I started drawing again. Went and bought a sketchbook and everything, something I haven’t done since high school. And one of the pleasant surprises from a few consecutive evenings of drawing is this: I’ve started listening to music again, too.
It’s not that I never listened before, more that in recent years music’s become less of a presence in my life. Losing a commute; switching to a medium that operates on the same linguistic channel as song lyrics; a flux of lunchtime-interesting podcasts; and the fact that in the mornings I don’t like to have things in my ears meant that the only times I’d really listen were on road trips and while driving late at night, and even then it’d be limited to night-time drive music like broody atmospheric stuff by the Canadian rapper Drake.
So now I’ll draw and listen to music, and it’s a good way for me to unwind in the evenings. I’ve been sketching friends’ Instagram photos that I’ve liked and posting the sketches to my own profile and I’ve found that it’s a nice way to say hello from afar, too. All these things are things I want to do more of, and enjoy doing, and integrating them in this way turns them into something even more compelling than the individual parts. It’s like a burrito of purpose.
Here’s a secret, friend, and I trust you to keep it until the time is right: I want to write and illustrate a graphic novel one day. I’m a couple thousand hours of practice away from being able to make a serious attempt at it, so why not start now, and start the same way I started writing non-graphic novels: by sitting down for a couple hours every night with my headphones on.