Emotion Toolkit.com

I recently watched a popular online commercial for the Honda Accord.  The commercial is a two minute, cause-and-effect sequence of perfectly timed events.  One object rolls into another which rolls into another causing items to descend or buttons to depress or mobiles to spin.  The sequence ends with a Honda Accord rolling smoothly off a platform.  Quite impressive!

The narrator concludes the sequence with “Isn’t it amazing when things just… work?”  The slogan in the last frame, “The power of dreams.”

I was surprised to learn that, because the commercial involved no computerized special effects, it took 606 tries to produce that perfect montage.  Things did not “just” work.  They worked because a team of engineers worked day and night for three months, spending 6 million dollars, to set everything up in just the right way, and over and over again, one little snag sabotaged their efforts.  But they kept on going, and eventually they ended up with a highly viewed, highly profitable, and astounding creation.

They made it look easy.  As viewers, we walk away with the impression that “the power of dreams” rests on things progressing smoothly and as expected, but in truth, dreams happen because we keep trying, even when everything falls apart over little things. 

The engineers and recording team invested a lot of time and energy not necessarily knowing if they would achieve the desired result.  As a graduate student, I know just how that feels!  It’s easy to become disheartened.  Without some measure of faith, I don’t think I could keep going as a researcher.

If you take special care to make sure that everything is set up perfectly, then some slight misalignment or unexpected bump in the road derails everything, you can walk away exhausted, or you can put everything back where it was, nudge the offending gear a little to the left, and try it all over again.  And again and again… until your dream comes true.

The full scoop on what went into producing this “amazing” set up:

If you thought that the people who set up a room full of dominoes to have them knocked over later was amazing, you haven’t seen anything yet.

There are no computer graphics or digital tricks in these images. Everything that you see happened in real time exactly as you see it.

The recording required 606 takes and in the first 605 takes there always was something, usually of minor importance, that didn’t work.

It was necessary for the recording team to install the set-up time after time and it took several weeks working day and night to achieve this effect.

The recording cost 6 million dollars and it took 3 months to finish, including the engineering design of the sequence.

The duration of the video is only 2 minutes, but every time that Honda shows the commercial on British television, they make enough money to support any of us for the rest of our lives. However, this commercial has turned out to be the most displayed in the history of the Internet.

Honda execs think that it will pay for itself simply because of the free showings. (Honda is not paying one cent for you to see it.)

When Honda senior execs viewed it, they immediately approved it without hesitation-including costs.

There are only six Honda Accords built by hand in the whole world, and to the horror of Honda engineers, the recording team disassembled two of them for the recording.

Everything you see in the sequence (besides the walls, floor, ramp and untouched Honda Accord) is part of those two automobiles. The voice is that of Garrison Keiller. The commercial was so well received by Honda execs when they saw it, that their first comment was how amazing the computer graphics were. They almost fell out of their chairs when told that the recording was real without any graphics manipulation.

By the way, about the wind shield wipers in the new Honda Accords, they are sensitive to water and designed to start working as soon as they get wet.

Out on a small pier over Lake Mendota, I sat dangling my bare legs over the water waiting to watch the sun set on the unusually balmy Wisconsin afternoon.  The jagged edges of the wood planks scraped against the underside of my legs while the soft ripples of my silk dress brushed against my knees.  Sandwiched between rough and silky, dense and diaphanous, I felt oddly content.  The ripples in the water below echoed the ripples in my dress, gliding across the surface in a ceasless, mesmerizing ballet.  I watched the convergence of waves until the visual syncopation pulled me into the consciousness of the water.

In the water’s receptive silence, with my face towards the enlargening sun, my mind turned to matters weighing heavy on my heart, and I was glad that only the sun sat across from me, because I started to cry.  I gave my sorrow to the water, to the warm air, to the sun.  I prayed for comfort.

I thought ahead to my Friday night.  I imagined I would spend it sitting in my cave of a living room, straining to entertain myself with some otherwise bland activity, like reading a book or watching a video, that would scarcely surmount my longing for true connection with life.  “But this moment is all I have,” I thought.  I returned my mind to the lake, the sun. 

The wind picked up.  I listened.  As it touched my skin, I felt cold.  But I refused to cover up, because the long Wisconsin winter was finally coming to an end, and I was determined to experience the afternoon as though it were summer.  In that moment, cold became a word in the language of the wind.  The discomfort in my body was simply its tone of voice.  Rather than a boundary between myself and the sky, my skin became the means by which the coldness inherent in the wind became conscious.  The poet David Whyte wrote, “To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings.  Surely, even you, at times, have felt the grand array; the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding out your solo voice… Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation… Everything is waiting for you.”

