Like with friendship and with dating and with love, I’m amazed by the way books and poems and movies and music enter stage right when I need them most. For most of my life, I’ve navigated the world under a deep-seeded pretense that worthiness is measured in perfection and organization. A pretense about life and relationships and creative work being rooted in beauty and purpose and order, all of which could only be truly attained by swimming the depths of brooding darkness.
In her book Big Magic and in several interviews afterwards, Liz Gilbert managed to make a mess of my pretense and launch me into a soulful, confusing, creative, painful healing process. Here are some of her beliefs, many of which continue to liberate me of concrete definitions, rights, and wrongs.
On Creativity and Paradox
Creativity is sacred and it is not sacred. What we make matters enormously and it doesn’t matter at all. We toil alone and we are accompanied by spirits. We are terrified and we are brave. Art is a crushing chore and a wonderful privilege. Only when we are at our most playful can divinity finally get serious with us. Make space for all these paradoxes to be equally true inside your soul, and I promise—you can make anything.
Stop expecting the paradoxes to resolve themselves. Stop demanding that it all be tidy, because it isn’t going to be.
In a moment of deep contemplation recently, I did have the question come to me, “How comfortable are you having a few deep, open wounds?” And the question itself made me relax. Just hearing that. “Oh I see, that’s the assignment. I thought the assignment was to heal everything” And weirdly, paradoxically, when you start being comfortable having open wounds, the wounds heal.
On Creativity Born From Darkness
I blame the German romantics. There came to be a vogue — and we’ve never really lost that vogue — of very, very pretentious young men in black clothing talking about how hard it was to make things and then taking laudanum and writing dark poetry about it. And it established a kind of a chic that has never really gone away. Like two hundred years later, everyone’s still holding that up as the model of what an artist is and it’s not my personal belief that that’s what art has looked like for most of human history.
On Fearlessness vs. Courage
I have no interest in becoming fearless. I have met a few people in my life who I would describe as fearless and they were sociopaths. You look in their eyes and there’s something missing. There’s a reptilian horror movie going on behind. They are dangerous to themselves and to others and to you and you should cross the street when you see them coming.
I think we live in a culture that really celebrates fearlessness. All language around fear is this very Navy Seal kinda “Kick fear in the ass” and “Punch it in the face.” It’s so violent. And I also know that anything in my life I have ever fought has fought me back.
So the difference between fearlessness and courage is fearlessness is I feel nothing and courage is I feel everything and I’m doing this anyway.