As a new artist, there are a few pieces of advice that you hear repeated to the point that they become banal and almost something to rebel against.
- “Do what you love”
- “Create every day”
- “Show up and do your work”
- “You need to work for 10,000 hours before you achieve mastery of your craft”
- “The thing you are most afraid of is the thing you should do.”
I bet you’ve already tuned out. Or maybe you agree with these statements in principle, but they’ve been repeated so many times that you stopped really thinking about what they mean.
I know that I had. I had started to believe that they were just platitudes. Just something to say when you can’t be bothered to think of anything true…or original. I wasn’t the kind of photographer who takes pictures every day and why on earth would I want to do the thing that scares me the most?
But this summer I did do the thing that scared me most… I let go.
I decided to take a digital sabbatical, a step back from the endless barrage of articles promising 31 easy ways to blah blah blah and number 19 is totes amazeballs. I stepped back from the copywriting webinars, the TED talks and the design blogs.
A little voice had been reminding me that I really wasn’t doing very much work that could be classed as art. I was caught up in a whirl of business tweaks and the endless search for a magic elixir that would suddenly catapult me to where I wanted to be….all without actually learning the lessons that are, after all, the point of the journey.
(And they say that adults don’t believe in fairy tales)
But every time the little voice spoke up, my terror shouted it down. How could I possibly stop? What if I couldn’t pay the bills? What would happen if I didn’t make all of those business tweaks and website updates? The unasked and therefore unanswered question lurking in the back of my mind was, of course, “If I don’t do that, what will I do?”
But, in the end, in a grand gesture of “oh what the fuck!” I decided to do it anyway. At least for a few weeks.
I forgot about growing my business, I forgot about copywriting and I definitely forgot about all of those 31 easy ways to blah blah blah and number 19 is totes amazeballs articles.
What did I do instead? I did the thing that scares me the second most. I sat my butt in the chair every day and I made pictures. I practised.
Practice is my nemesis (and not just because I cannot seem to remember the whole practice/practise distinction and I’m a spelling nerd so obviously everyone would think that I’m an unspeakable moron if I got it wrong).
Practice is my nemesis because it requires such discipline. The years I spent working in Financial Services were most definitely not my own so, now that they are behind me, I have an almost compulsive need to avoid structure of all kinds. To have a daily practice seemed to me like a very inconvenient kind of self imposed structure.
And, so it is. But it turns out that the benefits are tremendous.
Creativity is an elusive thing. It regularly slips through your fingers and evaporates into thoughts about everything else you have to do today, all those tasks to tick off your list.
However, if you force yourself to sit in that chair and create something…anything….even if it’s rubbish, you learn how to sit with the knowledge that the to-do list is there, but it must wait for the thing you have chosen to do today. You train yourself to accept that there may be tasks which do not get done and the world will not end.
It’s really hard to make positive choices in our lives because often we believe that thinking something is the same as doing it. We think we ought to exercise more. We think we ought to make time to paint, or draw or play the piano….but we don’t do it because we get dragged off course by the groceries, or the Twitter notification ping or the latest cute animal video.
I’m an artist. I have chosen to be an artist…not a professional copywriting webinar attendee, or email answerer, or cat video watcher. All of these things must always come second to that thing I have chosen to dedicate myself to.
All of us must make that choice repeatedly…every day in fact. Will we choose our own destiny, or will we allow ourselves to be dragged off course? Will we do the thing we love, or just think about doing it? It’s not an easy choice, it’s not even easy to understand that it is a choice, and that’s why we practise. We practise to understand that our days are made of small choices and, to quote Annie Dillard, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
As I look back on that list of often repeated pieces of advice, suddenly they don’t seem so jaded any more. Perhaps it was me who was jaded all along.