The beauty of sheer effort

Neera

I fell in love with the phrase “the beauty of sheer effort,” when I first read it in Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird.

I was reading Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird perhaps for the millionths time (that should essentially mean that I know every single phrase by heart, but no, something grabs me every time).

To give you the full context here is the excerpt from the chapter:

Six or seven years ago I was asked to write an article on the Special Olympics. … Things tend to go very very slowly at the Special Olympics. … The last track-and-field event before lunch was a twenty-five-yard race by some unusually handicapped runners and walkers…

She was a girl of about sixteen with a normal-looking-face above a wracked and emaciated body. She was on metal crutches and she was just plugging along, one tiny step after another, moving one crutch forward two or three inches, then moving a leg, then moving the other crutch two or three inches, then moving the other leg. It was just excruciating. Plus, I was starving to death. Inside I was going, come on, come on, come on, swabbing at my forehead with anxiety, while she kept taking these two- or three-inch steps forward. What felt like four hours later, she crossed the finish line, and you could see that she was absolutely stoked, in a shy, girlish way.

…

I kept replaying the scene of the girl on crutches making her way up the track to the finish line – and all of sudden my article began to appear out of the grayish green murk. And I could see that it was about tragedy transformed over the years into joy.

It was about the beauty of sheer effort.

Isn’t it true for all of us creative types too? We are not technically handicapped but each one of us feels inadequate in some form. Like the little girl on crunches, we move forward incredibly slowly. Two to three inches at a time.

We put in hours and hours of work into each day. Days turn into months and months turn into years, but we keep going without getting anywhere.

Sometimes we get stalled. But then we pull ourselves up and keep going.

And one day we cross the line.

That’s the sheer beauty of effort.

Photo by Ariel Pilotto on Unsplash

Does walking unleash creativity?

Neera

A lot of glories have been attributed to the humble act of walking by writers and thinkers. William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, and Henry David Thoreau were all avid walkers.

Henry David Thoreau has written,

“I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements .”

“Scratch a writer and you’ll find a walker.” Tegan Bennett Daylight said in an interview titled, The Writers Room.

Tegan was discussing how daily walks are a vital part of her writing process as they assist in the unlooping of her thoughts. Though she uses walking as a way to stay fit, this particular form of daily movement has had a positive impact on her writing craft, especially when she encounters creative problems,

“Almost everytime I go for a walk on my own, it brings me the solution I was looking for.”

Tegan believes that walking allows you to become distracted enough from yourself to let the creative play start to happen. She is not alone in that belief.

Now there is a scientific study to prove this wildly held belief. Stanford University did an elaborate study that proved that the simple act of walking increases creativity by a whopping 60%. That’s just walking, anywhere, not only in nature. Even on a treadmill.

But. another separate study by the University of Munich found the color green also has a positive effect on creativity. Now, combine the two – walking and green – and you’ve got exactly what a walk in nature has to offer.

Australian author Sarah Schmidt often documents her daily walks by taking photos and posting them on her blog. The often eerie and unsettling images mirror the mood of her equally eerie and unsettling (though engrossing) debut novel, See What I Have Done.

The photographs complement the mood and imagery of Sarah’s work, thus supporting her creative process, but the walk also grants her the time to contemplate her novel on a deeper level.

“I’m one of ‘those’ writers. You know the kind: fidgety, annoying, needs to walk out their thoughts, sees something along the way and thinks, ‘now that’s interesting. I wonder if…’ takes photos of it and then just stares at said photo for hours. I’m also desperately, heavily reliant on nature to help me write.”

Author and renowned nomad, Sarah Wilson – who’s lived out of a suitcase/backpack for eight years – offers the following insight into movement.

“I know this: It’s in movement that we find so much joy. It’s in movement that we create. It’s in movement that we fend and grow and connect more readily with big minds and reach more important touch points […] Studies show babies are most settled when rocked at the same pace at which a woman walks. We are calmed by the primitive memory of our moving ancestors.”

In a New York Times piece about writer and nomad Bruce Chatwin, the following line was offered, “Movement itself might be the ideal human state.”

John Muir recorded in his journal, “I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”

Writing could be described as a conglomeration of personal experiences, observations, external stimuli consciously or subconsciously absorbed and the occasional random insight.

These different sources of information settle in our brains, as Ann Patchett describes, like a “mental compost.”

It’s through the act of walking that an author is able to shake free this compacted knowledge and discover something useful.

