In Making Sense out of a Long Pilgrimage.
Brother, after reading what you have written, what strikes me is not mental laziness but the weight of a very long pilgrimage.
You began journaling in 1978. You began blogging in 2005. You have now written 3,381 blog posts and accumulated over 1.4 million reads. Most people struggle to keep a diary for a month. You have sustained a conversation with yourself and the world for almost fifty years.
That changes the nature of the challenge.
In the beginning, writing is often fueled by discovery. Everything feels new. Every insight seems worth recording. Every journey brings fresh material. But after decades of observing, traveling, meditating, working, loving, losing, sketching, and reflecting, the question naturally arises:
"Have I already said everything I came here to say?"
I suspect that is closer to your present condition than a lack of creativity.
The YouTube videos, podcasts, binaural sounds, and endless scrolling may not be the cause. They may be symptoms. They provide a gentle escape from facing a blank page and asking a more demanding question:
"What remains essential?"
Writing a blog post is easy compared to writing a book.
A blog post can wander. A book asks for commitment. It asks you to gather decades of memories and shape them into a coherent whole. That is a different level of responsibility. Fear often appears there—not because one lacks ideas, but because the work matters.
I remember from our conversations about The Aleutian Blues that you possess journals, sketchbooks, photographs, and memories spanning continents and decades. The material is there. The challenge is no longer finding content. The challenge is choosing.
When an artist has accumulated a lifetime of experiences, selection becomes harder than creation.
Your statistics tell another story:
- All-time views: 1,455,751
- This month: 15,343
- Last month: 72,324
Those numbers suggest that people are still finding value in what you have shared. The well has not dried up. The audience has not disappeared.
What may be happening is that your inner compass is shifting from recording life to distilling life.
The younger Shamsul filled sketchbooks and journals with experiences as they happened.
The elder Shamsul may be called to extract the essence from those experiences.
That is book work.
And book work often feels slower, less exciting, and more intimidating than writing a fresh blog post.
As for the dreams, I would not dismiss them. Throughout your life you have treated dreams as messages, mirrors, and invitations to contemplation. Perhaps they seem less important now because they no longer arrive as dramatic revelations. Yet sometimes the quiet dreams are the ones that deserve the closest attention.
Perhaps for a while you do not need to ask:
"What shall I write today?"
Perhaps the better question is:
"What experience from my life still contains wisdom that has not yet been fully understood?"
That question could take you back to Alaska, Green Gulch, Ecuador, Sri Lovely Farm, the refinery years, your family relationships, your artistic journey, or even yesterday's dream.
You have not run out of stories.
You may simply have reached the stage where stories are asking to become chapters.
And that is a very different task.
Salam to you, Brother. From where I sit, I see no evidence that the creative river has dried up. It looks more as though the river is slowing and deepening before it enters a larger body of water.
Brother, that sounds less like a casual remark and more like a vision that has been quietly waiting for the right moment to surface.
A retrospective exhibition is different from a normal art show.
A normal exhibition asks, "What have you been working on lately?"
A retrospective asks, "What has your life's work been about?"
From what you have shared over many conversations, your journey has never been confined to painting alone. Your work exists across several forms:
- Paintings and drawings.
- Sketchbooks and journals.
- Travel experiences.
- Spiritual reflections.
- Photographs.
- Blog posts.
- The manuscript of The Aleutian Blues.
- The stories behind the works.
A true retrospective could bring all of these together.
I can almost imagine a visitor walking through such an exhibition:
First, the young art student and traveler.
Then England and the sketchbooks.
The American Southwest and the University Without Walls years.
Green Gulch and Zen practice.
Alaska and the Iceland.
South America and the spiritual experiences.
The refinery construction years.
Sri Lovely Organic Farm.
The Penang artist.
The blogger with thousands of entries.
And finally, the elder artist reflecting upon the whole journey.
What strikes me is that the book and the retrospective do not compete with one another. They may actually complete one another.
The book provides the narrative.
The exhibition provides the visual evidence.
The book tells the story.
The paintings, sketches, journals, and photographs show the story.
Together they become something larger than either could achieve alone.
You used the phrase "final cut," and as someone who has long dreamed of eventually creating a video memoir, that phrase feels particularly meaningful. Not necessarily as an ending, but as an edited version of a lifetime's footage.
A retrospective is not saying, "I am finished."
It is saying, "This is what I have seen so far."
At seventy-five, many artists are still producing new work. Yet there is also value in gathering the threads and allowing others to see the continuity of the journey.
And if I may offer one thought: when that staff member from the Penang State Art Gallery asked when you would have your show, they were recognizing something. People do not usually ask emerging artists about retrospectives. They ask artists whose body of work has accumulated enough depth and history to warrant looking at the whole arc.
You have been keeping visual and written records since 1978. That is nearly half a century of material.
Not many artists possess that kind of continuity.
So perhaps the question is no longer whether there is enough material for a retrospective.
The question may be how to curate it.
Which works tell the story most clearly?
Which journal pages deserve to be displayed?
Which blog entries become excerpts on the wall?
Which photographs accompany the paintings?
And how does The Aleutian Blues fit into that journey?
Those are curatorial questions rather than creative ones.
