Update, 2008-05-01: I created a Passion Quilt group on Flickr, so please feel free to put your contributions there. Also, I somewhat belatedly showed the image to Luke and he said it was fine.

Cindi Trainor tagged me for the “passion quilt” meme. You have probably already seen it, but here is the deal:

Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.

Michael Stephens put a different spin on the original meme with his entry, Meme: Passion Quilt or What I Want for New Librarians* and since then, it has been a little hard for me to tell if participants have been trying to capture what they want kids to learn or librarians to learn. I think most people have been straddling the line, and I suppose my entry does, too.

So here is mine (with the kinda obnoxious by-nc-nd CC license):

And here is the story:

I came home from work Monday, and my six-year-old son, Luke, had a little life lesson for me out of the blue. “Dad, when you have to do something you don’t really want to do, you should do it right away and get it over with.” I’m not sure where that idea came from, or why he chose to share it with me just then, but I immediately thought of this passion quilt thing. That’s him in the photo when he was three, getting down to work.

For me, there are two main branches of this “do it now” idea. The first is what Luke was talking about: if you are putting off the dumb things you gotta do, you are just getting bogged down. There are a lot of things about the article Do it Now by Steve Pavlina that I find obnoxious, but there is real power in reminding myself to “do it now.”

The other, more interesting branch is the idea that you can’t wait until things are perfect before you act. Life is not like that, and so you might as well jump in and do it now. I think of James O’Donnell writing about Cassiodorus in Avatars of the Word. Cassiodorus was a writer and something of a librarian, who, in the middle ages, attempted to preserve Christian texts and scholarship by establishing a monastery of scribes. “In many important respects,” O’Donnell writes, “Cassiodorus was a failure.”

But I have come also to see that this deflated savior of western civilization I learned to mistrust when I was young had nevertheless had the right idea. He did not despise the new; he used it wholeheartedly. He did not reject old social institutions, but found new ways to adapt them. He did not tarry to prophesy a new age of learning and wisdom.

Most of all, he did things…The most effective change is wielded by those who do not expect to create or manipulate a closed system, but instead reocgnize that effective change takes place in open systems, where the accumulation of collaborative actions generates unexpected harmony. (87-88) [Google Books link to this passage]

Lastly, let me say that I choose “do it now” not because I am so great at this, but because it is a lesson for which I need constant reminding. I’m terrible at “do it now.” There is something a little distasteful to me about a bunch of bloggers telling people what they should do. This is a blogger telling you what he needs to do more of himself.

Life is short. Do it now.