The What to Do

(Any Major Dude Will Tell You, Part III)

Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement.

Don’t just stand there - do something! The spirit of our time is so infected with this logic that wrong-headed busyness gets more dinner invitations than inactivity. Still, paradoxical as it may sound, doing something when you're creatively stuck has its merit.

Someone once said you’re only lost if you have some place to be and some time to be there. Creative blocks are a lot like that. We’re only blocked when we judge our effort as “not enough”. Not original enough, not polished enough, not developed enough and so on. What if we set that judgement aside and carry on?

Jill Badonsky, the author of Nine Modern Day Muses (and a Bodyguard), likes to put it this way: So what? I’ll do it anyway! We resist this attitude only if we need to look good in the eyes of our peers, our audience, our customers. This is not a fear of failure, it’s a fear of the appearance of failure, and it's paralyzing.

Doing something in spite of a creative block means releasing our need to succeed and just doing what we can. Movement is generative. It pushes us into new perspectives, brings new materials into play, and broadens the field of what might be. Of course, you could always do something else.

Tomorrow: Any Minor World