☛ The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night, dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here. And don’t be so earnest.
☛ And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
I haven't read The War of Art yet but have had it highly recommended. (Amazon says The War of Art is nothing less that Sun-Tzu for the soul.)
I have read The Artist's Way and even went to see Julia Cameron speak. My spiritual view of the world is a bit more pragmatic that Cameron's, and some of her "spirituality" isn't quite my cup of tea, but I'll say this for her book: When I began reading it, I wasn't drawing. By the time I was half way into it, I was. So, as one reader offering a purely anecdotal response – the s**t works.
One thing is clear: You don't have to suffer alone. If you're facing resistance, realize that many others, great and otherwise, have faced the same. Its poison has even been known to stop a corporation. Just whatever you do, do something.
‣ Art is born in attention.
‣ The reward for attention is always healing.
‣ Anger is meant to be acted upon. It is not meant to be acted out.
Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity
‣ If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), "Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?" chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.
‣ Are you a born writer? Were you put on earth to be a painter, a scientist, an apostle of peace? In the end the question can only be answered by action.
Do it or don't do it.
It may help to think of it this way. If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don't do it, you not only hurt yourself, you destroy yourself. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet.
You shame the angels who watch over you and you spite the Almighty, who created you and only you with your unique gifts, for the sole purpose of nudging the human race one millimeter farther along its path back to God.
‣ Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do.
Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.
Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance. Therefore the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul. That's why we feel so much Resistance. If it meant nothing to us, there'd be no Resistance.
Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles
All quotes found at Goodreads.
I don't remember where I heard it, but someone once said, "No one ever says on their deathbed, 'I wish I'd spent more time at the office.'" Ever notice how in movies or television shows having to do with a particular job or industry it never shows the characters actually working. Because it's boring. Life generally doesn't happen at work. More often, it's happening somewhere else while you're at work. Unless its your life's work, your avocation, then that would be different.
In the end, that's the thing we are living for––the thing that gives our lives meaning. Whether we are writers, artists, musicians, or actors et al, we are thinkers and conceptualizers first and foremost. You are only truly working when you're thinking about YOUR work. Your work is your experience and your gift to the world. Even if no one gets to experience your art, you thought it and it infuses your life and how you think.
So get to work already.
There was a cartoon I saw once that had one's a drawing representing one's dreams and aspirations on one side and on the other us. Inbetween was the yawning pit of hell that represented the internet. Around the corner from my house there's a counseling center that offers help with cyberaddictions.
Few of us can say they don't get distracted by the internet. For many of us it has our nemesis when it comes to a productive creative life.
What can we do about it? Well, here's one idea:
If you need help, there are programs for that. Here's one––it's called SelfControl (logo at left), it's free, and it turns off your internet access to certain sites of your choice for a chosen period of time. SelfControl only limits access to certain sites but if that's not enough, if you need total black out, then there are other apps for that too.
Distracted? I only with there was a SelfControl app for everything else in my life. Whatever, let's do something about it and get back to the important work.
The Optimist: Someone who figures that taking a step backward after taking a step forward is not a disaster, it's more like a cha-cha.
It happens, sometimes,
that things are too much.
Stacks overflow.
Trusses break.
I get that.
What I don’t get is:
how one barrels through.
Where does that strength come from?
How is it fed?
And if it doesn’t appear on command,
how does one hold on, waiting?
Everything is collapsing.
By definition, that means:
nothing remains to be held.
I just discovered this guy. He's a law professor of all things. The above was taken from http://lessig.tumblr.com
The Sylvia comic is from here.