I dried my cheeks and left the pier before the sun kissed the water.  I passed through a throng of college students gathering on the terrace like an ant colony descending on a kitchen crumb, pacifying their social cravings with the overabundance of faces and freshly bared bodies.  I headed back to my car anticipating an evening of solitude and silence.

My forecast was off, however.  Life whispers continuously of love and beauty and raises its voice when we long to hear it.  I received a call from friends, and soon, I was standing in a vast green field near Lake Wingra, spying them in the distance. 

“Can you see the blue kite?” Dave asked on the cellphone, and when I spotted it, they waved in excitement, watching me cross the grassy plain to join them.  Daniel, a resident of the Madison Zen Center, had received a bright blue kite for Christmas with an image of the Buddha.  “Look, it’s a flying Buddha!” he giggled.  A blue Buddha doing sommersaults in the wind! 

Dave noticed the great shadow of an unassuming contrail streaking across the sky like a rainbow, an antirainbow, and told us about a photo he took in India when the sun cast a shadow of the mountains on the clouds in the sky.  The earth casting a shadow on the sky!

As the sun went down, bats filled the air.  They flitted sporadically through the deepening twilight like large, hyper moths.  I held the kite taut, steering its unpredictable ups and downs into amusing figure eights.  I hadn’t flown a kite in nearly two decades.

Suddenly, we noticed that the bats were chasing the kite.  They began to divebomb the kite string!  I was utterly enthralled.  Dave surmised that, using echolocation, the cross section of the string probably resembled the dimensions of a small insect.  They sent vibrations down the length of the string and into my hands.  Every time I felt a bat bounce on the string, I did a little dance, overcome with euphoria.

The evening I thought would be bereft of communion was, quite unexpectedly, saturated with it.  Life never ceases to speak to us.  All around is a shimmering field of consciousness, linking every soul, that will touch your senses and open your heart if you ask for it.  Watching the blue Buddha soaring high above me, finally, I understood what the wind had been trying to tell me out on the pier… “Come now, isn’t this the perfect night to fly a kite?”

I went on another short road trip with a friend.  I was only along for the ride, but I started out with the underlying, largely subconscious sense that I would find something, some kind of esoteric satisfaction or answer, at the destination.  When we arrived, my friend was unable to accomplish the goal of the trip.  We immediately turned around and went home.  Other than conversing in the car, the trip served no real purpose. 

What happens when you set off on a journey to find your treasure, arrive at a promised destination, and discover that you must return empty handed to where you started?  The temptation is to go back to the beginning disheartened, feeling as though you have gotten nowhere.  But your journey is not over, and your treasure is still waiting.

We travel not only through space but through time.  To return to the starting point, you have really arrived at an entirely new destination.  Unlike the oasis you first set your sights on, however, this new destination is linked to the original conditions that prompted your journey.  Sometimes I feel like I’ve gone backwards, but that’s impossible.

My Space-Time Treasure Map

1.  When the moon shines upon a barren landscape, that’s when you most clearly see the beauty of the moon itself.  And that’s when you come to know that it’s always there with you.

2.  You are not the only author of this life experience.  However things play out, the universe tells your story, and it cannot help but be one full of love. 

3.  The heart awakens most fully when you can forgive people for not being everything you wanted.  When you get everything you want, you can still be separate.  But when the heart is fully awake, there’s no separation.

4.  The greatest love you’ll ever know is the love that comes out of you.  Love can always come out of you, and when it does, suddenly there is no inside or outside, and you discover that you’re loved beyond measure.

5.  Hope is present even when you can’t feel it, and when you can’t feel it, you have been given the gift of silence, stillness, and now.

6.  There is a core of light in everyone, a core that remains untouched by circumstance and unchanged by personality, and regardless of what you may find on the surface, it is always possible to connect with that core of light.  There, you are always welcome, always invited, never turned away.  By presuming it, you receive it, and by receiving it, you bring joy to others.

7.  Intense grief makes strawberries taste better.

8.  Every moment gone terribly awry is the interior beauty of a perfect moment.  As Katsumoto said in The Last Samurai, “they are all perfect.”

9.  You are the dreamer.  In this collective dream, things operate backwards.  Rather than feeling joy and love because wonderful things happen, wonderful things happen because you feel joy and love.  When you cultivate joy and love for their own sake, the world around you follows suit.  Just like in a dream, what you see around you materializes to match or explain what you feel inside.

10.  There is a voice that never ceases to speak your name and a hand that never lets go of yours, and the message is always the same: “If you open completely to receiving what’s yours, I promise you won’t regret it.”

