Feb 27, 2022
The beauty of getting lost
It’s not uncommon for me to wander around the internet in the middle of the night, while my actual work gets buried among a plethora of tabs.
I genuinely believe that following a random digital trail is good mental exercise; a way to virtually leave your desk, stretch your legs and get a breath of fresh air.
I once wrote in my journal, that “distractions are part of the creative process, embrace them”, and I still stand by that because I’ve discovered over time, that all my wandering often leads me to a place of deeper clarity and better understanding. Maybe, not relating to the work I was doing prior to my detour, but to something else that is equally as essential to wherever I was before.
So, on this particular night, I ignored my scheduled bedtime and deviated from my nano-research to read an Interview with Rishi Dastidar on Sonder & Tell — and that’s how I discovered the practice; Haiku.
Originally, haiku is a Japanese form of poetry that involves describing scenes from nature using the senses. The poems should ideally be composed of three lines and seventeen syllables; each line containing five, seven and five syllables respectively. However, within Rishi Dastidar’s context, haiku is a practice in brevity.
He says, specifically, “My current favourite writing exercise is to get people to try and write haiku.”
I’ll give them a news story, and ask them to compress it into 17 syllables. And then try to repeat that for a product, a service, a proposition. People quickly understand that getting to the core is important, what details are really crucial and what aren’t.
That sounds like an excellent writing exercise.
In other words, getting lost on the internet is often worth it. There are a myriad of interesting, exciting things to discover and explore.
So, on that note, here are a few things I discovered recently.
Go on, ‘get lost’.
- An archive of stories about a successful 20th-century Black American designer.
2. This series of beautiful questions…
3. The Kool-Aid Factory; zines about the ways organizations coordinate.
4. A website that documents the tech tools used by modern brands.
5. A platform where businesses can find vetted agencies for creative and digital projects.
6. This poem on what it could mean when one marries a good man.
