Daniel Batten: Why You Have No Choice But To Follow Your Passion

Image from awesome talk on Talent + Passion here.

I was going to write a big post today responding to Kadie's challenge post, and talk about how, because it's so easy for me to lose faith in a project, I spend far, far more time putting my passion off for another day, when I have the time/energy/inspiration required -- and how that approach is ultimately hurting my art practice.

But then I found this brilliant summary of all the things by Daniel Batten:



(Originally posted by Daniel Batten at SpokenBliss.com.)

Have you noticed how many people there are that are doing things they don’t enjoy, saying “I’m just doing this for a short while, and then I’ll be able to…”

Sometimes this is true. But if you are still doing things you really don’t enjoy after three months of becoming conscious you don’t enjoy what you are doing, then I’d suggest you are kidding yourself.

The problem with kidding yourself is that it makes you into someone that you can’t trust. And as soon as that happens, you will also stop trusting – your ability to realize any goal – your talents – your integrity.

That’s a pretty big consequence. So how do you stop yourself from self-decepetions? That’s a good question – and one which I’ll answer,

But first, to help you root out all such self-deceptions from your life, lets look at 3 all-too common examples of how these self-deceptions manifest.

1. An entrepreneur starts a business because she loves x, and wants freedom. Three years later, she is operating the business (which she hates), doing very little of x, and has less money and less freedom than she had as an employee.
2. An employee says “I really don’t enjoy this job, but I’ll do it for now because it pays off my mortgage”. Twenty years later, he has switched job 7 times, got a few promotions – but still doesn’t really enjoy the work, and never feels that he has enough of a financial buffer to do what he loves.
3. An artist takes the plunge and “does what she loves” but doesn’t earn much money from it, so carves out 30-40 hours a week to do itinerant work to support what she does until she “makes it big”. Each person is living life from the standpoint of “I will be happy when…” (I get the house/ boyfriend/ job/ IPO/ big account/ ….). But even if for example the entrepreneur does hit pay-dirt – so what? For 10 years, she has practiced putting on hold what she loves – and so this is what she’s become an expert at.

Even if this person decides to give back by becoming a business mentor – without a lot of self-enquiry, she will only be able to mentor other companies to follow the script she followed. Seek whatever you want in this life – but know that the minute you say “I will be happy when…” you have lost something precious.

Whatever you practice is what you will get better at. Practice the guitar, and you will get better at the guitar. Practice putting your dreams on ice, and you will soon be an expert at putting your dreams on ice.

The remedy is that you must follow your passion. Do you see how you really have no alternative? It is too dangerous not too. We think that we will get financial gains and progress for doing “good enough” for a time. But trying to live a life without our passion is like saying, “I’ll just drive this car for a while then I’ll put some fuel in it later.”

Without fuel, we go nowhere fast, and so we end up coming slower as well as having less fun. A lose-lose. We end up pushing a car around, huffing and puffing, rather than relaxing and letting the fuel power the car while we relax.

So if you want happiness as an “end goal” that means you need to practice being happy, and stop practicing things that make you unhappy. Put fuel in your tank by daring to do what you are passionate about, right now.

Stop it, Daniel Batten. Stop being so awesome right now.

If you want to read more from Daniel Batten, check out his site, or go read this article as it originally appeared on SpokenBliss.com.

Challenge #21: Passion Is A Choice

Here's the thing.  Passion is a lot like love.  At first you fall in, head over heels, you can't help but be consumed with it.  Then slowly, over time, and with every obstacle you are forced to cross during your career, the feelings that were once so strong start to diminish and fade.  Then one day you wake up and have zero desire to have anything to do with what you were once so passionate about.

That's why passion is a choice, not an emotion.

Sure the happy lovey-dovey endorphins swimming through our brains are great to kick start us on our journey, but if we rely on those emotions to carry us through our career we're in for a rude awaking.  Every artist has those days where they roll out of bed and want nothing to do with their work, and suddenly have no idea what they are doing with their life.  Things start to close in around us and feel bleak and desperate.  But we have to keep going, because passion is a choice, not an emotion.