In all of my dreams about water, water represents both love and emotion.  I recently finished reading the book The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho.  To inspire, comfort, and reinfuse you with conviction for your passions, I highly recommend it.  Not hours after I finished the last page, a friend of mine began the first and, like me, cannot put it down. 

A good portion of the story involves a desert trek.  As I immersed myself in that world, I began to notice how my own life had entered the desert.  Just then, another friend, who didn’t know I was reading The Alchemist, sent me a message to recommend we watch the movie Bab’Aziz, about a prince who wanders the desert contemplating his soul.  The subtitle reads “to find the beloved, you must have faith.”

I am coming to understand the true nature of this desert.  There are periods in life when you are forced to trust without knowing what outcome you are trusting will occur.  You cannot trust that things will turn out this way or that way, you can only trust.  This trust is empty of form, empty of specifics, and empty of images of the future.  It must be reverent of the unknown, completely accepting of it.  You have to be unwilling to attach to the nihilistic predictions of hopelessness and yet not enter into optimism about any particular, because if you focus too hard on some distant particular, you lose your concentration, and the desert will swallow you up.  It takes total concentration to survive the trek, but it also takes total trust.  You can listen to everything that happens in this moment without trying to imagine its future purpose but also without concluding that it has none.  This is the now that blurs across time, faith and surrender combined.

Yesterday, a friend drove me to Iowa for a change of scenery.  It was comforting to be traveling on a long stretch of road without a destination in mind, a desert trek of sorts.  In two hours, we encountered the Mississippi River and drove to a bluff to watch the water rush across the earth.  Directly below us, along the side of the tree-lined cliff, picnic tables had ended it all.  Methinks Iowa offers little entertainment for its rambunctious youth.  Out in the river, also directly below, a line of vast machinery controlled the flow of water from one bank to the other.  A tugboat approached, and a sequence of locks that looked like pinball switches opened to let it through.  I was reminded of aortic ventricles controlling the flow of blood through the heart. 

Locks and dams on the Mississippi River, Dubuque, Iowa

After passing through the locks, it proceded merrily down the stream, and I wondered, if this were a dream, like all of my other water dreams, what I might take from the notion of navigating mechanisms that control the flow.  The tugboat waited awhile to get through.  Going with the flow and having patience?  Or am I the builder of that vast machinery?  Whatever the lesson, it’s clear that water is important in this world.

Then last night I dreamed that I held a beautiful goldfish in my hands.  The goldfish wriggled and gaped, but she was happy to be in my hands.  She knew I would take care of her.  I looked everywhere for water.  I found a faucet, and as I was looking for a cup or small bowl, the goldfish slipped out of my hands.  I couldn’t find her anywhere.  The lights became dim.  I tried to turn on more lights, but nothing shone brightly enough to illuminate the area around the kitchen sink.  Finally, I was able to shine a light and see clearly, and I found the goldfish lying on the floor under the cabinetry.  I picked her up gently and placed her in a small bowl of water.  She was still alive and very grateful to enter the water.  She swam around happily. 

But the water was murky, and the bowl too small.  She stirred up dirt and soil as she swam in circles.  I knew she needed a larger bowl with clean water.  I was looking for a larger bowl when I turned on the faucet, and I noticed that the water coming out was cloudy and full of dark fluid, like coffee.  I poured glass after glass, but every glass came out cloudy and murky.  In the first cup, some glob of pink goop had settled at the bottom and expanded slowly into a disgusting blob.  I showed someone nearby.  They were revolted.  In subsequent cups, layers of sediment and clouds of dust swirled around like a storm on Jupiter.  I was going to drink the water anyway.  Someone nearby was alarmed at my attempt to drink it, but I felt it was the best I was going to get. 

Eventually I woke up.  The goldfish was still thriving in the small, dirty bowl, but I knew she would need clean water, and a lot more of it, very soon. 

Two nights ago, a squirrel stood on his haunches to peer into my kitchen window, which rests at ground level.  Sitting at my table, he was at eye level.  He froze for nearly a minute, seemingly very curious.  What sort of world is this, he must have thought, which is brightly lit in the late evening, carved out into the ground like a giant cave, filled with odd shapes and structures, and occupied by those colorful bipeds?

Then last night, my five year old decided to add buttons to his cardboard robot, Sodo (short for Sodoro).  We pressed the ‘ON’ button and waited for Sodo to come to life.  I asked Sodo all sorts of questions, and he told me about a planet he had visited made entirely of candy, known straightforwardly as Candy Planet.  The lakes are made of rootbeer and the oceans, cranberry juice, and gumdrops are everywhere. 

