To me, the Old World represents a mentality that’s very limiting creatively. It’s the mentality based on the idea of separateness and struggle, scarcity and competition, endless striving and surviving. With it comes the sense that you can never really enjoy the way your work turns out. It has you focused on perceived imperfections, what you think you could have done better. It keeps you in your head, anxious, focused on ends. The future, the past. Rarely the present—at least not in a relaxed way. The goals presented at the “end” of the tunnel are not fulfilling, and are actually quite exhausting. Draining. Dark and dense. Methods and aims that are actually robotic and quickly becoming more so with the unceasing march of “progress.” Standards that constantly change and don’t actually exist, but provide real stress nonetheless. Naturally, you end up stuck swimming in shallow waters. There’s a built-in limit to this limiting mentality. And there’s beauty in darkness, but I’m honestly glad to be out of that mindset.
The New Age idea I’ve been expressing is entirely personal, but I’m not the only one using this phrase. It’s almost unexplainably freeing to realize the limits you’ve been accepting as objective truths were self-imposed and the ideas they were built on are flimsy and don’t hold up to scrutiny. When you shift your mindset away from the death grip of industry, competition, and the constant striving for control, your goals change. Your presence in the daily moment and awareness of the world around you increase exponentially. Spirit, feeling, and intuition become much more important than the shallow surfaces of products / objects / presented things. The interconnectedness of everything becomes much more important. You begin to want to harmonize with the world, to learn from and enjoy the challenges, not fight them. To let go and have faith that you’re not in this alone. To be less in your head and more in your heart. The process of creation becomes the thing to enjoy. The “end result” becomes just a moment in the process, as important as every other. The comparison to other creators and creations becomes irrelevant. The “standard,” nonexistent. Resources and possibilities, infinite. Timelines, malleable. Destiny, indestructible. All acts are known to be acts of collaboration. No one is alone. And each individual creator is free to experience the process as they choose.
Retrospect is interesting when you look at past work in these terms. The magic, the spirit, the patterns; the things that did survive and the things that didn’t. The story the process played out, how it manifested. What you missed; how you saw it then; what you’re seeing and hearing now with new eyes and ears. Life itself as art. Cool stuff.
Maybe this makes sense to you. It’s just an expression of the way I’ve put the pieces together and how I feel at this moment.
I made a playlist about it earlier with some of the songs from my own personal Old World period. The songs are sequenced in an intuitive, musically compelling way. Check it out if you’re curious.
Thanks for reading. ✌️