Emotion is what tells us we'll never be good enough, strong enough, talented enough, so what's the point?  Passion on the other hand requires a choice to say, "F!*# it, I'm doing it anyway," even when we don't want to, even when its hard, and even when we would rather be anywhere else but working.

I'm not going to lie, I am a chronic project non-finisher.  I get really excited about a project, get about 60% of the way through it, and then loose steam and move on to something else.  I constantly rely on my emotions, and when they begin to wane I loose interest and quit.  I can't even begin to express the number of boxes and boxes of half finished pieces of "something" lying around my studio.

Through the years I've laughed it off as a goofy personality trait, "haha, you know me…" But as I get older I'm starting realize what a serious problem this really is in my life.  Sticking with something just until the going gets boring and then bailing out is a terrible way to live a life or conduct a career.

I don't give up on my marriage because not every single moment is as exciting as the day we met, because I know that love is a choice I have made.  I have chosen to love this person.  Some days are fantastic, and some days I want to flush the toilet while he is taking a shower… but I love him because I have chosen to.

So why do I give my art career any less commitment?  Sticking with something just until I'm bored, never lets me truly accomplish anything.  I don't want to look back on my life and see a lot of false starts and half finished projects.  I want to be able to look at my life and say, "I DID this, I DID that."  Not, "I thought about doing this, or I started doing that, but you know…"

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People writing this blog every week is hard.  Half the time I'm pretty sure nobody reads it or could care less if I ever write anything on it ever again.  But I'm still here, and I'm still plugging along because this is my passion and I am choosing to embrace it for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, wether exiting or practically boring me to death.

So this week I encourage you to ignore your emotions and keep going.  Wether you were thinking about throwing in the towel on your creative career because it just doesn't seem to be working out, or you just can't seem to find the energy or motivation to finish that project you've had sitting in the closet for a month now.  Choose passion.  Choose to live a life you can look back on and say, "That was me! I DID that!"

This Vlog Brought To You By Nyquil (Wreck This Journey Week 4)

Being sick sucks. Trying to make a vlog while being sick . . . well, let's just say it leads to some interesting results.

Wreck This Journey is back in all its contemplative cold-medicine-drugged excellence, and this time I brought furbabies along for the ride!

Watch, enjoy, and please excuse me while I go wait for my nose to start functioning again.



Don't worry, even in my sickness-induced haze, I didn't forget the pictures.

Even when I'm sniffly, I try to end it on a good note. Thanks for listening, guys.

Why My Art Degree Isn't Worthless Like Everybody Thinks

Since Monday was a holiday, I know I should be posting a challenge up today, but I really needed to write this blog post for multiple personal reasons today, so this is what you get.  Lucky you.

Don’t mind me while I climb up onto my soapbox….

Maybe it was Kate's "Fight For Art" post, or maybe I've just had about as much crap as I can take this week; either way I have pretty much had it up to here (imagine a hand to eyeballs motion there) with the number of blog posts and newspaper articles circulating right now about the arts and creative fields being one of the top 5-10 most useless degrees at college to study. According to HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE and HERE and probably a hundred more places I didn't link to, the message I am getting from society is basically this:

"Don’t study art, it’s worthless; spend your time learning more important things, things that will make you lots of money."

 

First of all, you basically just told me that you think my degree is worthless… thanks.

Also, you are making the assumption that the value of my degree and the education I received is proportionate to the salary I will be making after graduation.   I can see how this may seem logical to you, but the two really have nothing at all to do with one another and I’d appreciate you not confusing the two.

Furthermore, (such a great word, don’t you agree?) I’d like to see you try and make it through your first semester of art school and see if you don’t change your tune.

I am sick of art students being painted as this lazy bunch of college students who just wanted to avoid taking math classes and sit around all day gluing together pipe cleaners and playing with paint.

