Against "Unproductive Sessions" and "Missed Opportunities"

Pay attention long enough, whether it’s seeing the world with clear eyes or learning to listen to what’s running underneath your thoughts, and you will learn something.

“What do you do when the lyrics just aren’t coming?” a fan asks Nick Cave.

I love his response:

“The thing you must hold on to through these difficult periods, as hard as it may be, is this — when something’s not coming, it’s coming. It took me many years to learn this, and to this day I have trouble remembering it.”

Or, to put it another way, “What we are talking about is not a period of ‘not coming’ but a period of ‘not arriving.’”

I encourage you to read Cave’s full answer—The Red Hand Files is one of those newsletters I always look forward to seeing in my inbox because of the insights he’s willing to share with readers about the creative life—but I also want to think about it in the ways I’ve been thinking about a sustained writing practice, and about those “unproductive” periods when it feels like we can’t find the words to express what matters most to us.

You can look at this in two ways. You can consider the truth of the world around you, and your ability to see it and to describe it. Or you can carry the truth that you carry inside you, and your ability to see and describe that. The two challenges overlap significantly, I think, and they both come down to the same thing—learning to pay attention. But that also entails creating a life for yourself that increases your ability to pay attention.

I’m not just talking about avoiding distractions, or about consistently putting in the work, though obviously those both help. Beyond these, though, you need to believe that the project of paying attention has value, even though its payoffs may not come right away, and even though those payoffs may not ever come in ways that the world at large recognizes as “success.”

(I don’t mean to say you shouldn’t strive for “success,” of course, but neither you should overlook the other rewards that will come your way.)

Pay attention long enough, whether it’s seeing the world with clear eyes or learning to listen to what’s running underneath your thoughts, and you will learn something. The lyrics will arrive—and, ideally, you will have positioned yourself to recognize that moment… even if you find yourself unable to fully capitalize on it just then.

This morning, I read a blog post by Christopher Schwarz, the author of The Anarchist’s Tool Chest, a book I’m finding extremely valuable in ways I haven’t fully figured out how to write about yet, but in the meantime, let’s talk about the blog post. Schwarz writes about a rushed tour of Fort Mackinac, during which he noticed one thing, and then noticed another thing, but because he and his wife couldn’t linger, because otherwise they’d put themselves at risk of exposure to the coronavirus from thoughtless unmasked tourists, it wasn’t until much later that he realized that the two things he noticed fit together in a way that could have led him to unpack some meaningful history, instead of simply recognizing a missed opportunity after the fact.

“I am a idiot,” he berates himself.

To which I’d respond by invoking this morning’s edition of another wonderful newsletter, Sara Campbell’s Tiny Revolutions. Campbell describes her experience of, as I’ve quoted Thomas Merton, what happens “when one learns to sit still and be what one has become.” This morning, she wrote about an encounter she had with a young boy before many of us started sheltering in place. He’d missed his school bus, and he had begun to panic and blame himself: “I’m such an idiot…I wasn’t paying attention and I should know better and I’m always messing up and…”

Campbell simply walked with him, and then, when they got to where he needed to be, he was able to shrug the moment off, but it got her thinking. “There was a critical voice already lodged in his head that’d he’d likely be living with for the rest of his life,” she observes—a voice that she still hears when she makes mistakes, too.

If you’ve ever read W. Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis, you’ll recognize this voice as “Self 1,” the critical aspect of your brain that picks apart your actions rather than simply letting you do what you came to do. I don’t know if Sara Campbell has ever read Gallwey, but I can see that she knows that you get past “Self 1” by developing a personal foundation of awareness, choice, and trust—or, as she describes it, drawing upon her own experience:

“You choose over and over to believe the voice in your head that wants the best for you and knows you’re not your mistakes. Even if it’s hard. Even if you think you don’t deserve it. You do.”

I repeat myself slightly, but: When you believe that voice, you will understand that you can always recover from your “mistakes,” and too that “success” comes in several forms, many of them unexpected. Don’t beat yourself up over the moments when the lyrics don’t arrive. Just keep cultivating an environment in which they inevitably will.