patience is everything
My lesson for this week has been remembering to enjoy the journey. I know it is so cliche, but it is so easy to get caught up in the pursuit of the next goal, and so easy to be held back by fear of failure. Especially for me, fear of poor performance prevents me from showing up at all. I'm not all that competitive, and I don't care much for being perceived as the best. My problem is that when I am free from my own expectations, I perform well, and then I have to live up to the standards of my own previous achievement or else my first achievement will be invalidated, a fluke. I lose sight of the original pleasure I got from just the process itself.
I do love the process, but not as much as I should. There is that special moment when you sit down with all the pieces in front of you, and you can envision the solution, you can taste it. I savor that, but if I don't get to that place I get frustrated. I need to just enjoy the part where the pieces are in front of me, I can look at everything and take everything in and not be so concerned with how it all fits together, and just be confident that it WILL fit together. That way, even if it doesn't, I'm still getting something out of it.
"Allow your judgments their own silent, undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be forced or hastened. Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating.
In this there is no measuring with time, a year doesn't matter, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn't force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!"
- Letter Three
I do love the process, but not as much as I should. There is that special moment when you sit down with all the pieces in front of you, and you can envision the solution, you can taste it. I savor that, but if I don't get to that place I get frustrated. I need to just enjoy the part where the pieces are in front of me, I can look at everything and take everything in and not be so concerned with how it all fits together, and just be confident that it WILL fit together. That way, even if it doesn't, I'm still getting something out of it.
"Allow your judgments their own silent, undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be forced or hastened. Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating.
In this there is no measuring with time, a year doesn't matter, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn't force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!"
- Letter Three
posted by Beth at 11:30:00 AM
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