I don’t know how intense your accounting class was, but has anyone ever broken down in tears crying in the middle of class because their work didn’t meet the standards expected of them?  Have you ever been graded on something you can’t simply study for or learn out of a text book? Have you had to create work without any guidelines or rules or knowledge of on what criteria you are being graded and judged?  Have you ever had a teacher hate your work because they didn’t like the color orange?

Listen people, every degree is hard. I’m not saying the fine arts are worse; I’m just trying to make the point that it’s not all sunshine, butterflies and flowers for us.  Which brings me to the point of this rant.

Why I think fine art degrees are so important and shouldn’t simply be passed over as some sort of third-rate, lazy-ass, worthless degree:

1) Art school fosters 
higher levels of creative 
thinking abilities.

This is the obvious one.  But in this day and age creative out of the box thinking is what is moving our country forward.  Art students understand that to get a result you have never gotten you have to go somewhere you haven’t been before.  That is the only way to move any industry forward.  Creative, innovative minds are what push our society into the future, and I don’t think it’s asking too much to assign a little bit of value to that role.

2) Art school teaches you 
how to embrace and handle 
feedback (good and bad).

Putting yourself out there in the world is difficult, but it’s even more scary if you’ve never had any experience opening yourself up to critique like that before.  If art school knows how to do anything well, it knows how to beat the crap out of your emotions until you grow a thicker set of skin and learn how to embrace the feedback, accept it with grace, process it, and grow from the experience instead of simply being traumatized by it.

3) Art students know how 
to push through the crap 
to get to the gold.

Every art student, no matter what year of school they are in, understands the value of pushing past the initial surface of an idea and digging down deeper to the root of the thought.  They know that the first several sketches of an idea are never going to be the best, so they keep pushing, keep digging further and further until they have expelled the obvious and are left with the essence.  

4) Art students understand 
the cost of business.

While you were busy drinking with your buddies at the bar in college, just about every art student was home eating Top Ramen noodles, or not eating at all.  Why?  Because we spent all our money on the art supplies we needed to complete a project to get a grade to pass a test so that we could graduate.  They didn’t just come free with the price of tuition.  Did your free history tests teach you about how much it costs to operate a business?  Did you have to learn how to budget for a project and work within that set budget to complete a project to the best of your ability?  Then when it’s all said and done did you have to sit down and figure out how much to price your work at so it would cover your time, labor, and cost of materials?  Probably not.

5) Art students understand 
how to present themselves 
and their ideas.

If you were one of those kids who liked to sit in the back of classes, blend in and hope that the teacher never noticed you existed… you probably didn’t go to art school.  For one, most art classes rarely ever had a “back of the room,” we were always sitting in little circles for some reason.  Secondly, if you DID manage to sit in the back of class, you were going to have to stand up and present every piece you made during the semester in front of all of us at some point, so going unnoticed would pretty much be impossible.  Art students become masters of the presentation.  You have to know how to get up there and quickly and professionally present what you did, why you did it and why you think it’s important.  That takes practice and art students get it by the bucket loads.

6) Art school teaches you 
to have an opinion and to 
be passionate about it.

It is impossible to go through art school without learning to form passionate opinions on one thing or another, it’s how we create art.  Every piece you make has to come from somewhere, and even if you go into a project just so-so on an idea, the amount of time you have to spend shaping the piece and putting it together automatically grows a strong bond between you and the subject matter.  Art is all about shedding light onto things that we as a society are intrigued by, want to understand or investigate.  Art school forces artists to think critically about the world around them and form passionate opinions about how their work can speak to those issues and bring about change or understanding to the world through them.

7) Art school teaches you 
that not everyone will like 
your work - and that’s ok.

The world isn’t like a biology test, there isn’t typically one right answer and then a bunch of wrong answers, it’s more just a mess of muddy grey.  Sometimes people will love what you do, and then other people will hate that very same thing.  Art school makes you very aware of this fact early on and teaches you that no matter how talented you are, there is always going to be at least one person out there who hates what you do.  You can’t change their minds, you just have to learn to ignore them and keep working.

