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Whenever I'm about to reinvent myself in a significant way, I find myself reading a lot of Emerson.  Today I came across something he'd written that I'd not heard before, but I found it both provocative and essential:

     “I find that the Americans have no passions, they have appetites.”

        -- Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Being neither American nor inclined to want to be beaten with a large stick ~grins~, I'll simply say that this observation spoke to me personally.  It identifies one of my greatest internal conflicts: stickiness.

I have always considered myself to be a very passionate person.  Having said that, this nasty little poke with a stick from Emerson's 1800's brand of wisdom has me asking myself if I have the right to claim this label at all.  I do feel things fiercely and deeply, and that is wonderful fuel spurring me on when I go running headlong into the next thing that calls.  But there's the rub: so many things do call, and my ability/desire to stick with them is often my greatest challenge.

This is a problem if you look at it in almost any light: makes it tough to stay put, stick to a career, be happy with one person, or to ever really feel full or know the true sense of the word "enough".  Some people might call it OCPD, or ADD, or simply fickle or even selfish and irresponsible.  And yet I've managed to be successful in spite of it.  While I do look back and feel at times a sense of grief over recognizing this as a deficit in the traditional sense of a person's life, I am also deeply grateful for living in the place and time I do.  In the niche that I've managed to carve for myself it's served me well.  As a journalist, being constantly propelled by "the chase" is a delicious habit.  It keeps me hungry, curious, always running after the next story to share.  As an artist, it keeps me buoyant and colourful and constantly inspired.  God bless the internet and Second Life, for those two mediums have provided the most provocative and fertile playground for the two most intrinsic parts of my inner life as a breadwinner and insatiable consumer.

Where this is a challenge is in personal relationships.  There are people that I connect with in a very rich and heartfelt way, and yet no matter how much I enjoy their company, I rarely seek it.  I do tend to hold people at arm's length.  Even my closest friends and family know what a gigantic pain in the ass I can be when it comes to simple, normal things.  I hate talking on the phone.  I don't do well with a lot of small talk, and within minutes of reconnecting I am often restless and uncomfortable again.  A pretty boring, run-of-the-mill personality disorder I'm sure, but an inconvenient one when you really do care a great deal about the people that you have so much trouble wanting to connect with in a deeper way.

There are exceptions.  It's at odds with my bleeding heart, because at my core I remain a better world scout and always will be.  My partner Baron is also an anomaly in many ways, perhaps because he's so much like me and doesn't question or seem critical of the quirks.  But Emerson's observation does have me scratching my head and asking myself how much I may want or need to confront this particular issue if I really want to move forward in my life.

Do I really have passion, or merely appetites?  Constant, glorious, intense appetites, but appetites nonetheless.  It's not that I haven't found my niche.  In fact, I've found it again and again.  It's that in spite of the thrill of the chase, and often getting what I want, I still feel quite empty at the end of the day.

I know because of the few anomalies that do exist in my life that there is a great reward attached to cultivating a more mature and intimate relationship with the people and opportunities in my life, and in my gut I know that I do want to know what it feels like to say "this is enough" and finally mean it.

In those instances I've allowed myself to let it in, what I am gifted with is richer, deeper, simpler and more enduring happiness and peace of mind.

So, tonight I'll thank Emerson for poking me with a stick, and hope that I'll be wise enough to really listen and finally choose it for myself.

2007 Obsidian Baby Grand Piano

One of the reasons that I appreciate and respect Baron Grayson so much as a partner is that he doesn't settle.  He's a perfectionist, and when he has a vision of how something should be, he doesn't settle for anything less than perfect.

Working with him is a fantastic brain gym.  I watch him and am both inspired and frustrated simulataneously, because his capacity for conjuring up fantastical spaces in a heartbeat is unparalelled.  Watching him makes me want to push myself harder, think smarter, work more efficiently.

