The Caples Awards were held this week — I wasn't able to go this year, and I was sorry because I always like to see what other creative folks are doing in the world of direct marketing.
The award itself is a bowl on a pedestal. And I realized earlier this week that I keep one of my Caples awards on a shelf in my office next to another bowl — a gift that was given to me a few years ago by friends who visited Thailand and Burma (don't get me started on the name change of that poor country or anything else about the junta) on my recommendation. It's the kind of bowl carried by a Buddhist monk in the morning when he goes out on his rounds seeking alms. He can only eat what has been placed in the bowl – and he can't eat more than what the bowl can hold.
One bowl, awarded for the ability to create hunger for material goods and services. The other, a reminder that it takes very little to have a full bowl.
One bowl, the professional recognition (and the rewards that come with it) that many of us yearn for. The other bowl a reminder of anicca — impermanence, a concept known to many people in a field where you can be the hero one day and on the street the next.
To paraphrase E.M. Cioran, to be fully human is to live the full contradiction of one's time. Or as one of my favorite queer American mystic poets, in this case Walt Whitman, would hve it: "Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself!"
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