August: The Future is Where Hope Lives
Memory boxes are art for people who know what they want the art to be about but not what they want it to look like.
My favorite cocktail party conversational gambit is to ask someone what they’re looking forward to. It gets people out of the tedious minutiae of the here and the now (do I have zucchini in my teeth?) and reminds them of the possibilities of tomorrow (partly sunny with a fifty percent chance of zucchini bread). People get out of bed today to work toward a better next week. All sorts of great things could happen in the next year.
The conversation gets good when we move past vast generalities (world peace) and get to specifics (three pounds of grated zucchini, sautéed in butter with salt and pepper and served alongside sliders made out of a 50/50 beef/bacon grind, topped with sharp cheddar, a slice of red onion, and Quaker Steak Buckeye Barbecue Sauce. Hey, it could happen). The details are what separate your dream future from, say, mine. Yours probably involves less zucchini, for example. The details are what make your dream future memorable and actionable. “World peace” as a goal isn’t something you can build a plan around. “Dismantle the apartheid South African government by cutting off their main source of income”, on the other hand, starts to look a bit more meaty. Case in point: that dream became a plan, and that plan worked. So I want details. What does your dream future look like, feel like, taste like, sound like? Who’s in it? Where is it? Is it a vision for a whole country or for the future you that’s going to enjoy a cup of tea and your hobby of choice alone and unbothered?
Take, for instance, Marc Scheff. Marc is an artist, gallery owner, and creativity coach. He has written business software and founded artist retreats. Marc was nice enough to let me use his real name, but what we talked about is between us, so all I’ll say is, he told me, “I’m breaking free this year.” And I don’t think it’s betraying anyone’s confidence to observe, in a general way, that life has a way of glomming on and piling up while you aren’t looking, until one day you wake up and you have no choice but to buy a red sports car, drop the clutch, and drive straight through the glom as explosively as possible, ideally directly to the nearest car wash.
Marc gets up every day because he knows that he has something to offer the world. He has a positive, teachable mindset that is biased to action, and if more people shared this mindset, the world would be a better place. In Marc’s future, people are actively chasing their dreams, reaching out to other people, sending the scary emails, making the intimidating phone calls, and moving forward. And he’s helping them do it.
The only thing standing between Marc and the future he wants is a bunch of his own mental hangups. So I gave him the image of a glass prison. My process for getting to these images is: embrace lateral thinking and see what pops up. My brain enjoys free association, and I let it take the reins here, whereupon it drove me straight to a song I hadn’t listened to in a few years.
From inside, you can see everything that’s out of reach. And escape is eminently doable if you’re willing to do the work and handle some cuts and scrapes along the way.
An excerpt from my summary of Marc’s session:
Remember: There Is No Box
That's what you told me you wanted your story to be going forward. Your glass prison only exists as much as you let it. You can shatter it, dissolve it, melt it, wish it away, or find some other exciting way to get rid of it because it's not there to begin with.
Marc is a fine artist himself, so I threw in a little art joke I knew he’d appreciate: a send-up of Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam.” This bit of the painting is all about the bestowing of the spark of life, sort of like how Marc wants to bestow the spark of grabbing life with both hands and fearlessly getting stuff done upon his clients. Full disclosure here: I was Marc’s client for six months. He’s not paying me to write this, so I can confidently say he’s got some skill in this area.
When I brought up the glass prison image, Marc immediately latched on. “That’s something I can work with. This is a talisman that will help me stay grounded.”
So, my last wish to Marc is this:
May the walls you shatter pave the way forward.
Reader, I hope your path is bright and glittery and takes you where you want to go.
***
New: The Memory Glimmer - The Anti-AI Impulse Art Buy
If AI can produce an image from a single sentence, so can I, and I can do it better and cooler. This month, I’m introducing Memory Glimmers. You give me a short prompt, and I find a visual metaphor that represents it. You don’t even need to tell me what the image has to be, just what you want it to be about. Remember, great art lives in the details.
The process is simple: Give me a memory, I translate it into art, and you receive a digital graphite study in your inbox within 5 days. All for $8. For $20, you get the original as well.
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October 21- 26, 2026
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