The reason artists are often called “crazy” is that the two states of creativity and insanity are really degrees of the same thing; few people talk to themselves more than artists need to, and more talking to yourself than that starts to get dangerously close to being lost in thought, otherwise known as “crazy.”
Most people have a boss with deadlines and job descriptions they have to fulfil so they can’t see how much that format is making them work, because even entrepreneurs know it’s much harder when there’s no external deadline imposed. But at least an entrepreneur has a client they’re servicing, but the reason they find marketing the hardest part is the same reason art’s difficult; there’s not only no boss, there’s no customer and the job is pure open space. As an artist you can’t even go to work until you decide how big your canvass should be.
Athletes might bemoan their hours spent training, but most artists would trade them that feeling for the agony of finding it difficult to create. I get a lot of mock hate-comments from artist friends who can’t figure out how I can do other writing and these pages every day by 7am. When your thoughts hold you back creating is very very hard indeed. I remember that sense well.
It’s terrifying to start a piece of art because you have a lot of notable things to think about. You have big, public ways to fail. If you’re an author you’re probably comparing yourself to literally the very best people in the world. If you’re a painter you’re worried about $2,500 in paint and canvass you have to invest before you can even try to sell it. If you dance you’re worried about injuries and being a musician on the road has all sorts of potential pitfalls. It can easily make you crazy if you do too much thinking and too little creating.
We’re all such harsh critics. We could still have our opinions and yet talk to people with the approach we’d use with them a kid, where we’d have fewer expectations and where we’d want to be more encouraging. But as adults we make it painful to show personal things. We offer our negative opinion; our corrections. And even if they’ve paid us for that opinion, it still hurts them to hear voices of nonacceptance. And so creating art is hard. The climb is high and the fall feels long.
What’s important for the artist or any other person to remember is that these distances we’ve climbed and these heights we fall from all exist only within our imaginations. You’re not linear. You didn’t advance and then fall back; you expanded and then expanded again. The courage to create work is hard enough; the courage to show it publicly is even more precarious. These are victories not failures. These are what every great artist experiences. It is simply the act of moving past our fears and into an act of creation.
We tend to think that when things are painful we must be doing something wrong but we only feel that way because there’s a cult of feeling good when in truth you wouldn’t even be able to sense feeling good without feeling bad to compare it to. So we must embrace feeling unsettled and wounded too, lest the art of our lives be shallow and hollow.
Artists spend very little time actually physically creating their art. What they do is spend time doing is observing life and then capturing poignant, worthwhile moments of it in art so that we too can benefit from their keen observations. Maybe they see something funny, maybe it’s what lead them to no longer be racist, it doesn’t matter; their only job is to place it in the world for us to find in the format we personally understand things in, whether that’s dance or painting or any other form.
Artists would benefit if they treated their art more like work, but before they can do that they must have enough respect for themselves that they actually feel genuinely motivated to live up to their own deadlines. If an artist is excited about what’s next then it makes sense that they’ll be excited to complete the project they’re working on, and that’s what gets the deadlines met; not a boss, not a date on a calendar–a genuine desire to finish so that more can be created. That’s a lesson the rest of the work-world can learn from successful artists.
Find what matters about your work even if that ends up being your co-workers having better days so they go home to their kids happier. As long as you feel genuinely motivated to create that positivity by doing what you’re doing, then the doing of it won’t feel much like work because it won’t be. It’ll be your life. It’s time you started actively living more of it. I’ll be better for everyone.
peace. s
Scott McPherson is an Edmonton-based writer, public speaker, and mindfulness facilitator who works with individuals, companies and non-profit organisations locally and around the world.
Following a serious childhood brain injury Scott McPherson unwittingly spent his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and the self. This made him as strange to others as they were to him. Seeing the self-harm people created with their own overthinking, Scott dedicated part of his life to helping others live with greater awareness. He is currently a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB, where he finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.
You’ll see overweight men keeping their suit jackets on to hide their bellies if they’re out for lunch with an attractive co-worker. You’ll see large-breasted women constantly re-pulling their cardigans over their breasts in a pointless attempt to conceal them. If a girl thinks her bum is too big she’ll try to hide it with long tops and coats. Short men avoid standing near tall ones if they’re trying to impress someone.
Just as you’re pulling your sweater down over your butt or standing behind a piece of furniture that conceals your gut, everyone around you is busy doing the same thing. The desire to be accepted by the group is a very human thing, but language and advertising have whipped an otherwise healthy human drive into a crazy over-drive that has 99.9% of people worried most of the time about some aspect of their physical selves.
You’re trying not to criticize your least-loved body part as a part of the weekly meditation we started yesterday. Make it easy today by focusing your attention outward instead. As you walk past each person try to figure out what they think their worst quality is and see if they work to hide it. If you don’t see them hiding it then that’s not what they think is their thing. The younger the person the more they’ll be inclined try to conform, so don’t watch octogenarians looking for a lot of signs of ego.
First you helped Mom mix things and that was fun but you wanted to grow. So then you got to heat things. Eventually you matured enough to be able to chop things and you’ve had so much fun doing that you’ve entered cooking school. You wouldn’t think a couple words like “cooking school” could be very ambiguous, but like all words—they are.
As you advance through the school each year your dishes and their creation becomes more nuanced and detailed as you can add things learned from both experience and ongoing education. Every year you add more, every year the bar for success gets higher. So does the pressure, but you accept that as the heat that goes with the kitchen. Yeah it makes you bark more at your fellow chefs and it really can make you sweat but you came here to succeed. This is a test you’re really serious about and you’re dedicated to doing what it takes to pass.
Being attacked for working hard and being good at something tends to upset people and so you’ll get defensive when they attack you. You’ll attack back. You’ll spend some time going over their cooking and judging it. It can turn into all kinds of ugly and it often puts people off their food.
“You don’t?” You’re lost. “Then who does?”
