Well, the issue at work is usually all
about the nature of compromise. You just have to know what to
compromise. Blind pursuit of your own ends which excludes the
possibility that others may be right does not allow for the
fact that in design we are always dealing with a triad – the
client, the audience and you.Ideally, making everyone win through acts
of accommodation is desirable. But self-righteousness is often
the enemy. Self-righteousness and narcissism generally come
out of some sort of childhood trauma, which we do not have to
go into. It is a consistently difficult thing in human affairs.
Some years ago I read a most remarkable thing about love, that also
applies to the nature of co-existing with others. It was a
quotation from Iris Murdoch in her obituary. It read ‘ Love is
the extremely difficult realisation that something other than
oneself is real.’ Isn’t that fantastic! The best insight on
the subject of love that one can imagine.
9.
ON AGING.Last year someone gave me a charming book by Roger
Rosenblatt called ‘Ageing Gracefully’ I got it on my birthday.
I did not appreciate the title at the time but it contains a
series of rules for ageing gracefully. The first rule is the
best. Rule number one is that ‘it doesn’t matter.’ ‘It doesn’t
matter that what you think. Follow this rule and it will add
decades to your life. It does not matter if you are late or
early, if you are here or there, if you said it or didn’t say
it, if you are clever or if you were stupid. If you were having
a bad hair day or a no hair day or if your boss looks at you cockeyed
or your boyfriend or girlfriend looks at you cockeyed, if you
are cockeyed. If you don’t get that promotion or prize or
house or if you do – it doesn’t matter.’ Wisdom at last. Then I
heard a marvellous joke that seemed related to rule number
10. A butcher was opening his market one morning and as he did
a rabbit popped his head through the door. The butcher was
surprised when the rabbit inquired ‘Got any cabbage?’ The
butcher said ‘This is a meat market – we sell meat, not
vegetables.’ The rabbit hopped off. The next day the butcher
is opening the shop and sure enough the rabbit pops his head
round and says ‘You got any cabbage?’ The butcher now
irritated says ‘Listen you little rodent I told you yesterday
we sell meat, we do not sell vegetables and the next time you
come here I am going to grab you by the throat and nail those floppy
ears to the floor.’ The rabbit disappeared hastily and nothing
happened for a week. Then one morning the rabbit popped his head
around the corner and said ‘Got any nails?’ The butcher said
‘No.’ The rabbit said ‘Ok. Got any cabbage?’
10.TELL
THE TRUTH.The rabbit joke is relevant because it occurred to
me that looking for a cabbage in a butcher’s shop might be
like looking for ethics in the design field. It may not be the
most obvious place to find either. It’s interesting to observe
that in the new AIGA’s code of ethics there is a significant amount
of useful information about appropriate behaviour towards
clients and other designers, but not a word about a designer’s
relationship to the public. We expect a butcher to sell us
eatable meat and that he doesn’t misrepresent his wares. I
remember reading that during the Stalin years in Russia that
everything labelled veal was actually chicken. I can’t imagine
what everything labelled chicken was. We can accept certain
kinds of misrepresentation, such as fudging about the amount
of fat in his hamburger but once a butcher knowingly sells us
spoiled meat we go elsewhere. As a designer, do we have less
responsibility to our public than a butcher? Everyone
interested in licensing our field might note that the reason
licensing has been invented is to protect the public not
designers or clients. ‘Do no harm’ is an admonition to doctors
concerning their relationship to their patients, not to their
fellow practitioners or the drug companies. If we were
licensed, telling the truth might become more central to what we do._____Part of AIGA Talk in LondonNovember 22, 2001
一步一个脚印。
英雄也是要往回看的。回头，每个脚印都是一个深刻的故事。
和母亲的每次电话，如果不极力忍住，就会像地震或者火山的爆发，我要几天的时间才能缓和下来。我忍不住会想，我妈妈是不是其实很恨我。很爱我，但是很恨我。不然，会什么她会对我说，那你就现在多挣一些钱给自己养老吧，既然你会孤苦伶仃地过你这辈子。
其实，没有任何导火线的啊，我只是稍稍抱怨了一下最近的工作挺多的。
她不止说这样的话，还说了很多话，其它的话。我想如果我有一个孩子，我不会把这些话语讲给他/她听的。
昨天晚上，很想和一个女朋友聊天。白天和她谈了关于冥想的练习。静坐，冥想，深入到自己思想里面潜力无限的地方。和她约好，晚上继续谈。所以给自己斟酒一小杯，点上一支香，坐好，拨通电话。
她甜蜜地笑着，说，我男朋友马上过来，我保证明天和你通话。哦，他现在到了。
我希望她快乐。我知道他们恋爱了。她爱他，但是又觉得没有未来。所以收了线，在网上看了些关于奥巴马的报道。
然后上床，刚躺下，又坐起来。
感受到心里面有很多负面的情绪和能量。于是盘腿坐起来，试着打坐。有一段时间可以集中精力，但是很快失败了。
T对我说，对这个环境感觉不快乐，就赶快离开。如果明天不会变好，一个月后也不会变好的。
我已经逃离了我在中国的家，但是电话线还在。我的朋友会轻轻说，你真不孝。
今天早上，读到一个朋友的信。他很开心我规规矩矩写中文给他。讲他昨天也和妈妈吵架了。
我想这个架和那个架是不一样的。对我而言，我的亲情是把双刃刀。
真希望他可以请我吃火锅。只是，这么多年了，吃火锅不能吃很辣了。也许他也是。
ok，这是博客的好处，发发牢骚，然后过我的日子。
I am the emotional creature
-Eve Ensler
I love
being a girl,
I can feel
what you are feeling
as you’re
feeling inside the feeling before.
