#081523: Great expectations

Thoughts on finding peace

August 9th, 2023

The easiest way to start an essay is to anchor yourself in space. To describe where you’re sitting (at a square, wooden dresser that has been transformed into a desk) and where you are (in a guest room at the house I have rented for the month, in Ibiza) and if it’s relevant, what you are doing (recovering from food poisoning that, for what it’s worth, knocked me out only for the 3 hours it was present).

The square dresser is facing a wall on which two copies of the same framed print of a skeletal structure, filled in by illustrations of various flower types, hang. The art is not particularly nice, and the room doesn’t have much point of view, but out the window to my right is the most stunning scene.

Lush mountain tops with varying layers of greenery — the kind of sculpted, tall trees you see only in Europe, making way to flat, dusty farmland where exactly one other angular, white box-shaped house is positioned about 6 acres from me. There’s a feeling that is almost biblical about this scene, this way of knowing that over the millennia it has been here, it hasn’t changed at all.

It helps to put yourself in a setting when you’re writing because the process of extracting an idea requires a sort of ascension of the self from the self up into space where ideas float so you can grasp the ones that matters most and pull them back down with you. It takes prioritization to decide which ones are worth bringing down and then rigorous yanking to ground them, but the process is easier overall when there is a container to fall into. Today, I guess that container is at this small wooden desk in the guest room.

Last night, Madeline and I went to bed with stomach aches, and at around 11 p.m., she woke up covered in vomit. When I went down to see her, I threw up too, and from right around then until 2 a.m., we took turns in the bathroom holding our hair back. It must have been something we ate at lunch. She’s napping now, with Mamma Mia on pause and I’m pretty sure I’m entirely better if not just a little weak. Nothing like a brief bug to knock you out physically but to keep your wits sharp. It’s within this tension that often I see the most acute mental space can be found. There’s more room for, and focus on psychic risk. On deciding what is worth bringing down.

I used to think I was a quick adapter but it turns out that while I love change — crave and seek it with fair regularity, the actual transition from one state to the next takes me a long time to adjust into. There is always this initial apprehension, a stubborn desire to stay put or claw into the nearest surface. But this step in the process of bringing creative ideas down is paramount to actually realizing them. It’s like, you go from the feminine free flow of gentle and airy and open and childlike, the fairytale terrain of wonder and fun where the ideas live, but once they have been uncovered, you have to, pretty expediently, return to the intensity of go-mode and to stay there in the valley of work and action to see the idea through — to make sure it has a complete and safe landing.

Expectations

Ironically, this transition from feminine (being) to masculine (doing) is kind of the opposite when dealing in matters of the heart or soul. When I am confronted with a circumstance or situation that I can’t seem to accept as real usually indicates that I’m judging the thing, comparing it to what I think it should be like, or what would be better. I’m stuck in the trap of expectation.

I hold on so tightly and there’s so much force in my grip, but am I even aware of what I’m holding on to? More often than not, it’s an illusion of reality as I’d have liked to see or experience it. A distraction from what is true, what is actually here.

This fantasy can be helpful through especially challenging moments, it can even be invigorating — a sort of fantasy map on which to place your target but the fact remains that in the blunt truth of presence is the only place where one can really begin to make a move.

When I can remember that life is a free fall, it’s effortless to let go. And when I let go, I am free from the ail of expectation — no longer laboring through how I think the-ominous-it should be, more open to and less critical of how it actually is. The sooner I can recognize this, the sooner I can tend to it.

August 12th, 2023

Do you have an easy relationship with patience?I think I fear I will find peace in patience, in the slowing down and waiting as opposed to impulsively doing and that I will lose my focus, get too comfortable and never return to action.

This fear and the way I describe it indicates that I don’t have a good understanding of patience.

That I have internalized it as a sort of inert sluggishness as opposed to an approach. To be patient is not to lose your focus, is not to get lost or caught up or any of that, its more like a choice to not beat the shit out of yourself (or those around you) when it (whatever it is) takes longer, is harder, overall evades your expectations.

Expectations are a thief in many ways. We set them most benevolently from a place of ambition, and I think we often use them as a reminder that we want, that we will act, to achieve beautiful, rich lives of our own making — they serve as markers of our motivation and agency.

What is lost when they are not met? Perhaps confidence, a bit of will, maybe even some of that motivation. But if the thing that gives us motivation can just as easily take it away, how much can it be trusted as an authentic quality to keep close, really?

I have documented at length the unexplained but clearly present funk that blanketed my own July. Only once I arrived in Spain did I realize that I had been caught in a spiral of expectation — that I was witnessing this summer through the lens of last, experiencing it in the past, and coming up disappointed every time it was different. I have only seen one physical pregnancy through to labor, though I’ve endured many as a creative and I recognize in this too that a similar condition can take place when you are comparing the process of past incubations to that of another you’re in, or are approaching.

