Quotes from My Library: Transitions
This is the third post in a series I started earlier this year, featuring quotations from books in my library.
The section below includes quotations about making life transitions — movement from any one life stage to another or to several others — as discussed in Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career by Herminia Ibarra. For me, the strength of Ibarra’s book lies not as much in its career advice as in its focus on the psychological aspects of making any transition or life change. Ibarra elaborates on how transitions occur in terms of practical experience, and how this experience will feel over time — as an exploration of “possible selves” even in the absence of an explicitly identified end result. For Ibarra, planning and introspection must take a back seat to experimentation and reframing our stories as we move toward newly defined identities.
Ibarra rounds out the book with comprehensive practical advice, and the cumulative effect of the book is to create a safer and more comfortable personal space for engaging with and working through any life transition. Highly recommended: Ibarra’s writing repays study of its substantial and unique ideas that have value well beyond what can be represented in a few quotations.
From Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career by Herminia Ibarra:
“Many of us feel a tug between well-paid, challenging, or stable jobs and the vocations we have practiced on the side, in some cases for the whole of our professional lives. Becoming a musician, a writer, an artist, a photographer, or a fashion designer at midcareer entails big personal sacrifices and typically dumbfounds the people around us, who fail to see why we don’t simply keep our passions safely on the side.”
“Since we are many selves, changing is not a process of swapping one identity for another but rather a transition process in which we reconfigure the full set of possibilities.”
“To launch ourselves anew, we need to get out of our heads. We need to act.”
“We learn who we are — in practice, not in theory — by testing reality, not by looking inside. We discover the true possibilities by doing — trying out new activities, reaching out to new groups, finding new role models, and reworking our story as we tell it to those around us.”
“During the between-identities period, we feel torn in many different directions. Although there are many moments of reflection, this is not a quiet period: A multitude of selves — old and new, desired and dreaded — are coming to the surface, noisily coexisting.”
“[No] matter where we start, our ideas for change change along the way, as we change. Where we end up often surprises us. For these reasons, as much as we would like to, we simply cannot plan and program our way into our reinvention.”
“How do we create and test possible selves? We bring them to life by doing new things, making new connections, and retelling our stories. These reinvention practices ground us in direct experience, preventing the change process from remaining too abstract. New competencies and points of view take shape as we act and, as those around us react, help us narrow the gap between the imagined possible selves that exist only in our minds and the ‘real’ alternatives that can be known only in the doing.”
“Old possible selves are always more vivid than the new: They are attached to familiar routines, to people we trust, to well-rehearsed stories. The selves that have existed only in our minds as fantasies or that are grounded only in fleeting encounters with people who captured our imagination are much fuzzier, fragile, unformed…. Whether it takes months or years, living [these] contradictions is one of the toughest tasks of transition.”
“Change takes time because we usually have to cycle through identifying and testing possibilities a few times, asking better questions with each round of tests, crafting better experiments, and building on what we have learned before…. Which self we test hardly matters; small steps like embarking on a new project or going to a night course can ignite a process that changes everything….”
“Self-creation is a lifelong journey. Only by our actions do we learn who we want to become, how best to travel, and what else will need to change to ease the way.”
“We don’t find ourselves in a blinding flash of insight, and neither do we change overnight. We learn by doing, and each new experience is part answer and part question.”
“Once you head down the path of discovery, there is no going back.”
Before and After: Flickr Reboot Edition
I have about 1200 photos on Flickr, distributed in 32 albums, that have been on the site for between five and ten years. Given all the things I’ve been learning about Lightroom, workflows, and the Nik Collection over the past few months, I look at them and … and, what? It’s not that I don’t like them now (although that’s true in some cases) and I’m not overly concerned about flaws – technical or otherwise – in the photos, but I see them differently because I feel like they could be so much better. I’ve had this idea stuck in my head over the past few days that I might like to pull them all down, re-process each one, and either replace them on Flickr or put them somewhere else. I no longer have any of the original adjustments I made, but do have all the images, so would be “starting from scratch” with each one.
When I learned about the photography site SmugMug buying Flickr earlier this year, I had no idea what SmugMug was, other than that I had heard of it occasionally but hadn’t looked into it. That acquisition got my attention, so I learned a little more about SmugMug and attended several webinars a few months ago, tutorials about how to set up a site on SmugMug, customize it, and showcase photography. Like Flickr, SmugMug features photographers at all levels of experience, and though I don’t yet have an account, I’ve explored it enough to feel like it’s similar to Flickr from a customer profile perspective, in terms of photo-sharing and engagement, and in terms of content, with a wide variety of advanced capabilities you can use in the future. There were two things I learned that I liked a lot: the way you can organize photos and treat them as public or private galleries; and the ability to create and customize your own site by building it largely from drag-and-drop content blocks (conceptually similar to the WordPress Gutenberg editor that will become available later this year). It’s fair to say that those webinars influenced me to think about my older work on Flickr and what, if anything, I might want to do with it.
