Sometimes when I travel I include picture from my hotel room, but by chance my wife and I recognized and took a picture of our hotel room. It might not be immediately obvious to anyone else – except I’d looked out the window minutes before, we were one of the only hotel rooms with an open curtain in more or less the right place — and, tellingly, I could see the same bags piled by the window. Even zoomed in it’s pretty small, and I can’t go and check right now to confirm — my wife crashed out early while I took a West Coast church board meeting — but as best I can reconstruct it, here’s what I see in that window:
My laptop bag is what I call my “portable office” – containing the book(s) I’m reading, my writing notebook, my drawing notebook and tools and any reference materials, the top scientific folder and notebook I’m working on, and a bunch of laptop gegaws like a power supply and various USB plugs. I think this doesn’t look like a laptop bag because my hiking shoes are piled atop that, but whatevz. The other half of the “portable office” is a stack of books and a clipboard with my “todo paper”, a heavyweight copper parchment or blue linen paper I use to organize tasks, all shoved into a tote bag for easy transport.
Next to that are more creative piles – a tote with the portable music keyboard and some music theory books for my electronic music practice, and next to that is a larger tote with the “active pile” of the fiction, comic and technical books that are near the top of my pile. I don’t always get to all those piles, but the longer I stay in any given place, the more glad I am that I’ve got that pile with me so I can quickly switch gears to whatever task that sparks my creativity in the moment.
All that seems a lot, but it’s way downsized and organized compared to the stuff I used to carry around everywhere. Someone once said they thought I had some kind of caching system that I just can’t quite turn off, and I agree – except the only way I seem to be able to do all the things that I do is to keep a big pile of stuff near me so I can turn spare minutes into accomplished tasks. I … don’t think I’m that great at it, honestly, but it does enable me to get closer to where I want to go, step by step, piece by piece.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Um, I said it already: our hotel in downtown Asheville.
