Pale river rock of a moon cool to the touch. A notch someone cut in a log as a bench. What am I and this ego out here in the morning dark? Eno has a painting on a post card of a country landscape he holds to the web camera and describes. He puts a small cutout figure in the center and says now look where your attention goes. You can’t see the landscape the same, it’s changed. He wanted to remove that figure from his songs. Which is why some songs don’t have many lyrics. And this is a problem in our world, we are too much in it.

I’ve been contracting now for six years, meaning I don’t have a steady employer. There’s an agency that uses me as staff augmentation but they only give me work once their staff is fully utilized. It’s gone well for me most years, but not as much the past two. You have to trust the work will be there through dry spells; often it feels like it’s just outside the frame, off-camera. The work is off-camera and so are you.

I’ve been ruminating on the ego and how much of ourselves we bring to work, whether that’s a good thing or not. The pride of ownership that comes with work, for example. It’s hard to swallow this but who you are doesn’t matter as much as you think. It’s what you do. And who you are can get in the way of what you do.

So it’s freeing the times I see this, and humbling too: to take my little stick figure out of the landscape and do my work off-camera. I’m a ghostwriter and consultant, a dime a dozen. The trickery comes those times I feel I’m something more. The ego craves to be recognized. But it’s the work not the person that matters more.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, prose

Tags: Brian Eno, Creative Nonfiction, existentialism, identity, Poetry