To the squirrel peering into my little world, it must seem as though I live on Candy Planet.  All the nuts a creature could want, all the water and sweet drinks, all the warmth, the light and beautiful sounds.

I have sat in my kitchen on more than one occassion crying over some loss or frustration.  And I have sat outside in the cold dirt smiling and laughing.  John Milton said, “The mind can make a heaven out of hell or a hell out of heaven.”  These other worlds, the planets and places and realms that fill the universe, are nothing compared to what we make of things in our own thoughts and imagination. 

I have a habit of complaining about the cold and longing for summer.  The lakes in Madison were covered with ice and snow for months.  On Candy Planet, they call that a rootbeer float.

From Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire:

Under the desert sun,
in the dogmatic clarity,
the fables of theology and the myths of classical philosophy
dissolve like mist.

The air is clean, the rock cuts cruelly into flesh;
shatter the rock and
the odor of flint rises to your nostrils, bitter and sharp.

Whirlwinds dance across the salt flats,
a pillar of dust by day;
the thorn bush breaks into flame at night.

What does it mean?
It means nothing.
It is as it is
and has no need for meaning.

The desert lies beneath and soars beyond
any possible human qualification.
Therefore, sublime.

Once upon a time, there was an orange-breasted bluebird living near the canyons in the Sierra Nevada mountains.  She spent her days in a small swath of land studded with craggly pine trees and berry bushes, and in the pillows of wind filling the great space above.  Layers of forest ebbed into the distance, becoming bluer and paler until they dissolved into the mist of the horizon. 

Where sunlight mingled with cool air from the shadows of trees and boulders, she flew.  She flew effortlessly from branch to branch in search of snacks and curiosities.  One day, however, she felt a desire to fly beyond her usual territory.

I want to fly west towards the river and see the ribbons of gurgling light.  No wait, I want to fly north towards the peak of the nearest mountain and perch on the highest branch.  Which way do I fly?  What if I fly in the wrong direction?

Torn, she did not fly north or west.  She flew northwest, towards nothing in particular and found neither a river nor the highest branch.  Instead, she ended up in a place not unlike her starting point.

Disappointed, she then flew towards the river but thought continuously of the mountain and fretted about what she was missing.  Her thoughts of the mountain soured her experience of the river, and her crestfallen rendevous with the river dampened her desire to fly toward the mountain.  With that, she perched for a full afternoon on a dead branch near the river bank not knowing what to do next or what would satisfy her longing.

When finally she decided to attempt another journey, she focused intensely on the movement of her wings and began to worry. 

Am I flying correctly?  What if I make a mistake?

As her attention became isolated to her feathers, she lost her feel for the wind, and the air quickly became reluctant to carry her.  Her wings stiffened, resisting her flap-by-flap scrutiny and logical commands.  She entered a free fall, her heart siezed up, and fear enveloped her like a wave of sun-scorched air.  She fell into the leaves of a tree and thought she would meet the ground soon, but the air caught her wings again, and she lifted with it.  She flew to a nearby branch and rested.

She had failed to reach any destination, and she seemed unable to fly.  She descended to the ground and stood in the dry pine needles and brown leaves and dirt.

What do I do now?  I don’t like where I am, but I can’t seem to get anywhere else.

She poked around in the dirt for many days, too afraid to fly and too confused to select a journey. 

Then, one morning, a squirrel scampered by and darted up a nearby tree.  She watched as it climbed out onto a lone branch extending out over a clearing in the forest.  The squirrel was soon poised at the end of the branch.  Where would it go now?  Suddenly, the squirrel leaped into the open air.

The bluebird gasped.  She watched in horror, awaiting the squirrel’s demise.  However, instead of plummeting quickly to the ground, he opened his arms.  Flaps of squirrel skin fanned out from his body, and he caught the wind.  He glided across the clearing, soaring into the space like a ray of sun, and gently landed in the brush many yards away. 

He ran quickly back to the tree and scurried up the trunk.  His little claws on the thick bark made a comical clatter as he found his way back to the lone treebranch, positioned himself, and leapt again into the open air. 

Weeeeeeeeeeee!

The bluebird felt a light enter the knot in her heart.  Looking up, the bright blue and soft white of sky filled her with glee.  She rocketed into the air and flew across the forest.  She bounced on currents of air, grazed the treetops, and chased dragonflies around. 

The knot in her heart slowly unraveled.  Joy was her compass.  Joy was her destination.  In her play, she found her way to the highest branch of the mountain top, and from there she could see the whole river.