8) Art school teaches 
you good work ethic.

It is impossible to just show up on test days for art school.  You are either there every day working in class (and out of class for hours on end usually), or you don’t have a finished piece to turn in on critique day.  If you do decide to slack off and skip class and not work at home and turn in some crappy half ass project, you then have the consequence of having to stand up in front of all your peers and show it off,  you can’t just quietly hand in a test paper to the teacher.   I pulled more all-nighters trying working on art pieces than I ever did studying for exams.

9) Art school takes 
theory into reality.

Most degree programs can talk theoretically practically for their entire programs, art school immediately takes you from theoretical to practical application.   You can’t just be an armchair creative in art school, you are forced to actually live your craft, discover exactly what it means to you, and carve out your own unique voice.  The irony of art school is that no one can really teach you how to make art, it is something you have to discover for yourself.   It can teach you the techniques and the classical ideas, but it is up to you to take those tools and figure how to use them in your own unique way, no one can do it for you.

10) Art students are 
masters of failure.

Nobody wants to fail - in fact, in most degree tracks you are strongly encouraged not to.  Students are told to get straight A’s and 4.0 GPA’s so that they will look great for the future.  But As and 4.0 GPAs don’t teach us a damn thing about failure.  Art on the other hand is all about failure.  No artist has ever made anything without first failing miserably at it, getting back up again and trying it once more, and sometimes a thousand more times until their piece finally comes together and works.  As human beings it is impossible for us to grow without learning how to fail, because it is only through failure that we can truly test the boundaries around us and push them.  Playing it safe never got anybody very far, and those who are afraid to fail are not going to have the courage to push our society toward greater things.

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So if I'm a boss, looking to hire a new employee, do I want someone who sat in the back of class, followed the leader, did what they were told, got decent grades and that's about it… 

Or do I want someone who has highly attuned abilities for creative and critical thinking, knows how to form an opinion and professionally present it to a group of people, clearly outlining why their idea is important.  Someone who can handle any feedback you throw at them, can keep pushing a concept past the ordinary into the extraordinary, but understand the costs behind the project as well.  Someone who understands not just how something would work in theory, but how it would work in the real world and isn't afraid of hard work. And most importantly someone who isn't afraid to put their ideas out there and possibly fail because it's so new and different and innovative?

If you ask me… creative studies students don't sound half bad. 

But what do I know, I graduated with an art degree.

It Takes Two (AKA How To Be Married To An Artist)

Christo + Jeanne Claude

Frida Kahlo + Diego Rivera

Georgia O'Keeffe + Alfred Stieglitz

Being married to a creative person isn't easy.   Our emotions tend to run close to the surface, we collect strange objects that we tell our spouses will "one day" come in handy for a project we're sure, and we spend ridiculous amounts of time and energy working on projects until they are just right, only to then turn around and tear the entire thing apart and start over because we just weren't "feeling it." 

We study hard to fine tune our craft and work for months or years on end to get into the public eye, and then once our big moment is upon us are utterly terrified of anyone seeing our work.  

Not only do we need a partner who can encourage us to keep going when the road seems to all but have vanished before us,  we also need someone who can be there to tell us when we are straying off course and losing sight of what is really important.

But mostly we need a partner who pushes us to be better, to take risks, and to dig deeper.

I'm not quite sure my husband knew what he was getting into when we got married.

Sure he thought, "Oh, she's so creative," but I'm pretty sure he thought that would translate as "Oh, she'll have good taste in decorating", or "Free art for the walls, score." Not, "Dear God, it's 3am and she still hasn't gone to bed because she's having a panic over her show and almost threw all the work out the window because she is having last minute doubts about her talent," or, "You want me to do what while you photograph me for your project!?"

