i tend to start in the middle

was watching some stuff about toyota on youtube

been thinking about processes lately. Particularly I’ve been stewing on the idea that being an author, or a painter, or a musician… is less about you creative output, and more about managing the creative process that produces that output

“The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.”

― Robert Henri

What do I produce? One way of looking at it is the artifacts. Tweets, essays, books. But in some sense these materials are the exhaust of the process. And I feel I’ve been overdue for some time now to zoom out, see the big picture and look at my process. What is my process? I feel a flinchy aversion to describing it, as if describing the process will spoil it somehow. Something about tripping over your own feet. And maybe another part of it – maybe the stronger part of it – is some embarrassment about the nature of my process

I tend to start in the middle – I tend to wake up each day and open up Twitter and see what people are talking about, and often I get some ideas along the way, sometimes some of those ideas are excellent and end up inspiring something good. This is a decent strategy maybe 80% of the time, but sometimes it starts to feel tapped out and I feel it’s time to go deeper somehow, maybe start by reading some books, or…

I wrote somewhere recently that I experienced a great relief when I realized that a bunch of my minor misery was downstream of a misunderstanding. Particularly, this was because of a faulty metaphor I was using – I was describing my notes as “full of false starts”, which is a sports metaphor that doesn’t actually apply to the creative realm, where there is no starting gun and no particular finish line. Rather, my notes are full of partial sketches, or to put it tautologically, my notes are full of notes!

I am now curious to know what other misunderstandings I’m needlessly suffering from.

✱

I still haven’t fully internalized the fact that I now make a living ‘doing whatever I like’. In several ways this is a childhood dream come true, and yet I don’t wake up every morning ecstatic about this. And I think this – the disparity between my internal psychological state and the reality I inhabit – is something of a ‘failure’. Not something to be ashamed or upset about, but something to investigate with gentle curiosity. Maybe I should call it something else. It’s something of a muddle. Why am I not happy to be living my childhood dream? Why aren’t I leaping with joy and delight every minute, or at least the first thing every morning? Part of it, I think is some kind of “survivor’s guilt” – I’ve ‘made it’, yes, to some degree, but many others who are ‘deserving’ have not. And I feel that ‘owe it to them’ to make something of the chance I’ve been given. “Don’t waste your life, Stark,” said Yinsen with his dying breath. “Earn this,” said Cpt. John Miller to Pte. James Ryan with his. And every day I am always thinking about ‘the essays I ought to be writing’, which fill me with some amount of dread. It’s a lot to live up to. It’s a lot of pressure. I probably put too much pressure on myself.

Of course, if the roles were reversed – and I remember very clearly when I was in the trenches of my own battered psyche, struggling to survive day to day, if you had asked me what I would say to one of my kinsmen who made it – I think I’m genuine when I say, I hope they’re happy. I hope they’re living their best life. Their joy brings me joy. I’m glad that they thought of me, but I don’t want to drag them down with my worries. But that’s the thing about real kinship. We each want the best for the other, and we each want to worry for the other where the other would rather that we fuss less. The question, of course, is how to do it with skill, with grace.

There’s also a kind of funny paradox where… being heavily burdened with the perceived obligation to do something tremendous, makes it difficult to actually do it. Wonderful things often have a bit of mischief and recklessness about them. We must make sure to honor the ancestors, the fallen, the lost – but not every moment of every day, not at the expense of living our lives. That’s not what good ancestors would want. So it dawns on me that some of what is going on here is… poor ceremony management? A part of me worries that if I simply let go of all this tension, that I might then become some sort of irresponsible, escapist, avoidant, derelict… vagrant. But having written this out, it becomes clear to me that this is something that would benefit greatly from a little bit of compartmentalization. I could do some kind of monthly ceremony to honor the others. Maybe weekly, even. I just created a monthly calendar event. Makes me think I should add other things to it.