There’s a man here in the pub who wheezes as he comes in and then every time he so much as moves. I don’t know why, but I find it really disturbing to listen to.
I’ve been reading web comics — last night I went through one for hours while Craig did his ironing. I went from laughing out loud to really admiring the guy’s style to being completely intimidated by the work. There’s definitely a point where inspiration stops.
An article I read this morning talked about inspiration literally, saying that, like breathing, you can’t keep taking it in; at some point you need to create. [The writer muffed the metaphor there, saying that it’s only inspiration when you create, but clearly creating is analogical to breathing out. Pfft!]
When I just draw my world, I’m perfectly happy with my drawing style. [It only occurred to me last night that I have one.]. It’s only when I start looking at other’s work — which is good for learning from, to a point — that I start to doubt and think, “Oh, maybe I should draw like this person or that.” But that’s like wishing I had someone else’s ears.
What I did really like about this comic strip, though, was how the artist didn’t censor any of his ideas. Some of the things there were pointless or weird, but he just put it all in there. That’s a great recipe for getting a lot of material, rather than waiting for a worthy topic. I would like to make a strip like that. [I also found it fascinating that the strip’s creator suddenly leapt from drawing like a twelve-year-old to having a beautifully crisp and defined line quality.]
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We went to London last week. I was there to sit in on Strategic Coach’s UK workshops, which really helped me reconnect with the reality of what it’s like to run an entrepreneurial business (scary, yet these folks not only survive, they come to these sessions to shake everything up, which is unbelievably courageous).
Craig joined me, and not only did we get to play in a nice hotel room, we caught up with my old pal Tim and saw him give a brilliant, funny performance in Rock of Ages. We saw some other good friends, and goggled at shop windows, restaurant menus, and estate agents’ displays. How can anyone afford to exist there? I envy the creative resources and outlets there, but there’s also this striving for status that I just can’t relate to.
What a pleasure, to come home to our cold little Georgian box of an affordable home. I must admit, though, that for some reason I feel strung out. Is it adapting abruptly to the change of pace? Is it brain-fog from the wheat and sugar I ate? Is it the challenge of catching up with my projects?
It certainly didn’t help to go from being courted by majillionaire entrepreneurs who wanted to hire my skills to doing a driving lesson and sucking utterly at it. I am firmly in what Strategic Coach calls “The Gap” about driving and about how much work I’m producing. It takes an extra step, a willingness, to step back from that stuck state and defuse it. It almost feels like there’s a nobility in holding myself to an impossible standard. I know that’s dumb.
Even though I work with these ideas all the time (and even *cough* write articles about it), there’s still a difference between intellectually understanding a concept and actually applying it. That’s why I’m not put off when someone talks about a particular Strategic Coach principle as “just common sense”. Yes, but we rarely practise all the things we know, so that support and accountability is the other half of what the Coach provides.
The flipside of accountability, it occurs to me now, is compassion. We’re not so good at that one. I’m great at creating structures for articulating what I should get done, but it’s that second piece that creates room for our own experience. That’s what I admired about the comic strip I read, how much attention this guy is obviously paying to the really little stuff that makes up our daily existence.
So, yeah, more of that.
Humour ties into this, too: There’s no oxygen for it in high-pressure situations.
Okay, geez, it’s time to work on other stuff. Thank you for reading all this. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this relationship between yourself and the things you want to do. It’s clearly a topic I’m fascinated by.