But over the years he's adapted and gotten pretty damn good at it.  I mean now he hardly bats an eye when I ask him to photograph me stuffed in an old trunk holding a tiny candle and hiding my face.  Or tied up from head to toe in an old abandoned building.  (Which worked great until the cops showed up because someone had seen us and reported that a man had kidnapped me and tied me up and was photographing me…)

And in that time I've learned a couple things about being a good creative partner from him.

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1) A good partner makes you do your own work.

You know back in school when they made you do those terrible group projects and one person always just took over and pretty much did the entire thing while the other people in the group just sat around twiddling their thumbs and throwing paper airplanes at each other?  That's not what we're looking for.  A good partner doesn't just do the work for you, they come along side you, encourage you, but make you do your own god damn work.  Every creative needs to struggle a little in their work, it's what tells us that the work is worth doing.  If it was easy everyone would be making it.  The struggle lets us know we are on the right path.  If your partner comes along and makes the road too easy because they think they are trying to help us, they can really keep us from forming the passion and connection to our work that we can only gain through the struggle.

2) A good partner believes in you 
more than you do in yourself.

The honest truth is that almost 99% of creatives never really feel talented or good at what they do.  Most of us are self-conscious, and constantly doubting our skills and talents.  A good partner can see through all that.  They can see the talent we are afraid to show off, and they can help us see it as well by pushing us towards situations or people that will be able to reflect it back to us.

For example, my husband once sent an anonymous email to a major art publication saying he had come across this great young artist that he thought they should take a look at.  A week later I got an email saying they were going to run a 5 page article on me.

3) A good partner can keep calm 
and problem solve.

During almost every creative project something always goes horribly wrong.  It's just fact.  At that moment, while I'm running around having a panic attack because I think my creative career is ruined and that I'll never work ever again, my husband is quietly sitting in the corner making a plan.  It never fails.  I freak out and he calmly saunters in, breaks down the problem and offers a list of possible solutions that I couldn't see because I was too busy freaking out.

4) A good partner takes you seriously 
when nobody else will.

One of the things I love most about my husband is that he has always taken me and the work I do seriously.  As a creative people we are belittled right and left as we go through life. People say things like, "Do you actually make any money doing that?" or, "You just sit around and play with crayons all day, why don't you go and find a real job?"  A good partner doesn't see your work as frivolous or silly, they can see the importance that it has to you and take it as seriously as you do without jokes or laughter or belittlement.  They would never tell you to go get a "real job," because they know you already have one.

5) A good partner cares more about you 
than about your work.

It's easy to get lost in a project and lose your bearings in life.  You forget to eat, you stop sleeping as much as you should, and bathing becomes very low on your list of things to do.  A project can also consume you to the point that your mood changes, and you start acting like someone you're not.  The project can become so important that nothing else matters.  But a good partner never looses track of you, the you that you are supposed to be.  And they care more about making sure that you are happy and healthy than about the well being of your project.  They can see where passion has stopped and obsession has set in and know when to intervene to keep you safe physically and mentally.

I think I'll keep him :)

Slow Gin and Other Stuff I Learn About In Bars, or How Process Can Help Us Calm the #%@&! Down

One night a week, I bartend. While I can't do any fancy bottle twirls (yet!), I have had the chance to hear my fair share of funny bartending, bar attending, or needing-attending-to-while-in-a-bar stories. Last night, I heard a pretty funny one: a new girl was working behind the counter a few years back, and one of the more experienced bartenders was hanging out and enjoying his employee discount. When a customer ordered a shot of sloe gin, the new girl grabbed the bottle of regular gin and proceeded to pour very slowly. (Ba-dun-chhh!)

While I'm not sure that "slow gin" tastes much different than its quickly-poured cousin, I do have a strong suspicion that the speed at which we go through creative processes makes a difference in the outcome. And I'm not the only one: artist Tim Slowinski (aptly named, good job Tim's parents!) started the "SlowArt" movement in order to combat our increasingly accelerated "fast food" way of observing and consuming the world and making art:

"Art is a way of life, a method of being, a way of perceiving the world."  

