Like many writers, I have wasted countless hours staring at blank pages or flickering screens, waiting for inspiration to overcome me. All writers know this doesn’t work. Though most of us can recount the occasional moment of overwhelming afflatus, when an idea emerges fully formed and we run with it, these are the outliers. Usually, inspiration only happens after the creative act begins: we become inspired after, not before, we write.
I discovered years ago that, to make that supposed magic of inspiration happen, I simply needed to start writing. I set a ten-minute timer, force myself to type with the urgency of a prisoner writing his confession, and somewhere around minute seven or eight, I surprise myself by discovering whatever hidden message I secretly wanted to write all along. I know this, I’ve “discovered” it several times. Yet I keep forgetting, and needing to relearn this important lesson.
How many of us, I wonder, spend our lives wandering largely aimlessly, waiting for inspiration to overtake us? Waiting for God, the universe, or the shared unconscious to speak some message we need, and provide our lives direction? When I watch people trudging through jobs that pay well, but provide no larger satisfaction, or sticking with hobbies, relationships, religions, and other activities they clearly hate, this question always emerges again.
Wandering is a useful activity, I’ll acknowledge. Elijah, the Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed all needed to spend time wandering, searching for that higher message they’d eventually bring back to the nations. An entire world religion, Taoism, is dedicated to attentive wandering, to finding one’s place by encountering new experiences without a schedule. So I never want anyone to accuse me of disparaging the act of wandering.
However, there’s a difference between wandering purposefully, with an attentive mind seeking answers, and traipsing aimlessly through life, hoping something might emerge, fully formed, and give our lives meaning. Modernity has stripped most people of purpose, whether they find that purpose through religion— which continues retreating from daily life— or through worldly pursuits like work, which is increasingly automated. We meander, today, because there’s no destination left.
In my childhood, my parents told me writing wasn’t a pursuit for grown-ups. Most people who aim to become writers flail about and never make a profit, they warned me; so act like a responsible adult and learn a trade. Because they provided no guidance in finding a trade, but also no support in becoming an artist, I became neither. Though I think I’m a pretty good writer, I’ve never made my bones in the field, because I never learned the business aspects of art.
(Full disclosure, my parents eventually reversed themselves and said I was a natural-born artist, and should pursue that. But not until I was nearly forty, and my habits had calcified.)
From a political perspective, progressives and leftists like speaking of systems. You’ll hear them harping relentlessly on systemic racism, systemic poverty, systemic injustice, and the systemic kitchen sink. Conservatives condemn them for this, using the language of individualism and autonomy, but their actual policies swap systems for hierarchies, and urge everyone to find their place on the pyramid. Systems or hierarchies: either way, shut up and comply.
I could continue listing ways modernity fails us. Education, by dividing life into discrete subjects, separates art from business, philosophy from science, and pits these disciplines in gladiatorial combat. Therefore too many aspiring artists never learn the fiduciary responsibilities of art-making, while, as we learned in 2008, too many business professionals overlook the human aspects of finance. Then artists and economists both crash.
As in writing, life doesn’t provide ready-made inspiration. Jesus didn’t promise anyone salvation through abstract belief; he told believers: “Go, and do likewise.” We can give mental assent to anything: I’m going to love my neighbor. I’m going to write this book. I’m going to start my business. But until we do, it doesn’t matter. Our brains respond to the stimuli we give them; we change our brains, and arguably our souls, in the doing, not the rumination.
How many people, I wonder, march through somebody else’s life script, hoping that inspiration will emerge? More than a few, surely, and that includes me. But in life, as in writing, inspiration comes second. We live first, with the mistakes and the uncertainty which life entails, then inspiration follows: clarity and insight emerge from what seems, at first, like chaos. Inspiration isn’t a fully formed idea; it’s the moment we see patterns in life’s mess.
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