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Welcome to the ELAN Blog - weekly postings of philosophy and occasional opinions. This week is about something we have been discussing in our Artist’s Way class. We have been talking a lot about pathways.
Specifically, how do we know if we are on the right path? In fact, during the first class twelve weeks ago, we shared some of our goals and fears in the midst of confronting the challenge of uncovering our hidden and not-so-hidden talents.
Nestled among the fears listed including fear of competition for our time, fear of guilt, fear of being laughed at, fear of taking our art too seriously, etc. was one that stands out: What if I am going down the wrong path?
What if I decide to spend some time (competing with other things) on a creative pursuit and it turns out to be the wrong direction? The wrong creative pursuit? Two fears, for the price of one! Fear of wasting our perceived precious time and fear of not pursuing some other endeavor that is more worthy.
Like most fears, this one, too, is unfounded and grounded in falsehoods, not truth.
Ray Bradbury, in Zen in the Art of Writing, talks about his drive to write from the time he was a young boy. Teachers told him he had no talent and yet he wrote. People told him it was a waste of time and yet he wrote. In fact, from the time he was 12 he wrote 1,000 words a day.
What drove him to do so? How did he know he was on the right path, despite outward signals from so many sources to the contrary? Did he know, at the age of 12, that ten years later he would finally write a story worth selling? That story, “The Lake,” has since been reprinted dozens of times.
How many of us would have given up long before that? What kept Bradbury at the typewriter day after day until the afternoon when, in his words: “I wrote the title “The Lake” on the first page of the story that finished itself two hours later. Two hours after that I was sitting at my typewriter out on a porch in the sun, with tears running off the tip of my nose, and the hair on my neck standing up...I realized I had at last written a really fine story.”
Ten years! Ten years of rejection, ridicule, competition for time. Ten years of fear. Could you do it? Maybe, if you KNEW you were on the right path, you could.
So, how do you know? A former pastor of mine used to say, you will know when you are on the right path when you can do no other. That is true, but the problem for most of us, is there are too many other things we can do. We are multi-talented. It is not the NOs that get in our way, it is the YESes.
So which YES is THE YES?
I had a revelation in our class last week. We should cast aside the fear that we are going down the wrong path solely for the reason that that which we are drawn to is that which we are naturally inclined toward. Yes, we will have to spend some time on honing our craft. Yes, we will have to share our discretionary time with something we are passionate about. Yes, our family and friends may think we are nuts. But YES, we would be nuts or soon become so if we would fail to honor our true, authentic selves by not pursuing our God-given gifts.
Let me share two examples, fictional as they are. One is a short recounting of a very banal TV sitcom that aired last night. If you saw it, too, you can share in my guilty pleasure (we don’t have to tell anyone else we were lounging around on a Monday night watching trash network TV.) Basically, the lead character was asked to help an ex-girlfriend with her singing career. In the end, he was a true friend and told her the truth. She had NO talent.
Don’t we all secretly wish we had a friend like that? One who would be brutally honest, but in a loving way? One who would save us the time and trouble of pursuing a faulty path?
The truth is, they don’t know either. Success and fame, if that is what you are after, has so much more to do with determination, gumption, stick-to-it-iveness than talent. In Outliers,
