Potential, Opportunity, Distraction, Intention
"Our job is to come out of this as our full & alive & authentic selves.”—@BaileyJoWelch
I am a big fan of Lost Art Press, an independent publisher just across the river from Cincinnati. Lately, LAP’s blog has been featuring sneak previews from an upcoming collection of essays by Charles H. Hayward, who spent more than a quarter of a century as the editor of The Woodworker. One recent excerpt, for example, included a quote from the 19th-century art critic and social theorist John Ruskin. “The weakest among us,” Ruskin wrote, “has a gift, however seemingly trivial, which is peculiar to him, and which worthily used will be a gift also to his race for ever.”
Here’s what Hayward had to say about that:
“In how many of us, I wonder, does the gift lie dormant? It is like a seed which must be fed and watered before it can yield its fruit, and wether it will be a weakly or a sturdy plant depends mainly on just how much attention we are prepared to give it. Honest, persevering work is the first requirement, and with it goes the courage to battle with any defect of our own temperament, whether of impatience or carelessness or laziness, that will hinder and thwart our progress. In this way a man may become a competent handicraftsman, turning out work which will not shame him.”
Setting aside the chauvinism of the era, I think this can be a useful way to think about our writing practices. I’ve long been skeptical about the notion of innate talent, the idea that some people start out with more innate ability than others, that they’re just more “naturally” creative or expressive. As far as I can tell, it’s pretty much all skill, and differences in capability can be attributed to how much opportunity a person has been given, from an early age, to develop that skill, and how much opportunity they’ve been willing to seize for themselves.
I want to emphasize the role of “how much opportunity a person has been given,” because one objection I have to how Hayward frames the issue is his discussion of “defect(s) of our own temperament.” I’m not denying that impatience and carelessness and laziness can be traits that get in the way of developing our capability to express ourselves—at the same time, I want to acknowledge that, in many ways, modern society is arranged in ways that withhold opportunity from us, sometimes more deliberately than others, and from some people more deliberately than others. So I don’t think that not being at the top of your game as a writer represents any kind of moral failing, and I certainly don’t think that being at the top of your game as a writer represents any kind of moral success.
(Mind you, being at the top of your game as a writer almost always comes with a stronger sense of self-awareness, and a stronger recognition of one’s personal agenda. A better philosophy scholar than I would be able to tell you whether that, in and of itself, constitutes a “moral success.” My instinctive reaction is that the self-awareness we cultivate through a diligent writing practice is not in and of itself a moral success, but that it can be used to achieve one.)
In the last few newsletters, I’ve reassured you that it’s okay if you haven’t been writing at your best lately, or even if you haven’t been writing at all, and that’s still true. And here’s something I wrote two years ago, when I never imagined we’d all be stuck in our rooms for more than a month:
“We’re not writing machines, after all. The key is intention: If you’re willing to continually apply yourself to your writing, even after you’ve seemingly fallen short of the mark, you’ll have something to show for your work eventually. And, perhaps, every time you pick yourself up after having a setback reduces the likelihood of falling into that same trap again. (Reduces, not eliminates. Again, we’re not machines.)”
So it’s important not to lose sight of the dream, because there’s far more to a writing practice than finding wide swathes of time in which to pour your soul out on paper fill an electronic file with scintillating prose. Earlier this evening, I came across a wonderful tweet from Bailey Jo Welch-Pomerantz:
“It is not our job to come out of this quarantine thin
or fluent in a new language
or with another book deal
or having perfected a new hobby
or with an immaculate house.Our job is to come out of this as our full & alive & authentic selves.”
For some of us, coming out of the pandemic with a more authentic understanding of our lives and what we’re meant to be doing with them might result in some scintillating prose, but for a lot of us it won’t, and that’s okay. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how metanoia, a term from the New Testament that has commonly been translated as “repentance” but might more accurately be called “a change of heart,” isn’t so much a result as an ongoing process, and I also recently used that result/process analogy to describe the Buddhist concept of “metta,” or compassion meditation. And now I’m coming to realize that this applies to our True Self as well.
You’re never going to be perfect. But as long as you’re holding intention in your heart, and doing your best to act on it, you will inevitably come closer in some way to the things you want to say, and the life you want to live. And though we might not be working under optimum conditions, you have as much raw potential to accomplish that as anybody else.