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From Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement address:

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. …

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

My DVR records the servies Frontline whose episodes accumulate because Frontline tackles serious and often depressing topics which are usually hard to watch.

True to form, on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 they aired Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero. The show was very thought provoking and I captured a couple memorable quotes—one from author Ian McEwan and another from opera singer Rene Fleming. Both these quotes relate to questions of faith and faithlessness surrounding those tragic events.

As I watched and listened I also came across a very interesting definition of art given by Kirk Varnedoe, curator of painting and sculpture at New York’s Museum of Modern Art:

Its true that art transports you, that it gives you the sense that you can find other worlds than the ones that you know are inside of you.

There are so many imagined worlds. Each artist creates a world with its own logic and its own set of rules in which you can move in and inhabit. They find form that lets you imaginatively take part in experiences with which you may not have had any contact, and for a moment, conceive of a world as pearlescent and as beautifully, rectilinearly ordered as a Piero.

To feel these things through art expands the reach of who you are. But art doesnt only transport you to new, imagined places. It also, in the best sense, narrows your vision, focuses with a new immediacy on the things that may be the most familiar to you. It gives a new spiritual dimension to the objects that you touch, to the room that you inhabit. And this is not just a tidy or comfortable experience but can be suffused with a kind Dionysian pleasure, in the sense of the small world controlled and the poetry of the world possessed, this crossing over of the line between what is the love of the material thing, of the dust mote in the sunlight or the sheen of the porcelain, of the look of the ivy winding around the bowl of fish, you know, this sort of pleasure in the daily small things.

In art, through art, I think, transmutes itself into a form of spirituality…

via Transcripts | Faith And Doubt At Ground Zero | FRONTLINE | PBS.

I think that I now have my answer to the question “What is art?”.

The RSAnimate videos are…awesome!  They’re produced by a UK company called Cognitive Media.

Here’s a blurb about what video scribing from Cognitive Media | Economist Conferences UK:

Scribing is the real-time capture, processing and iteration of information in a visual form. This could be presented in words, cartoons, pictures, diagrams, flows and hierarchies.

When I think of “mind maps” I’m really thinking of something like video scribing. For years I’ve used large format paper (11″ x 17″) as gigantic notepaper and I’ve benefited from having more space to design, draw associations and annotate. These larger pages have worked well as a communication tool during consulting engagements. They also work well to map conversations and can be updated over a longer time than a typical “note” in a notebook.

But I wish there were a way to capture thoughts that came closer to video scribing.