I am an
emotional creature.
Things do
not come to me as intellectual theories
or
hard-pressed ideas.
They pulse
through my organs and legs and burn up my ears.
Oh, I know
when your girlfriend is really pissed off,
even though
she appears to give you what you want.
I know when
a storm is coming,
I can feel
the invisible stirrings in the air.
I can tell
you he won’t call back.
It’s a vibe
I share.
I am an
emotional creature.
I love that
I do not take things lightly.
Everything
is intense to me,
the way I
walk in the street,
the way my
mum wakes me up,
the way
it’s unbearable when I lose,
the way I
hear bad news.
I am an
emotional creature.
I am
connected to everything and every one.
I was born
like that.
Don’t you
say all negative that it’s only only a teenage thing,
Or it’s
only because I’m a girl.
These
feelings make me better.
They make
me present.
They make
me ready.
They make
me strong.
I am an
emotional creature.
There is a
particular way of knowing,
It’s like
the older women somehow forgot.
I rejoice
that it’s still in my body.
Oh, I know
when the coconut is about to fall.
I know we
have pushed the earth too far.
I know my
father isn’t coming back,
and that no
one is prepared for the fire.
I know that
lipstick means more than show,
and boys
are super insecure,
and
so-called terrorists are made, not born.
I know that
one kiss could take away all my decision making ability.
And you
know what? Sometimes it should.
This is not
extreme.
It’s a girl
thing,
What we
would all be if the big door inside us flew open.
Don’t tell
me not to cry, to calm it down,
not be so
extreme, to be reasonable.
I am an
emotional creature.
It’s how
the earth got made, how the wind continues to pollinate.
You don’t
tell the Atlantic Ocean to behave.
I am an
emotional creature.
Why would
you want to shut me down or turn me off?
I am your
remaining memory.
I can take
you back.
Nothing has
been diluted.
Nothing’s
leaked out.
I love,
hear me, I love
That I can
feel the feelings inside you,
even they
stop my life,
even if
they break my heart,
even if
they take me off track,
they make
me responsible.
I am an
emotional,
I am an
emotional, incondotional, devotional creature.
And I love,
hear me,
I love love
love being a girl.
如果就这样度过整个冬天，那么在开春的时候，所有的努力都挣够了一个假期。哪怕在开春的时候，是另一个辛苦历程的开始。
每天要工作很久。深夜回家时连门上同屋留的字条也看不见了，错过了很多电话，朋友轻声责备我，忘了给家里电话，还有一些琐碎的必要的小事堆积起来……今天早上硬是抽了一些时间给一个年轻的已婚的朋友回了信，因为她刚刚发现了一些被丈夫藏起来的信件……然后疲倦地来到工作室。咖啡，浓茶。集中不了的精神，一些想哭的情绪……
我想起他给我的一句话，他说在最近一段时间特别特别想我，因为他工作太忙了，没有任何社会交际了，他的所有工作以外的情感思维，就统统投到我的身上了。
我很感激他这样讲。也许我曾经期待过他能告诉我更加浪漫的话语。但是，事实是，这样的话让我更加地感动，更加让我觉得和他很近。
我们曾经很短暂地在一起过。很短暂。短暂地都不敢相信对彼此的思念到现在还那么浓烈。
所以，我应该感谢我的上帝，我的那个若有若无的保护天使吧 – Don’t cry, because it is over; Smile, because it’s happened.
我可能是一个足够槽糕的人了。
但是我有曾经爱过我的人，正在爱我的人，将会遇见的人。他们都是好人。他们都在为了自己的理想或者爱在努力。他们给我能量。
虽然我在这个非常非常hard woking的时代，虽然我的工作以外的所有情感和思维，正在孤独地投入到不切实际的对浪漫的幻想中。
谢谢你，我的上帝，让我在开始工作前，有这些凡人的片刻，察觉到一些去爱去祝福的能量。
1, Hard working.
2, become more patient.
3, always being appreciate for having friends，and knowing good people.
4, be liked by nice people.
5, want to be a chinese daughter.
有两个是在舞蹈课上认识的，有一个是在一个关于交流的课上认识的，还有一个是在旅途中认识的。
我们都没有想到，可以彼此说那么多真实的话语。非常真实。很多话语，我们都可以选择不要提及。
这一个8月份，夏日。德国的天空是白色的，多云的，有时候会是闷热的。我还从来没有从一个男孩那里，得到像从她们那里得到的那么多赞赏和钦佩。
她们真的是那么好的女人们，美丽，性感，自立，有抱负，渴望着真实又强烈的爱。
有的时候，我会有一些软弱的，被愚蠢肤浅的引诱吸引的时候。我会感觉到我不能自拔的倾向，在这些时候，我特别渴望能够回到她们中间。
她们都是非常好的女人。你若敢喝她们一口，就不要怕烈，也不要怕醉。
我们都是非常好的女人们。
