Then Take Your Hat
It is immensely satisfying when you are able to pull an entire creative idea from just a flicker of a moment —perhaps even a single world or phrase you, or someone else, utters. In those moments, you feel creatively powerful. While you’re in the throes of such imagination, it provides you with a certain confidence: “If I can create from something this small, I should never have trouble coming up with ideas again!”
It doesn’t work that way, unfortunately. Echoing last week’s post about being in “zones,” just when you think you’ve unlocked something, it proves to be just another inconsistent flash of heightened competence.
I’m hardly one to bemoan anything that ends in a completed song on the other end, though. You may or may not be able to pump the next one out in the same manner, but whenever your efforts lead to something, it is a victory of the highest order. A lot of your work doesn’t go anywhere, requiring that you understand failed efforts help build the future work, too. While that might be true, if you’re constantly relying on those less-tangible results, things quickly turn depressing.
A friend of mine is a video game designer, and I remember him telling me several years ago about a game his team had just released. As a major gamer myself, I naturally had a lot of interest in the particulars. I asked several questions concerning what he liked about the process, what was difficult about it, etc.. I was surprised at the answer:
“I think the best part is that I finally got to see one of the games I worked on actually get finished.”
We don’t see all the work that goes on under each other’s hoods. The point isn’t just that the work you see is a byproduct of a whole bunch of work you don’t, but rather that sometimes the mere completion of something is the most important aspect of the whole enterprise. My friend said exactly zero things about whether he thought the game was good or not (reviews were mixed), or if he enjoyed working on this particular project, or anything like that. Maybe there comes a time when “completion” is not an acceptable, singular barometer of success, but it’s clear that sometimes it is. Talking with my friend became a lifelong lesson in appreciating the results, no matter how humble those results may or may not be.
This has been an enormous gift for me as a (song)writer. So much of what I do has relied on completion being something worth celebrating. It’s an acknowledgement of your own life’s work, throwing something else on the pile as you careen uncontrollably towards the end of your life. Do I wish my books and albums sold thousands of copies? Yes. Have they? Absolutely not. But before I desired the sales, I desired the creation. I have succeeded at that part. Succeeded quite well, actually.
I visited Walden Pond this past week. And while it’s tempting to wax overly philosophical about all the Thoreau/transcendental themes therein, the element that I want to touch on is the mention of how Henry David Thoreau was only known locally during his life. And given that this was a man who would walk 8-10 miles in the snow to keep “appointments” with specific trees he had friended (which as an aside, rules), my guess is that not all of the local celebrity he had accrued for himself was of the positive kind. Surely a portion of his peers thought him crazy.
I imagine that Thoreau might agree about the whole value-of-completion thing. As the ever-defender of Simplicity, Thoreau would no doubt understand that additional validations —certainly those that involve approval from the wider civilization— are mostly dead ends. Or as Ron Swanson would later say, “Don’t start chasing applause and acclaim. That way lies madness.”
Thoreau’s version is probably phrased in many different ways across his writing, but I particularly like a line from his poem, “Conscience”: “Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.”
Maybe such discourse is the haven of those for whom external gratification is lacking. Maybe it serves as some type of consolation prize to tell ourselves our work is important, that it has merit, and that, perhaps most of all, it is worth doing. I ask questions like this often when it comes to the work I spend a lot of time on, but fail to see proportional results in external ways —books, albums, journals. And when I feel these things becoming unruly, I hear Thoreau’s words of “simplify, simplify” regularly ringing.
Though, as ever, I rarely have a definitive answer to provide, I will offer that a constant pursuit of simplicity has the capacity to isolate. And even in the cultural touchstone of Thoreau’s journey into nature, it’s important to understand that even in those Walden years, he was hardly a hermit. Sure, he lived in the cabin, and wandered the woods by himself befriending trees, but he entertained, and regularly went into town to spend time with others and shop. Someone who loved spending time alone, but recognized that he needed to commune with others, too, in order to survive. He was less a hermit and more just an introvert who lived in the forest for a few years, and who really, really liked walking.
Though that message of simplicity might not always mean to destroy everything you are down to the studs, it does echo that a creative act might be enough on its own, hardly needing additional validations to be considered essential. And much like my game designer friend, the completion of that act might be as good as it can possibly get.