It was this concept of art, not only as a process of creating objects, but as a way of life and perception that was to become the basis of SlowArt. Essentially, under SlowArt, the life process itself is a devotion to art, all life energy is directed and focused as an expression of art. In a SlowArt life, activity that appears unrelated to art is engaged only as a support structure for art. Art is not an occupation under SlowArt, it is a vocation and devotion. (SlowArt.com)

Read all about it here. And it's not just for the artists -- art itself can observed and consumed using the SlowArt principles, which has in turn led to the creation of Slow Art Day, an annual event where participants are invited to deliberately and unhurriedly interact with a select pieces from a museum's collection, before spending a lunch together discussing and exploring their experiences in greater depth.

In fact, it's not just for the traditional confines of "art," either -- the Slow Movement can be applied to almost any creative process -- whether cooking, or parenting, or watching a movie, or taking a vacation, or doing a scientific experiment. Its core principle of "Slow" instructs us to resist the urge to rush past what we're doing and get twenty bazillion thousand other things done just because we can, and instead spend that time focused on the moment at hand, allowing ourselves to be fully present and open to receive the experience.

Sounds good, right?

Challenge Number #19: Reality Check

Put on your PJs, lose the make up and grab the Ben & Jerry's people,  things are about to get real.

I'm not going to lie, most of my creative career has felt a lot like running around really fast in the dark praying that I'm not going to run into a brick wall and knock myself unconscious.   I don't really have a solid sense of direction or even purpose all the time, often opting for the Indiana Jones "make it up as I go" method of living.  This has served me well over the years.  It may not be the most efficient way of living, but it was sort of, kind of, working out.

Till it wasn't.

Here's the problem, while running around at Mach 10 in as many directions as possible, making life up as I go, sounds like a great plot to a spy novel, it was a really inefficient, unproductive, exhausting way of living.  I just couldn't see it.

As our world get's more and more advanced and we discover more and more technologies for helping us do simple tasks more quickly and efficiently we slowly begin to fill up our lives, one moment at a time.  We work our jobs, we commit to extra curricular activities, we eat out instead of having to take the time to come home and cook a meal, let alone take the time to shop for the groceries to make it.  And then in our down time between events we scour our media pages, scrolling through pages and pages of Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook updates.  Filling every once of spare time finding out what our friends, or most likely people-I-only-met-once-but-am-somehow-facebook-friends-with are doing, thinking, saying, eating or just posting for the hell of it.  We've become the poor little frog, slowly, over time, being busied to death without even realizing it's happening.

The Pressure Of Making Art For A Living

Brothers Matt and Jesse Brass are working on an amazing series of films right now entitled "Making Art".  I just had to share part three of their series entitled "Pressure" where they interview artist Preston Farabow about the pressure of making art for a living.   If you like this one, make sure to check out the other videos in their series!

Happy Friday!


Pressure: Preston Farabow from Matt Brass on Vimeo.

If you want to know more about the series click here for a great behind the scenes interview with the brothers about their project that was featured on artsology.com!

Proper Practice Prevents Poor Performance, and Other Obnoxious Inspirational Notions We Really Wish Weren't True

Shut up, chalkboard.

This week's challenge is one of those simple-stupid things that seem so easy, so obvious, that they barely deserve mention. But let's be real -- how many days so far this week have you actually set aside 30 minutes to create art??

If you just had a stream of protests and excuses come screaming to the front of your brain about why you haven't been keeping up, don't worry -- you're not the only one. If you're like me, it's probably because you're busy -- or at least you believe you are. Or maybe it's because you totally set the time aside, but when you sat down in front of that empty screen or canvas, you couldn't think of anything to make.

Let's rewind. When you first read Monday's challenge, did it remind you of anything? Maybe something that involves people clad in spandex with their smiling promise of rock hard abs in six weeks? That's right, we're coming up on Obnoxious Inspirational Notion #1:

1) The brain (and creativity) is just like any other muscle, and can atrophy without regular use.