The creative work, Brother, has largely already been done—over decades of living, observing, sketching, painting, writing, and searching.
Salam. It would not surprise me at all if one day visitors walk through such a retrospective and discover that the exhibition is not merely about an artist from Penang, but about a human being's lifelong search for meaning, expressed through every medium available to him.
You are making perfect sense, Brother.
What I hear is not really a question about posting the chat. It is a question about the difference between sharing a vision and protecting a vision while it is still forming.
There is an old tension that many artists, writers, and seekers encounter.
Sometimes speaking a dream aloud strengthens it. By sharing it, you declare your intention and invite the universe—and other people—to witness it.
At other times, speaking too much about a dream can dissipate its energy. The dream becomes a conversation rather than a creation. One receives the satisfaction of talking about the work instead of doing the work.
Only you can know which of these applies here.
As I reflect on your situation, I do not feel that the retrospective exhibition is a secret that must be hidden. It seems a natural aspiration for an artist with decades of work behind him. There is nothing boastful or inappropriate about saying:
"I would like one day to have a retrospective exhibition that gathers together my paintings, journals, writings, and experiences."
That is simply a statement of intention.
What I might be more careful about sharing is the feeling that the retrospective represents the "final cut" or culmination of your life's journey.
Not because it is wrong, but because life has a habit of surprising us.
You have already reinvented yourself many times: student, traveler, fisherman, construction worker, safety manager, organic farmer, blogger, artist, teacher, seeker. If someone had told the younger man in England in 1978 that he would write over 3,000 blog posts and be contemplating a retrospective exhibition at 75, would he have believed it?
Probably not.
So there is wisdom in leaving some space for the unknown.
Perhaps the retrospective is not the final chapter. Perhaps it is the beginning of another one.
As for posting this chat, I would ask yourself a simple question:
Are you posting it because you need validation for the vision, or because the reflection itself might be useful to others?
If it is the latter, then it may be worth sharing.
If it is the former, you might let the vision sit quietly within you for a while and see what emerges.
My instinct is that there is a blog post hidden here, but it is not necessarily this entire conversation. The most powerful part may be your own realization:
"When the staff member asked when I would have my show, I found myself answering that I would like it to be a retrospective. The answer surprised me. It made me wonder whether my paintings, journals, blog posts, and book are all parts of a single body of work."
That realization belongs to you. It arose from your lived experience at the exhibition. The conversation merely helped illuminate it.
And there is something beautiful about allowing certain dreams to remain partly unspoken—not out of fear, but out of respect. Like a seed beneath the soil, not hidden away forever, but given time to develop roots before it emerges into the sunlight.
Salam, Brother. My feeling is that neither choice would be wrong. The question is whether this vision currently feels more like a seed that needs nurturing, or a sapling that is ready to be seen.
Then I think you have already answered your own question, Brother.
If your intention is to share the process rather than announce an achievement, the conversation serves a purpose. Many people only ever see the finished painting on the wall, the published book on the shelf, or the exhibition opening crowded with visitors. They rarely see the uncertainty, hesitation, self-doubt, distraction, and questioning that precede those outcomes.
What makes your blog unique is that it has never been merely a showcase of accomplishments. It has been a record of the journey itself.
A reader who is struggling with their own creative project may recognize themselves in what you wrote:
- Wondering if they have run out of ideas.
- Being distracted by endless media consumption.
- Feeling intimidated by a larger work waiting to be completed.
- Questioning whether they are still growing or simply repeating themselves.
- Sensing a vision but not knowing how it will manifest.
That is where "Trust the Process" becomes more than a slogan. It becomes a lived experience.
Looking back over your own life, how many important developments arrived before you knew how they would unfold?
The opportunity to join the crew of the Iceland.
The years of keeping sketchbooks.
The decision to start a blog in 2005.
The friendships, travels, exhibitions, and spiritual encounters that later became meaningful chapters in your story.
At the time, each was simply the next step.
Only later did the pattern become visible.
That is what trusting the process often means—not believing that everything will happen exactly as imagined, but continuing to take the next sincere step even when the destination remains unclear.
As for the length, I would not worry too much. Your blog has never catered exclusively to hurried readers. Some will skim. Some will stop after a few paragraphs. A few will read every word. Those few are often the readers for whom the post was meant.
Besides, after 3,381 posts, you are no longer writing merely to attract clicks. You are contributing another page to a long conversation with your readers and with yourself.
So if you decide to post the exchange, I would frame it not as a declaration of future plans but as a reflection on where you find yourself today:
An artist with decades of work behind him, wondering whether the urge to create has diminished, only to discover that the challenge may not be finding new material but gathering a lifetime's worth of material into a coherent whole.
That is a question many creative people eventually face.
And yes, "Trust the Process" seems an appropriate phrase—not because the process guarantees a particular outcome, but because your own life has repeatedly demonstrated that meaningful paths often reveal themselves one step at a time.
Salam to you, Brother. The retrospective, the book, the blog, and even this conversation may all be parts of the same unfolding process. The interesting thing is that none of us, including you, can yet see the finished picture. That uncertainty is not a flaw in the process; it is part of it.
No comments:
Post a Comment