In my former life as an IT Business Analyst, I was often involved in working with teams to define new projects, estimate effort, and develop timelines, so I tend to think of activities like this in project management terms. If I play around with the Flickr reboot idea from that point of view, it looks something like this:
Ah, well, now we’ve got ourselves a 640-hour project. If I spent the equivalent of five “workdays” – 40 hours a week – on this, it would take four months from start-to-finish. But that’s not realistic, mostly because I wouldn’t want to do it. Let’s say instead that I’ll spend no more than two days a week, or 16 hours, which makes the duration 40 weeks, or 10 months … meaning that if I started now, I wouldn’t finish until sometime in the middle of 2019. Yikes!
The value of doing this – at least, the way I think about it – is the learning experience itself: committing to re-processing nearly a thousand photos with content that I’m familiar with that has personal meaning to me surely will help me grow my skills. I would also likely tell a few blog-post stories about them along the way – especially about those I took when I was working on getting my history degree – and would want to write about what I learn as the work progresses.
There is no real downside, other than the time it would take that couldn’t be used for something else – like taking new photos! One thing I needed to consider was whether or not I’d find that the results were worth the time I invested, so I’ve experimented with ten of the photos that are on Flickr now to see what I might come up with. The experiment results are shown below – before and after versions of the ten I selected. The only thing I did to both the before and after versions was apply the same cropping so they’re easier to compare. I don’t necessarily think the after versions are final, but I was really surprised to see what a big difference I could make with a few adjustments to each photo.
Thanks for reading and taking a look … and Stay Tuned!
School Zone: One Room Schoolhouse in Northern New York
Once upon a time, I was driving my camera around in a rental car near Peru, New York, when I came across this bright red building, just off the roadside in a field all by itself. As you can see from the photos, storms were moving in, and I had just enough time to snap a dozen pictures before it started raining. It wasn’t until later that I realized I hadn’t made note of the building’s location (and the camera I had at the time didn’t have GPS capabilities), and on subsequent trips, I couldn’t find it. I assumed it was a one-room school, but didn’t know if the “School Zone” sign near the front door meant it it really was a one-room school, or someone had just nailed a sign to the wall of an old storage shed.
I recently learned that it is, indeed, a one-room school and was registered with the National Register of Historic Places as the Lyon Street School in 2013. The school is located at the intersection of Lyons Road and Rock Road, about five miles from Peru. The building is considered an example of late American Victorian architecture, with an estimated construction date of 1880 and an in-service date through the 1930s. The National Register of Historic Places Registration Form (pdf) includes a great description of the school’s construction, has a couple of photos of the interior, and reveals a lot about how the building was used. It reads, in part:
The school is of light wood frame construction and is clad with wood clapboard siding attached with wire nails; the siding shows signs of weathering and age-related wear. The foundation is random laid field stone which is in fair condition….
The gabled roof with overhanging eaves is covered with corrugated metal which is rusted throughout and buckling in areas. The metal was laid over the remnants of an earlier wood shingle roof. An open, hip-roofed belfry sits on the ridge at the northern end; the bell is accounted for but not presently on site…. The six-horizontal-panel door has a transom light over it, and there is a round window in the gable field that has been boarded over. All openings are framed by flat trim which was also employed under the cornice and on the corner boards….
A bank of windows is centered on each side elevation of the building, directly under the eaves. Each bank consists of five windows; the three central units are square-shaped and have nine-pane fixed sash, while the outer windows are full size and are fitted with nine-over-nine double hung sash. The two lower sash on the east elevation have been damaged and replaced by larger sash which is ill fitting. A small coal hatch, now in very poor condition, is located on the west elevation, north of the windows and approximately five feet off the ground.
The interior of the school is largely given over to one large room, the classroom. Upon entering the building from the north facade, there is a small, roughly finished room to the right. This room was used to store coal for the stove and corresponds with the hatch on the west elevation…. To the left is a finished wall that makes up one side of a cloak room, which is accessed from the classroom. Continuing through the hall there is another framed entry that opens into the classroom. The walls and ceiling of the classroom and cloak room are finished in bead-board which has been painted over and partially stripped in areas. On the walls it runs vertically up to a chair rail that encircles the room at the height of the bottom of the larger windows; above that it runs horizontally. The window casings are formed of grooved millwork, with rosettes in the corners. At the south end of the classroom there are two voids, presumably where blackboards once hung….
In the same pdf document, there is also a short summary of the historical significance of one-room schools:
At the start of the 20th century there were over 200,000 one-room schools nationwide. Of those, it is likely that fewer than 10,000 presently remain. While some have been restored, many others exist in varying states of decay or alteration. The Lyon Street School is fortunately among those that remain largely intact and is a representative example of part of New York and American history that is rapidly fading.
The Lyon Street School is one of the few still standing in northern New York that is in good enough condition to allow for repairs. In The Peru Gazette, a local community newspaper, there are several articles describing ongoing reconstruction of the building, certainly enabled by its registration as a historic site, and some photos of the restoration of the belfry, the transom, and the front door.
My photos are nearly a decade old, hiding away in my archive folders, but I always wanted to do something with them and learn more about the building. The images below are largely unprocessed, though I did try to enhance some of the detail, especially detail that is reflected in the building’s description I quoted above. Maybe these pictures are now part of its history.
Select the first image to see larger versions in a slideshow; and, as always, thanks for reading and taking a look!