One of the troubles with stored memory is that so long as you have come out whole from the other side of a former experience, the past becomes romantic, and this romance has the potential to soil one’s chance to be in current attendance, detangled still from the shackle of what will come next and free from what came before.

The same can be said for familiar routines, in particular those that repeat year after year with space between them (like those shrouded in the particularities of the four seasons). They can be a grounding force on turbulent times, an unexpected pathway to freedom in the flail of overwhelm, but I find that it’s hard not to compare one to the other — when they look the same, it’s like Groundhog Day, but surely I am different.

I crave adventure and a cut away from what’s known, but it’s on me to go out and seek it.

August 15th, 2023

I have rarely observed the gap between reality as it is and as I want it to be.

More often, I have assumed that reality as I want it to be is reality as it should be but in accepting it instead as it actually stands, what I find most apparent is how much peace can surface. The way your buttcheeks unclench and the chest knots untie. A sort of calm washes over you and dissolves expectation, melts down the grip of should be’s and defeats the monster of comparison — allowing you, or me, to do the next best thing for this life, real life, not that feigned simulation.

Maybe this process is a form of patience, too.

But it can feel so good to get caught in the simulation!

Praise is cheap fuel, but can provoke creative progress

It never lasts longer than one adrenaline rush’s worth of time and in this way, it kind of reminds me of the trap of validation — how praise can feel so good and how easy it can be to start chasing it once you have tasted it, but how dangerous it is too. Dangerous because when you get caught up in achieving praise, it is so easy to lose your focus — to take your eye off the prize of whatever has afforded you the praise (let’s say it’s your work), shifting your loyalty away from the quality of your work to the validation.

I don’t know why some of us crave praise more than others do, but I know that when it comes, it feels so good. That it’s like any drug that works to the extent that the more I get, the more I want, the more I think I need, and when I am not paying attention to these dynamics, it is so easy (almost inevitable) to misplace my loyalty.

This misplacement is characterized by my turning my focus to the outcome of my creative work — what the response is like, instead of, not even the actual work, but the creative progress of the work.

I am seeing with more clarity these days that to do your work well, you have to, in some way, stay committed to creative progress.

To come up with an equation to “recreate wins” is tempting and wholly achievable. And in the short term, it might even pay off, but it is also how we fossilize progress — by spinning around the work we’ve already done, repeating or iterating upon, or enhancing it.

I think this is how we have ended up with so many entities that produce the same thing.

Take a risk

Praise can be good if it’s used appropriately. It can be motivating and momentum-driving, it can raise your risk threshold, but the thing that’s important to remember is that it is fuel.

Praise is relatively cheap fuel that can get you going but will not keep you going, so by all means, use it when it serves you. Not to fan the flame of your self-image (one way to evaluate whether you’re caught up in validation is by asking: whose opinion of me matters the most to me? I’m not saying it’s the only opinion that matters, but it’s the one that matters most — and without exception, the answer should be your own), but to give you courage to dive into your own vulnerability and to take a creative risk.

To take a risk is central to creative progress: to put yourself out there and do something that is not a sure win, that won’t keep you safely riding the merry go-round but will connect you to the part of yourself that is scared, that has doubts, that questions you.

I think I have spent a lot of time avoiding this part of myself — trying to beat it or make it go away forever yet somehow that gives it more power, gives it the sense that when it is present, when fear and vulnerability have entered the room, they must be heeded to and respected.

In fact these sensations require just the opposite: a mere touching into, a recognition of their presence.

Sometimes in spells of overconfidence, fear that begets vulnerability is a needed reminder, too, that I’m not hot shit. But after the touch and the recognizing, after the shit turns lukewarm the task order is clear: commit to taking the risk anyway.

Fear is always going to come, you know? The more often you introduce it to your wilderness, the safer it will feel.

This is what I feel my daughters at least.

*

By now I am sitting on a wooden chair that overlooks an L-shaped outdoor sofa, set up to watch sunset from the front of the house. I have cramps in both of my pinky fingers, which carry most of the weight of my phone while I’m writing and is where I am writing from now.

The bushes ahead of me are bulbous, and small pink flowers are sprouting from their branches. An orchestra of crickets sing songs over head and three small potted palms line the partition between this space where I sit and a clotheslines for drying. It is peaceful and quiet and it is calm. The minutes feel long, time has stretched into a new shape.

Many people, they say, come to Ibiza to get lost, but there is a great deal of finding that can take place too.