This Neverending

You are looking at a website with art, music, development, and thoughts, all belonging to some person named Dan Wentworth, and you might be wondering... Why?

Why is Dan making this site? Why should I bother reading his blog posts?

This post is intended to answer these questions.

Much of the website building and design wisdom I find seems aimed at a single purpose: converting visitors into cash.

That is not my purpose. Perhaps it might happen, and that would be cool, but this site would not exist at all if that were the goal.

I am making this website to engage with you. Hopefully, I can create a valuable experience for you, and maybe you will take that as a sign that we should build a relationship. That would be my ideal measure of success.

Basically, I hope that my interests and musings will pave the way for me to meet interesting people.

So the next question is naturally, how can a website about art, music, and development create value for someone other than the artist who made the site? Typically, a portfolio website is for showing off a skillset and creating career opportunities. That is fairly one-sided, and I have a different scope in mind.

You see, art, music, and development have all contributed deeply toward improving the way I spend my time. Time is our most valuable resource. I disagree that time is money. I argue that time is life. Accumulated money does often represent time you have spent, unless you were born rich or got lucky in some other way, but already, the equation of time = money is only true sometimes. By contrast, when you spend your time, you always spend your life and will never get it back.

Art is the key to all of this. I can bring both music and development into the art category: Art is not painting, drawing, dancing, singing, or any performance really. The performance is definitely a part of it, but it is not even close to the big picture of what art is.

Art trains us to perceive the world around us - how to see it, feel it, hear it, maybe even taste it - mindfully, and then to create artifacts and experiences that share what you found worth sharing. I find that this supercharges my ability to focus on gratitude, which is key.

Of course music is art. I believe that programming can also be art. Like painting, programming has properties and behaviors that interact in certain ways, and furthermore, like painting, programming interacts with dynamic context that is wildly complex. For those of you who are programmers, you probably see what I am doing here: I have taken on Object Oriented Programming as a philosophy. In fact, Aristotle spoke in his philosophy about objects, their properties and behaviors, and the difference between being "wood" and being "wooden" in Metaphysics. As I read his take on these things I was seeing logic that aligns perfectly with the Object Oriented Programming mindset.

Learning art is deeply related to this understanding of objects. Learning a new medium such as watercolor involves becoming intimately familiar with the properties and behaviors of different paints, brushes and paper types. Using watercolor for different purposes can vary tremendously when we consider the near-infinite contexts it might occur in. Are you painting contemporary art? Are you painting a portrait for a commission? Are you just learning to control how much water is in the brush? Are you painting outside? I find this mindset to be profound, and yes, it absolutely influences how I produce music and how I program.

Ok, Dan, dramatic statement, but what does it mean?

At the root, the pursuit of art is a set of known actions one can take in order to train ourselves to recognize what deserves gratitude. Through training the eye to see mindfully, we deeply enhance our ability to appreciate what makes this oak tree different from that pine tree. Through training the ear to hear, I can guide you to listen to a song you have already heard thousands of times in a new way, as though it were the first time. Through studying user interfaces, you can see the beautiful simplicity in the old-fashioned car stereo's radio buttons.

Armed with my knowledge of the properties and behaviors of music, born of years of practice, I can appreciate music even if I am not in the target market. Let's face it: I am not a huge fan of country music, but I bet you I can find something to love and respect about any country song. I see this as a superpower. I even challenged myself to write a couple of country songs. I love this about myself. It arms me to maximize the value of my time when maybe I don't get to choose which song is playing right now. It also arms me for social intelligence because I have trained myself to become an expert at finding what I can like in imperfect human beings, which happens to be all of us.

So, even though I know that art and music are not likely to be financially lucrative paths for most people, I believe strongly that all of us should be pursuing art as a way of maximizing the value of our time. If you work out your gratitude muscles, they grow stronger. Art is exactly that process for me, and I hope that I can use this website to share that with you.