This can only occur, however, if the mind is unclamped or enters a non-thinking state.

“Go outside. Don’t tell anyone and don’t bring your phone. Start walking and keep walking until you no longer know the road like the palm of your hand, because we walk the same roads day in and day out, to the bus and back home and we cease to see. We walk in our sleep and teach our muscles to work without thinking and I dare you to walk where you have not yet walked and I dare you to notice. Don’t try to get anything out of it, because you won’t. Don’t try to make use of it, because you can’t. And that’s the point. Just walk, see, sit down if you like. And be. Just be, whatever you are with whatever you have, and realise that that is enough to be happy. There’s a whole world out there, right outside your window. You’d be a fool to miss it.” – Charlotte Eriksson

Photo by Nicolas Cool on Unsplash

Your Day Job

Neera

Austin Kleon talks about it in his book “How to Steal Like an Artist,” Elizabeth Gilbert has a chapter about it in her book “The Big Magic,” Hugh MacLeod explains it with a beautiful example in his book “How to Be Creative.”

Basically, the message is the same.

It will take time for your art to make you enough money so that you can live off it. In the meantime, you need a day job.

“A day job is which pays you well enough and doesn’t rob you off the all energy so that you can’t even create. It gives you connection to the world and a routine. A day job puts you in the path of other human beings. Learn from them, steal from them.” – Austin Kleon

Hugh Macleod has Sex and Cash theory.

“The creative person basically has two kind of jobs, one is the sexy, creative kind. Second is the kind that pays the bill. One year John Travolta will be in an ultra-hip flick like Pulp Fiction (“Sex”), the next he will be in some dumb spy thriller (“Cash”).

Soon you accept it, I mean really accept this, for some reason your career start moving ahead faster. I don’t know why this happens. It’s the people who refuse to clean their lives this way – who just want to start Day one by quitting current crappy day job and moving straight on over to best-selling author … well they never make it.” – Hugh Macleod

Elizabeth Gilbert takes it one step further.

“I have always felt like this is so cruel to your work – to demand a regular paycheck from it, as if creativity were a government job, or a trust fund. If you can manage to live comfortably off your inspiration forever, that’s fantastic. That’s everyone’s dream, right? But don’t let that dream turn into a nightmare. Financial demands can put so much pressure on the delicacies and vagaries of inspiration. You must be smart about providing for yourself. To claim that you are too creative to think about financial questions is to infantilize yourself – and I be you not to infantilize yourself, because it’s demeaning to your soul. (While it is lovely to be childlike in your pursuit of creativity, in other words, it’s dangerous to be childish.)”

Many creative souls murder their creativity by making it their prime source of living too soon.

Many artists go broke or crazy because they have this idea that they can’t create unless they dedicate themselves exclusively to their creativity.

And when they can’t pay their bills and they have to take a “job” they descend into resentment, anxiety, and aversion to art. That is when they say goodbye to creativity forever living a life of resentment

Elizabeth Gilbert kept her day jobs until her fourth book got published, way after the insane success of Eat Pray and Love.

J. K. Rowling worked when she was an impoverished single mother while writing the Harry Potter series.

Toni Morrison used to get up at five o’clock in the morning in order to work on her novels before going off to her work in the publishing industry.

I had to wait till my financial responsibilities were over and I had access to my superannuation before I took the plunge into my creative life.

What you can do is to find a job that can pay you well enough to pay your bills and leave you with enough time and energy to invest in your creative pursuits.

You can also look for a job that can teach you certain skills you need towards your creative endeavors.

A library job can teach you how to do research, graphic design job can teach you how to make your website look pretty and copywriting job can teach you how to sell things with words.

The worst thing a day job does is take time away from you, but it makes up for that by giving you a daily routine in which you can schedule a regular time for your creative pursuits.

Figure out what time you can carve out, what time you can and stick to your routine. Establishing and keeping a routine can be even more important than having a lot of time.


Two Lists

Neera

Make a list of all your excuses and then put them on your pin-board.

Then make a list of all the reasons why you want to be creative and put it next to your Excuses List.

Whenever you feel disheartened read the Excuses List first. If the reason for your dismay is something new, add it to the list.

If it is something already on the list, read the Reasons for Being Creative List and get back to work.

The lists could look something like this.

