Interest rekindled

Ever since the minor meltdown in our relationship sparked by the unveiling of my 126 words, I haven't given much thought to the art portion of the Kisokaido Project. I think both of us were too scared to mention it for a while. I started to lose interest, and was pretty much resigned to letting it become Erik's baby. Erik is an artist, I'm not, I thought, so why not let him worry about the art and me concentrate on the walk itself? But Erik wasn't prepared to give up so easily. He's passionate about making art, and passionate about making other people passionate about making art.

Anyway, on Sunday (Monday here) he mentioned on his blog how in Japan we used to make lists of all the things we needed or wanted to do each day, and cross them off as we did each one. (Strangely enough I'd been thinking about this just a day or two previously.) Erik thought this might form the basis of an art project. He suggested coming up with sixty-nine tasks, and doing them at each stop on the Nakasendo. I took it a step further - or perhaps misunderstood - and started thinking in terms of doing sixty-nine tasks each day, not at each stop but throughout the entire day. I got all excited, and sat down and wrote a short list of tasks, including composing a poem/haiku, eating something new, and helping someone, all of which are now part of a growing list of ideas (including some exciting new ones from Erik, I see) on a new page on the wiki.

There are lots of things I like about this proposal. But the main one is that by choosing the tasks carefully we can make it so that the art isn't something separate from the walk that could be seen as interfering with it (in the way that having to stop to take video would, for example), but something that's an integral part of the walk, something that will actually make the walk itself more enjoyable and fulfilling.

Erik's already put out a call on his blog asking for people to come up with suggestions for tasks we could perform. So I'm going to do the same. We're not looking for random tasks, by the way. There should be a point in doing them. They should all be beneficial in some way, either to us or to the people we meet. They shouldn't be too time consuming. They should be legal. And they should be fun. They could be tasks we do individually or tasks we do together. An added bonus would be that they relate in some way to the history of the Nakasendo or to Hiroshige's prints. So get your thinking caps on and send in your ideas.

As you can see, I'm interested again.

Distance walked today: 3km
Total distance walked since blog began: 419km
Days left until launch of Kisokaido Project: 74