Lately I’ve been thinking about the amount of pigeonholing that goes on when someone decides to commit to a subject or line of work. Have things in society become so watered down that in order to survive you must micro-concentrate? If so, how does that help anyone? I get asked if I’m an artist or a sociologist or an ethnographer or an academic or a dilettante…and to what end? So I can be pigeonholed and confined to one specific track where I am destined to wile away and twiddle my thumbs?

Last night as I was rifling through my bookshelf, I came upon an old copy of Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums. It greeted me like an old friend, reminding me of the first time I read the novel in 1993. Back then I was a freshman in college starting an interdisciplinary arts program, and now, years later, I find myself still heavily involved in interdisciplinary modes of thought. Looking back, it’s not hard to see why I gravitated towards this particular school, as it allows for the blurring of lines and opening of spaces. As I write and research along boths that allow me to attempt to connect the worlds both inside and outside of academia and between common societal notions of art and craft, I am often stunned by the threads (no pun intended) that hold them together.

In this blurring of lines we work towards expanding our world views and pre-conceived notions as we go about our daily lives, connecting the disparate and seemingly separate. Once we connect one thing to another our understanding and compassion grows in ways that not only allow for our creativity to spark but also our own personal lives.

Which is precisely why keeping a sharp eye towards how things intertwine is vital. One of my current favorite examples of this is the website 10×10, which by using “linguistic analysis”, notes the top 100 news stories of each hour and day. Although it looks a bit like the child’s game Memory, to me, the site serves as a welcome visual reminder of not only the world’s vastness, but also its constant states of unrest, waiting and hope.

Sometimes I get asked why I see connections between two quite random things, but I think that in modernity, we can only grow by realizing that instead of difference, everything is very much quite the same.