When I first met him I had barely months before created an accidental business, making virtual pianos originally to satisfy a personal need as a composer to have my favourite vice close at hand in my digital digs.  WIthin months I had 76 shops, crafting a presence at virtually every major telehub back in the day that there was no point-to-point porting.  It was manic.  I spent most of my time running from site to site, trying to make sure that rent was paid, that products were up-to-date, and that my merchandising fit the unique parameters of each space.  This is the stuff that nervous breakdowns are made of, spreading yourself too thin as a one-woman show, and trying to find the balance between creating and maintaining.

Baron was my customer.  He crashed his airship in front of one of my shops and found my piano by accident, and bought it.  When the transaction record came through, I realized it was old product, and sent along an updated version with a quick note of apology.  Being the hermits that we both are, it's a wonder that we bothered to chat at all, but we did, and that evening was life-changing in ways too numerous to spell out in a blog.

2005 Christmas Piano

So, Mr. Grayson became my muse.  He challenged me to think in different ways, to imagine that I'd created an image strong enough and widely-known enough that I could stand in a single place and sell my wares without having to depend on the manic nature of sheer volume.  He opened up a Christmas shop and encouraged me to do a piano for the season and place it there, and while it scared the hell out of me to take a leap of faith that included winding down the small hub empire that had been feeding my business for so long, I did, and it worked brilliantly.

Credit where credit is due: I didn't know him at all when I met him, but it didn't take long to recognize that he was a very bright, inspired man who had already crafted a much larger and more successful presence of his own.  The traffic in his shop allowed me to cultivate a new market, and the very act of "re-imagining" the piano that I had been selling was both cathartic and wise.  I created the first Christmas piano again, and again, and again (ocpd being a shared gift and affliction ~grins~) but finally decided it was "good enough" (words that are generally unfamiliar in our domain) and set it out.  That began a metamorphisis in both the way that I did business, and in the way I approached creating my products.

Today, Serendipity Studios exists on it's own SIM, and has become a fulltime business/nightmare to manage, and I'm challenged to re-imagine things once again.  There are three key problems that I'm faced with today:

1) Burn out.  I'm simply tired of doing the same thing over and over again, and need to either radically reinvent it, or leave it.  The pianos are a vital part of my business, and what I am known for, so I don't really want to simply abandon them, especially when I've got so many ideas for the ways I want to recreate them to make them more fun and more vital.

2) Sheer volume.  When I started making pianos and bringing my compositions in, there were only 10,000 people in SL.  Two years later there are more than 4,000,000, with that number growing exponentially every month.  Be careful what you wish for.  Yes, I wanted more business, but the logistics of trying to stay on top of such a large and growing market are daunting.

3) Perfectionist bug.  Baron blogged on this very early this morning: the challenge of being a content creator with OCPD and ADD.  It's a gift if your job is just "thinking stuff up", but a curse when it comes to pulling the trigger and finally releasing what you've been refining for entirely too long because it's still not right.  Last winter I completely rebuilt the pianos and the way they play music from the ground up, had three new Christmas pianos, and two new Valentine's pianos ready to go (ready being a relative word here).  They're still unreleased.

2006 Tannenbaum Baby Grand Piano

In spite of having released very little new product these past months while I've been sick, my profit margin is holding it's own.  This makes me feel both relieved and guilty.  I hate coasting on old product, especially when I feel like that product could be far better.  It feels like ripping the customer off, and this is another point where B and I both struggle.  We want to give our customers the best quality we possible can, but there's so many other shiny new things to chase ... ~sigh~

So why blog about this?  For the same selfish reason I blog at all: to hold myself accountable.  If I put it out there, I have to do it, and dammit, missing the two biggest retail holidays of the year is just grounds to be shot.

I've not bothered to think about my challenges in terms of labels, but it's been healthy to recognize it in shared conversations the past few weeks and to say "okay, that's me ...now what?".  Seems like dodging to engage in a flurry of blogging in the middle of a pseudo-crisis, but it's in fact been the thing that's pushed me to just put things out there and be done with them.

So, note to self: finish the darned dynamic songbook and get these pianos out!