Excuses List

  • I am not good enough.
  • I will never be good enough.
  • I don’t get time; housework and family take up all my time.
  • Holidays break my routine.
  • It is so hard to get back to routine.
  • There is so much to learn. I will never be able to learn it all.
  • Until I know a substantial amount I can’t become an authority on it.
  • Unless I am an authority I can’t share/publish/write.
  • Other people know so much more and are better writers.
  • No one will ever want to pay for what I write.
  • I am good for nothing.
  • I can’t keep up a simple routine.
  • My work is not original. So many others have already written about it.
  • My body is not the same. My eyes get tired looking at the computer. I am getting old.

Reasons for Being Creative List

  • My creativity gives me a purpose in life.
  • It is the reason I live.
  • I am happy when I am creating.
  • I write for myself. I am writing a book I want to read.
  • My creative projects are better than mindless TV, endless cleaning and unnecessary shopping.
  • I know I am getting better each day.
  • I can see that, over time, I have written so much and some of it is really good.
  • I am learning new things every day.
  • Creativity keeps my mind active.
  • I am meeting like-minded people through my creative pursuits. They are the kind of people I want to be friends with. They are the best assets I have.
  • Creativity is my second nature. It is god-given and I have it as much as any celebrated artist does. All I need is to practice more.
  • I could write, I could draw and I could paint like a child. I can do them all as well as an adult.
  • With my creativity, I am bringing the best out of me and the best out of others.

Photo by AbsolutVision on Unsplash

What would you read to someone who is dying?

Neera

This is what Annie Dillard had asked Alexander Chee’s class (writer of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel). She wanted this to be the standard for their work.

What a great question to test the quality of your work. The ultimate goal to strive for.

When I think of a dying person I think of my mother. I sat by her side the whole night, alone, holding her hand. We didn’t say much because she was drugged, but if she was awake what would I have read her. What would she like to hear?

She would have like to hear stories from her past. Nostalgic stories. Of good days. Maybe of a bad one too. Because they always ended in something good. I have written some of those stories but they wouldn’t have cut it. They lacked emotion and they lacked hope. Writing for a specific reader help bring more life to your writing.

I would have read her Helen Garner’s, The Spare Room, Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie and John Green’s The Fault in our stars.

I would have read her poetry too. Poems she liked and used to recite to me. Then there were songs. Songs I heard her sing when I was a little girl. There is something in songs and poetry. They touch your heart.

She would have enjoyed Dylan Thomas’s poem “Don’t go gentle into that good night.” She was a fighter after all. She fought till her last breath.


This Pin is from Gregg-Graniteville Library

Walking

Neera

A lot can happen when you go walking. You see the autumn colors in its full glory – crimson, yellow, orange, pastel green splattered in the backdrop of suburbs.

You see amazing sights, sights you have not seen before, just around the corner from your home.

You stop to admire a tree at a distance that has just shed its bark. It looks majestic in the sunlight, its strong and shapely limbs hold the foliage proudly. You say to yourself, my god, what a beautiful tree! Suddenly you feel the urge to go near it, to touch it, to sit in its shade. Just as you walk towards it three kangaroos go past it, hopping in full flight.

You start walking in their direction hoping for a photo opportunity with them. You find them half an hour later, resting at the cozy spot. They hear you coming close, they stand erect, their ear straight, listening to the crunch of your shoes on the gravel. You take a picture and then walk away somewhat scared that if they decide to come to you, you have no chance to outrun them.

You hear the sound of the wind, whispering. Sometimes howling. Birds call you. If you stop long enough they start talking to you. You can’t understand of course, but they are telling you something. But you are certain that with time and practice you can learn their language, just as a seasoned wanderer does when he ventures a foreign land.

You see wild rabbits racing across the ground. You see the sun radiating its glow in all directions. You see treetops, drifting clouds, the shape of the distant hills. You reach the foot of a quarry which you didn’t know exist just a few kilometers from your home.

You notice the path you have been walking so far was the horse track.

A story starts taking shape in your head. You pull out the notebook you brought with you and start scribbling. You capture the thoughts before they vanish. Words come faster than you could write them. You have never been this clear and eloquent at your desk.

You find a rock to sit and write. No, you don’t write. You receive. You receive what the creator himself is giving you, in the middle of its own creation, nature. That’s why he summoned you here.

You sit there until there is no more to receive. You feel complete. Your soul is content. Sun has gone down. Birds are returning to their nests. Ants are coming back too. You get up and start walking back to your home. A little differently though. As if you not walking on the ground but just a little above it.

You are happy. Really happy.