Frame - This Changes Everything
“If I put a frame around these bread crumbs, is that art?” - one of the painter friends asked this question to John. John Cage a pioneer and maverick musician interested in Zen philosophy had a simple answer for this: ” The frame meant everything.”
If you take a violin maestro and make him play in the street corner, people will simply ignore him and move away. But put him in a concert hall and charge an entrance fee of $199, people rave about it. The concert hall is the frame.
Frame instructs people to look at or experience things in a specific manner. It tells us to pay more attention to things that we do not usually observe. In a way what we do with our writing in LifeLog or any other place is having a better “frame”.
Sometimes the frame is us. When a recommendation is coming from a specific person, we know the context and we will give more attention because of that person.
A specific example, I may not read about CGM (continuous glucose monitoring) from any medical journal or blog. But if Brandon Wilson writes about it, I will read it intently because, for me, Brandon’s recommendation changes everything. Because of Brandon’s interest in health, wellness and his experiments, the quality of my attention to a CGM will be different. Brandon is my frame or a lens that makes me look at things in a different way.
Curation is a frame. Writing is a frame. Maybe being mindful and more present will make us look at everything inside a frame. Maybe it is the quality of the attention, that is being referred to as “frame”.