and other borrowed ideas about creativity and writing.
This blog is the manifestation of the struggle to overcome resistance, the Steven Pressfield War of Art type of resistance: Resistance to producing art, resistance to doing hard work. By art, I mean any form of creation. There is a commonly held idea that art is this process of dancing with the muses and that great masterpieces spill out of the artist in fits of inspiration.
The reality is generally the opposite; great artists have great routines. The work hard, sitting down every day to exercise their craft. They accept that perfection is impossible and thus shed the burden of sublimity, one of the main sources of resistance. Instead, they do the work and ship it out to their audience, even when it’s bad. Eventually, it becomes good. To be clear, the great artist strives for constant improvement, not perfection.
This is not to say that inspiration is not valid or that one shouldn’t learn to see and appreciate gifts from the muses. This manifests as countless times that I have been on an adventure or wandered along a thought path in my head, realizing how excellent it would be to document the experience on this website. In my head, there are hundreds of posts on this site. You can see the disconnect in technicolor: a couple of false start blog posts, a neglected website and very little to show for the maelstrom of ideas in my head.
It’s all too easy to point this out relative to how hard it is to act upon it. I know what I should be doing, but one of the hardest things to overcome in the human experience is our resistance to doing tasks that have less immediate reward. Night after night, I visualize myself sitting down at the computer, editing photos, polishing posts, and shipping. But then I think of how I need to really nail down the website design first, and to do that I need the perfect logo, and to do that, I need the perfect concept, and to do that… perhaps I will just allow myself another four hours of phone distraction first. Let me hole up in my cozy den of immaculate denial, the place where I can do all the wrong things under a carefully crafted pretense of justification.
Night after night, I inch closer to nowhere because this path of inaction is asymptotic. The end goal is never reachable. The only way to arrive somewhere is to take an entirely different path.
Here we are today, at this fork in the road in a yellow wood, realizing with such clarity the obvious nature of our situation, as if just awoken from a lifelong stupor to realize we have been stuck at this crossroad, unaware of the need to make a decision, let alone which decision to make. Perhaps we should skip either path and scramble up that bluff to the east to see what the view has to offer.
Good post.