Awareness

Awareness is an art form.

It's one of those things that's kind of boring and a bit uninteresting but crucial to action, kind of like tying your shoes. I mean you could wear velcro sneakers of whatever, but that's just cheating and perhaps too easy (one man's opinion, so take it with a grain of salt).

I think that too often we skip to the part that seems more interesting to us and totally forget about creating a foundation, a context. Awareness allows that to happen. Awareness allows us to make informed decisions about our means and executing the hell out of them. Knowing background and history allows us to our understand our past and assess how we want our future to look like, scrutinizing our present to see if we're on track or not. 

I think the problem lies with our current context and culture. We're the post-dvd millennials that stream content whenever and however we please. Skipping to the end is too easy. We don't have to invest as much time, money, nor emotion to get what we want anymore. We're bored people that are okay with cheap thrills. I guess if I had a bone to pick, it'd be with what the instagram definition of storytelling has become in my perspective, my context, my world.

Storytelling is too easy now, it's become pragmatic and logical; we can see the ending without seeing the ending, and if that ending isn't worthwhile, then it's not worth investing in at all. There's no cause for innovation because ideas don't seem worthy of pursuit, it's like "creative" paparazzi; it's seeing and believing that you have to be worthy of story to have your story told. I think that's (insert expletive). I think that we have enough visual storytellers as it is, because capturing stories worth capturing is easy, the story is already evident. The hard work comes from extracting, investigating, and using awareness to see something that everyone else doesn't see. 

I think we need more people that see narrative, that take the obscure and boring and shine them in a new light. Seeing narrative requires knowing backstory or how light works, or when the sun rises, or how long it takes for paint to dry, or where to move the decimal in the right place. Everyone's creative, there is no select or elite few. I think that, because I believe there's an innate desire within us that sees a disconnect in daily life and pieces things together to make sense of it all. That's creativity. It's knowing and questioning why we believe what we believe or what we see how we see it. It's substance for us to see and visualize symbolism, foreshadowing, and reference to things beyond our current canvas or medium.

By setting that awareness, we cultivate culture. Because we are creative, we can't settle with a status quo, if it even exists. We are the movers and shakers of culture. Instagram storytelling is too easy, let's take dumb pictures of chairs or the sidewalk, or a water bottle and allow your context to let you see it in a different way. Don't let how other's perspective shape the way you see things. Create an internal inventory and create that context and awareness. Dig, do hard work and allow that to influence your perspective. And really, that's what storytelling ought to be–describing/articulating/seeing things in a narrative that's wholly within your eyes, voice, and tonality. #nofilter