I thought I’d let a season pass and then things would be the same as they were, but the seasons kept going and I kept morphing before I could register it. Too late to restore the past, I’d have to keep forging forward bravely and leave the things that shaped me behind. Like a potter with a heap of lifeless clay, I had to carve until I saw the vision come alive.
Life has found repeatable motions. I go to work. Come back, read, work out, heat up dinner. Recently I’ve been telling my friends I’m trying to be ambitious at my job but also ambitious in my life as a whole: an ambitious friend, partner, writer. Each part requires a consistent slog toward something really soft and ambiguous. It’s hard to tell if you spend more time investing in particular areas that they will have any ‘return’. It’s hard to tell what to prioritize.
These years that passed in a blink were years of striving. Great art made me desperately want to make great art. My friends in San Francisco were dreamers and technologists and artists — I loved the grandness of their visions, the particularity of their desires. I moved my apartments every single year, from a little loft in the Mission to a Victorian in the Marina. Easels were set up and books purchased. Weekly walks by the water, the creamsicle colored horizon. My friends tease me about liking San Francisco, but I think it’s inevitable to have a warped, unrequited love for the place or person that first revealed you to yourself.
The mysterious reward of the human experience is not just to get what we want but to find something worth wanting. Something worth negotiating with reality for. Joy arises from the challenge of exertion, the thorough search to find it.
Still, the world demands effort and follow-through in the smallest of actions. Laundry, workouts, meals, articles, dishes, calendar invites. I hosted a brunch today and 6 of my friends texted me they’d come an hour early to help me set up. Effort shows its face everywhere, in every crevice and I’m grateful for how I’ve begun to see it: a soft light that drapes over every experience. For a sketch to turn into a painting or an idea into lifelong craft, for everything to run in the way it does — requires a great deal of persistence and repetition to generate any magic.
I think about this quote by Annie Dillard constantly:
There was joy in concentration, and the world afforded an inexhaustible wealth of projects to concentrate on. There was joy in effort, and the world resisted effort to just the right degree, and yielded to it at last. People cut Mount Rushmore into faces; they chipped here and there for years. People slowed the spread of yellow fever; they sprayed the Isthmus of Panama puddle by puddle. Effort alone I loved. Some days I would have been happy to push a pole around a threshing floor like an ox, for the pleasure of moving the heavy stone and watching my knees rise in turn.
— An American Childhood via
All the books I’ve read this year echo this sentiment: if you don’t live the way you believe, you inevitably believe the way you live.
So that’s the goal. To live the life I believe in. To keep the faith in my small, precise, efforts, knowing everything adds up in teaspoons. The writing and the heartbreaks, the serendipity and the failures. Such is life. It’s elegant and ugly and hopeful. We don’t get a transcript from heaven telling us what is worth the hunt. The search goes on until you find ideas worth chasing. It’s a gift to be thrown into the game. The hidden beauty lies in figuring out how to play.
PS: Short hiatus as I started a new job… but I’m back! New sections coming soon!
Also… let me know if I should write about having a full time job and writing regularly on the side - a lot of people have been asking about this topic recently given my last post. In all honesty I used to have a really time consuming/stressful time working and writing, but it was worth it to me.
Meanwhile, would love it if you joined our little crew by subscribing/liking/commenting if you’re so inclined. It helps me reach new readers. Thank you!
YES! would love to read about having a full time job!!!
“a consistent slog toward something really soft and ambiguous” is the sentence i’ve been looking for when trying to explain how unknown pursuing creative goals can be. keeping this in my back pocket & remembering i can take it out whenever i want and there’s no rush to shape it (slowly) into something