The good news here is muscles can always be rebuilt - though if you've been away from something for a long time, it's probably going to take longer to get back into the swing of things. That's okay.

The bad news is, the brain is technically not a muscle. So yeah. Take that, stupid metaphor!

Despite its Biology FAIL status, Notion #1 makes a great point -- all that creativity isn't just going to flow out of your fingertips if you haven't been training yourself to direct your creative energy their way. But before you start the artist equivalent of a Rocky montage, I want you to remind yourself that if you're finding it challenging to actually make art everyday, it will get easier as your creativity muscles grow. As that devilish belle Scarlet O'Hara once said, "Tomorrow is another day." Do your best today, and then do your best tomorrow. Don't let one day's failure because the thing that keeps you from trying again. I promise, you got this.

Why Do We Glorify Being Busy?

Whenever somebody asks me "Hey! How's life going!?"  I almost always without fail reply.  "Super busy, but great!"

I do this because saying "oh you know, things are super laid back and easy right now." somehow seems equal to saying "I'm a lazy bum who has no work ethic and just sits around on my ass every day."

Where along the way did we as a society suddenly decide busy is better, that busy means you're successful, and that busy is a good thing?

Now don't get me wrong, I was a self employed college student for years… I understand busy.   I know there are seasons of your life where it just can't be helped.  But I do think a lot of times we don't understand or value personal downtime as much as we should anymore.

But like Kate was talking about in Monday's kick ass post, as creative people, busy can simply suck us dry and take over our lives.  We NEED that down time to relax, recharge, be inspired and have quiet time to work.

No one is going to carve out that time in our lives for us.  It has to be a choice.  We have to choose to say no to one more item in our schedule and protect our personal creative time.

It comes down to this… would you rather lead a busy life, or a productive one?  Busy people spend their lives running around looking like they are being productive, but in the end they never spend enough time in one place focusing on any one task to be productive.  Productive people spend their time fiddling in their garage with stuff that interests them until they've built the worlds first personal computer. The choice is yours.  :)

Here's a short awesome video from Thrash Lab talking about this very same thing!

Challenge #18: Just Do It

Last week, we pondered the question, "Is an artist still an artist if they're not creating?" While I don't pretend to have the answer to that, I do have an answer to the general feeling of malaise and confusion about life that may result from a failure to make art -- and it's GENIUS! Are you ready??

Just. Do. It.

Sorry Nike, I know that's kinda your catch phrase and all, but really, it applies to so much more than athletic footwear.

Sometimes (okay, all the time), I don't feel like taking the dogs for a walk in the morning. But I do it anyway -- sleepy, grumpy, and generally zombified though I may be -- and by the time we get done with our walk, I'll have woken up, the dogs will have used up some of their crazy energy, and I'll get to come home feeling productive. Not to mention that getting up out of the computer chair every now and then is actually good for me. But when that alarm clock starts screaming at way-the-F-too-early o' clock, the only thing that keeps me from smashing the snooze button with the vengeance of a thousand She-Hulks is one simple phrase: just do it.

Art creation can happen under similar circumstances. It certainly did in college, at least for me -- the teacher would give an assignment, and I would work on it. Usually leaving most of the work until the last minute, but still, I would work on it. Whether I felt relaxed and inspired, or if I felt stressed and exhausted, I still did it, because at the end of that project was a grade, and that grade could decide the future of my degree.


"Real life," as many of us post-college noobs have taken to calling it, comes with the same demands -- it can just be a bit harder to understand how our actions will affect our future. Being in school gives us an artificial sense of movement and accomplishment, with graduation acting as the finish line. Once you're out of school, there aren't any finish lines, or checkpoints, or advisors waiting for you to come in for a degree check. You're just existing, same as everyone else, and you have to be accountable to yourself when it comes to setting and accomplishing goals.

Therefore, dear reader, this week we're challenging you to stop waiting for a teacher or a client to put the pressure on you before you create. JUST DO IT -- take 30 minutes every day to work on art. Even if you don't finish a piece this week, you'll still be a lot closer to finishing than you were when you started. Now grab your swag, and get creating!

