What It Is
“It all comes back. Remember what it is to be me. That is always the point.”
Joan Didion
A few questions that have been haunting me recently:
· How do we remain creative — how do we use our voice — while also acknowledging the collective need for silence?
· How as an artist do I stay productive when I know, deep down, that this epoch doesn’t need more, more, more?
· Why do I feel the incessant need to feel productive, and why am I so caught up on being oh-so-proud of what I produce?
· Why is it so hard to remember what it was like to play as a child?
Most of the time my gut tells me the answer to all of these questions is to just. keep. writing. Because I only ever feel the need to be creative when I haven’t done anything at all … and if I sit down at the piano and close my eyes and play a melody with my right hand and a chord with my left; and if I breathe in and out of my harmonica and hold onto a note until my breath is gone; and if I write in my journal like I’m doing right now, all of a sudden all of these questions become secondary and the answers don’t seem to matter much at all.
When I’m in it, I forget about all of the noise and the questions. I no longer feel the “need” to answer to anyone, including myself, and this is when I start to remember what it is; this is when I begin to feel like that boy again, the one who spent hours writing poems, practicing piano, or building Lego cities.
These moments when I’m in it, when I return to the excitement and mystery of truly and simply being, is intimately linked to when I can can forget about myself. In this zone (in positive psychology it’s called a flow state), I’m able to escape the confines of “Samuél” or whatever other idea I have of myself; I become part of something bigger, of something more encompassing than my ego, and the judgmental voices in my head start to dissipate (“it isn’t good enough; get a real job; you’ll never make it; stop pretending”).
This is what I need to remember: it’s only in the act of creation that I can recall what it’s really like to be me.
