8 Clicks from Nowhere ䷀

Dispatches ⌂

Tag: practice makes perfect

Chapter List

  • Race Day

    I’m a distance runner. I’ve noted this on numerous occasions, and suggested on every one of those occasions that running has been a great metaphor for many life lessons.

    Hold onto your hat.

    When I travel, it’s race day.

    No, not for running. (At least not always.)

    See, for every race a runner runs there are often months of training. If I’m running a half marathon in August, then in April we’re starting hills, planning weekly increases in distance and working out a strategy for all the other bits that go into a successful showing.

    Race day is the last day of a very long era of practice, honing, patience, suffering, and growing.

    When I travel, it’s race day for my hobbies: my art, my photography, and often my writing.

    I’ve just spent months out in the neighbourhood pointing my camera at interesting suburban things, colourful patches of trees, and posed pictures of my dog. I’ve hunkered down with a sketchbook and inked endless mundane nearby objects, strolling people, and familiar landscapes. I’ve sat in the field and written essays, penned journals, and compiled updates for social media.

    All of that is practice.

    And then I step off a plane, camera strapped over a shoulder, pen and paper ready, and a blank journal stuffed into my backpack—ready to perform. Ready to take the best photos I know how. Ready to sketch things I’ve never seen before. Ready to scribble notes about experiences and impressions into pages for later perusal.

    Race day is the last day of a very long era of practice, honing, patience, suffering, and growing, even if that is about running… or art and hobbies and habits.

  • Duty Demand

    I suppose many people read this site and assume that I’m some sort of creative workhorse, never stopping, never resting, burning the candle at both ends (as they say) and churning out endless works of creative brilliance powered by vast, sweeping moments of inspiration granted from on high.

    Heck, nothing could be further from the truth.

    I squeeze in a nap almost every day. I play video games whilst prone on the couch. I take the dog for long meandering walks in the park. I doom scroll. I sit idle while I try to work up the motivation to do something besides sitting idle. I’m just a guy.

    I struggle with ideas. I run plots over and over and over in my head and then decide half way through that the story is going nowhere. I carry around empty notebooks. I put ideas in point form into my phone and then forget what I was trying to say on the topic. I tear up terrible paintings and use the back sides as scrap paper. I noodle on my musical instruments and ignore the pieces I should be practicing while I endlessly tune or wipe dust from the corners. 

    Creativity is a lot of things, but I don’t think I would personally call it a straight line.

    Creativity is a mindset. Creativity is a duty to a long game. Creativity is holding the spirit of making and sharing and inventing and dreaming in your head—and then being ready to push on with the work when opportunity strikes, sure… but it is also habit.

    I am all those things from before but also I block off time every day to write. I keep notes on my phone. I hang those musical instruments near a music stand so I can reach over and pluck them from the wall to play. I have rituals. I have schedules. I have deadlines. I have demands I put upon myself to get the work done through the chaos of life. 

    That’s long game consistency, and creativity often comes simply from getting the work done around other commitments and obligations. Under the category of Duty & Demand I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Fibre Arts

    I have a lot of friends who consider themselves fibre artists, knitting and sewing and quilting and weaving, but if you clicked on this post thinking I had something to add to that conversation I apologize in advance: the fibre I have been thinking about more recently is the dietary kind.

    I think you would be hard-pressed to find a nutrition expert that disagrees with the idea that more fibre in our diets is a positive thing. We all know this, of course, but it’s the actual eating more fibre which has always been the tricky parts. Most fibre-rich foods are definitely not in the category of exciting, tasty, comfort foods.

    But then you get a bit older and you spend some time actually heeding that nutrition advice and, yeah, eating more fibre.  The correlation is not immediate, though. It takes a few days, or maybe a few weeks, and suddenly you just feel better.

    Fibre is a also a great analogy for other parts of life. As we age and develop a kind of mid-life urgency to add purpose and meaning to our fleeting days it’s so easy to look past the important bits of advice and go straight for the tastiest morsels. 

    See, fibre is more than a healthy food, it’s a way of thinking about a part of your life that thinks beyond the moment of gratification. It’s the lesser-palatable bits of effort and practice and pursuit for which we often don’t see immediate payoff, but in a few weeks or years makes the most difference.

    Figuring out what’s fibre and what’s something else, though, that’s up to you.

  • Just Because

    This daily public affirmation has a website.

    Oh, so you’ve figured it out? A little more than forty-odd posts into my persistent writing of these little public missives about my creative explorations  right here every weekday and perhaps you are sitting there pondering the point of two hundred words of indulgent affirmation.

    I could justify it. I could try and convince you that there was some marketable value inherent in such a prospect, despite that most pursuers of profit have moved onto bigger platforms. I could point at the personal brand value of exploratory concepts in words and sounds and images. I could brag about some hidden big-picture strategy towards a long term personal creative goal.

    I could. I won’t. It would all be a lie.

    Why do musicians play scales?

    Why do runners log training runs?

    Why do chefs trial recipes?

    Why do dogs howl at the moonlight?

    The answer is practice. The answer is habit. The answer is instinct and drive and compulsion to create and make and share and then makes some more.  The answer is doing without expectation of audience or purpose or influence or flex. The answer is accountability to self and ideas. The answer is human and even more than that, the answer is universally personal.

  • Warm Ups

    Oh sure, you read this and ask: what the heck? My imposter syndrome flares up like a torn ACL in the middle of a marathon whenever I hit publish on one of these posts.

    All sorts of people are filling blogs, podcasts, video channels, and social media feeds with unsolicited creative insights and rando advice, so much so that when I decide to do something (if nothing else) parallel to that effort it sometimes strikes me as a bit “influencer” —and not in a good way.

    I’ve been writing here routinely for a little more than a month now, tho, and I want to let anyone reading know that if motivations are worth anything at all, I think mine are leaning towards the innocent and genuine.

    I’m not necessarily trying to change your mind, or generate revenue, or glaze clout, or whatever the kids are saying these days. I’m largely using this writing as a warm up, a kind of public morning pages[1]. I’m writing for the sake of writing, and writing metaspective gloops to throw up on a scheduled, deadlined blog is to creativity is as to doing stretches before that aforementioned marathon: not crucial, but a good idea.

    It may feel like I’m jabbering on without any solid bonafides about these topics, but I do think I have something worth saying, imposter syndrome be damned.  And a couple hundred words of jibber jabbering is just what the doctor ordered to my brain limbered up for more important writing.

    Plus, if it turns out to be something useful… it’s already been shared for the benefit of you, too.