My Own Personal Abyss

The lights have been out at the Abyss since last Monday, in the name of detoxing from our constantly-connected world. I'll be honest -- I haven't been the best patient. In my defense, our detox week coincided with my attempt to buy a house (to all you homeowners out there, I don't know how you did it without going insane, but hot dang I applaud you for it), so the interwebbies became even more present then usual in my life.

That said, even just taking a break from the blog caused a real shift in my schedule and sense of availability. Writing and/or editing two to three posts a week, keeping up with Wreck This Journey, and making sure to get my collaboration sessions on with Kadie all take up significant chunks of time in my life. While its a worthwhile way to spend my time, once I add in work, household maintenance (dogs aren't going to walk themselves), and socialization (friendships aren't going to take care of themselves either), I end up feeling like there's not a lot of time left in my day. This isn't the first time we've talked about the struggle to find time for everything, but today I want to share a sneaking suspicion I've had for a while: that it just can't be done, period.

Cue Scrubs' theme song:



True story, brah.

Here's the thing: I've always thought of my creative work (writing, drawing, sewing, painting, etc.) as the thing that I do after I get everything else done. The thing that will arise out of the void created by having "nothing to do" -- my time abyss, if you will. It's why I identify so well with the definition of "abyss" that we highlight here on the blog -- the primal chaos before creation.

Here's the problem: when exactly do I find myself with nothing to do? There is always something that I could be doing -- whether it's helping out family, or grocery shopping, or joining into that super-interesting conversation on Facebook about whether the latest fan theory on Labyrinth is awesome or SUPER-awesome (and if you just missed that reference, you absolutely desperately must go rent it, or Netflix it, or stream it, or whatever the kids are doing these days. No excuses.) -- and thus my expectation that time to be creative will just show up in the form of empty, unscheduled hours on my calendar has left me with very little art produced in the two years since I stopped having to make art for grades. For that matter, even when I was in school, I still wouldn't make art outside of what was assigned. Back then, I attributed it to inspiration fatigue -- but these days, I'm not so sure.

You've probably guessed where this thought process ends up:

Is an artist still an artist if they aren't creating?

 Good golly Miss Molly, I don't have the faintest idea of how to answer that question. The short version is "Yes?" with a question mark because while I wholeheartedly believe everyone has the creative capability to be an artist, and therefore if you identify as an artist, who am I to say differently; but at the same time, being an artist is arguably choosing to make the creative processing of inputs - aka, what most people think of a "creativity" - your life's work. The long version is "Maybe . . ." followed by a long descent into rambling stress about how labels don't really help anyone anyway and how even DaVinci needed to eat, but then again, if I really was an artist, wouldn't I just feel compelled to make art all day long, everyday, and maybe I'm really just in the wrong field . . . You get the idea.

But here's the crux of the issue: instead of existing in a void where I have time to make nothing but art, at the moment I exist in an abyss devoid of art creation -- and that makes me sincerely question what the heck I think I'm doing with my life.

I'm reminded of the stories of the first trans-oceanic explorers, sailing off towards the horizon without any proof that there was going to be something waiting for them out beyond that infinite line of earth meeting sky. It takes faith to embark on such a voyage: that the water will give way to land, that the void will eventually become repopulated with something, and I'm not interested in turning back now -- but in the meantime, when it comes to art, I feel like I'm piloting a very small skiff into a vast and immeasurable darkness, where my inability (unwillingness?) to make time to create leaves me without oars or sail. That's a frightening thought.

I know, it sounds melodramatic. And in some ways it is -- there are far worse things in the world than being busy with family and friends and work and day-to-day life. But if we're going to truly change the way the creative world, and the world at large, currently does business, we have to stop only talking about the pretty, happy, pulled-together front that so many of us use to disguise how genuinely lost we are, because of some feeling that we don't 'deserve' to feel lost. That kind of pretense helps nobody.