The Art of the Edge

March 28, 2014  

Like any kid, Gumbo is growing up.  And when kids grow up, if they have any gumption and imagination at all, they become unpredictable.  That, I believe, is the purpose of this new feature, to show that Gumbo is bright and creative and anything can happen.  

Living on edges is an art.  It’s where I’ve been most creative and where I’ve found others’ most focused expressions of what interests and pleases them & me.  In travel, art, books, movies, I’m going to try my utmost to find the interesting edges and share them here.  I’ll look for what’s happening in the present and, if you’re lucky enough to be where it is, how to find it.  And the occasional view from left field.  Remember?  Unpredictable.  I’m not a deep thinker but I do love to have fun with ideas and share what I like.

The Edge is, by it’s nature, in a different location for each of us, and for ourselves at different times in our lives.  I learned early on that I could make that line move farther out, reliving scary moments until I could move beyond them.  I once made my living as a wallpaper hanger which requires climbing ladders and, interestingly, that fact hadn’t occurred to my acrophobic self until the decision had been made.  Over the years I found I could go higher and higher and while the fear of heights has never gone away entirely, it’s receded significantly.  So too, with travel, and while we tend to get more conservative as we get older, I’ve found that previous experience has held that limitation at bay as well, so my capacity for an adventure seems, despite the years, to have remained intact.

I’ve also learned that I can ignore parts of an experience if, by not ignoring, it will impede my progress.  When I was 20, it took the form of buying a one-way ticket to France because I wanted the job and I wanted Paris, ignoring the fact that I had no money to get home.  Herein lies the heart of one of my life mottos, “it’ll all work out”.  The other one is “it could be worse”, which comes into play when things appear not to be working out.  I’ve exercised both mottos individually and together and they remain true for me, always comforting.

For an artist, no real progress can be made until we reach the edge of what’s gone before.  In the realm of personal finance, having more than we need can clutter the path to finding what’s most important to us.  And for travelers, I believe the edge is where we, as outsiders, can best experience a place.  We can never really hope to understand the heart of a culture that’s new to us, and the world created for travelers is rife with barriers of comfort and countless insulators that obscure our view.  So the edge, the line between those two is the place I value most.  

I’ve spent most of my life, the parts of my own choosing, living at the edges, an observer.  I choose it because, to my way of thinking, the view is clearer from there and because it’s less crowded.  The art is not falling off.  So far, so good.

Joanna