Combatting "Resistance"

Hello, my friends! 

How are we all doing out there? I hope that you are creating as best as you can! The new year has started and as resolutions go— New year, new you...right?

For me? I am feeling pretty angsty about it all. Or as I've come to call it "Resistant", with a capital "r." I've been showing up to my work, yes, and working toward my goals, yes...but there is still a bit of paralysis, resistance and clunkiness. And in talking to my art friends, they are feeling somewhat same thing. 

Knowing that I have goals, deadlines and accomplishments to—well—accomplish, I thought back to a book my mentor gifted me that has help me push pass some of my hang ups about my art and my creative life. With all of these feelings cropping up, and being a solutions-based person, I decided it was time for a revisit.

Introducing— The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. A book that my high school theater teacher assigned to his classes, he gave me a copy as I was making my way into the creative sphere, at that point as a professional dancer and musical theater artist.

This book has reshaped and rewired my brain around the thought of being a creative and what it means to push through the "war" that all artists are destined to wage with, what Steven Pressfield calls, Resistance ("self-sabotage, procrastination, fear, arrogance, self-doubt"). Though I am halfway through a reread of Pressfield's book, here are some quotes that I've highlighted to share with you.

“The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.”

Just show up. Show up. Show up. This is, sometimes, the hardest part. As a perfectionist myself, I know I try to wait for the "perfect" routine to recreate the "perfect" environment to create the "perfect" work but I can't think of all that. I just need to sit down and meet the work. This is a bug war I wage with my anxiety and perfectionist brain and it is a great reminder to just "work."

And once you sit down to try your hand at whatever you set out to do, this next quote comes into play:

“This is the other secret that real artists know and wannabe writers don’t. When we sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us. The Muse takes note of our dedication. She approves. We have earned favor in her sight. When we sit down and work, we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings. Ideas come. Insights accrete.”

Below there is an interview where Steven Pressfield spoke about the Muse and how, we as artists function as sort of conduits to the creative—the ideas, sparks of inspiration, and art making being funneled into, and channeled out of us due to our dedication to sit and create. When we sit, we tell the universe we are ready to receive that spark. 

"Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It’s a gift to the world and every being in it."

When asked to say a few words about the word "art" in the interview below, this is what Steven had to say: "In many crazy, mysterious ways, it's the highest form of a human gift that one can give to other human beings..." 

When you remember why you create art, and whom its for, I think it helps tap you into a different sense of being and purpose. Art is the gift we give to one another, and I know we all understand and feel that on a molecular level—that is is the highest and most precious gift we can give to other human beings...especially the small ones in which we create for.

So as my predecessor, Lee Wind, used to say—"ILLUSTRATE AND WRITE ON!"