BEAUTIFUL WARRIORS
EPISODE 010: BEAUTIFUL WARRIORS
The creative life has plenty of fight in it. Most of us fear the fight. But when you learn to take a fall, and to anticipate & respect the daily struggle, you stop fearing it quite so much. Let’s talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
Like many of us, perhaps even you, I was bullied a lot during my school years. My dad was in the army and we moved around a lot, giving me just a few too many first days at new schools, each of them a chance to be the new kid, the one that didn’t fit in. The kid with the target on his back. Don’t get me wrong, I gave them plenty of reasons to think I was different, not the least of which was the fact that I made up for my small size with my sarcasm. My mouth had a troubling habit of writing cheques my body couldn’t cash.
I remember being on a playground, happily doing what little kids do when they aren’t concerned about looking cool, when this larger kid laughed at me, started pushing me around and asking, "how stupid can you get?” Not understanding the concept of the rhetorical question I said something like “it looks like you’re already pushing the limits.” I remember doing a lot of running away as a kid. Until I stopped running.
Years later I went to the bus stop and the older kids started hitting me with a bicycle inner tube that had gone cold and hard in the winter air, and I snapped. I lost it and fought back through tears freezing to my face, my arms swinging like angry windmills. I got into a fair number of scraps that year. Every day was a fight, or felt like one. Now, 40 years later, everyday still feels like a fight, It’s a different fight, and it’s a fight I’m learning to respect, even love, since it shows no signs of going away.
I’m David duChemin and this is A Beautiful Anarchy. This is episode 10 and this morning I want to reflect on the fight, and suggest some ideas for approaching the daily battle of creative work and art-making. Let’s talk about it.
Music/intro
When I first started to play with the idea of a podcast for everyday creative people I was faced with the need to come up with some visuals for the whole thing, something I could put on the album art, and the website. This is a podcast about creating and making but I didn’t want to use the threadbare images of cameras and paintbrushes, because this isn’t about the tools we use so much as the perils and rewards of the process itself, and how we live our creative lives.
I don’t know exactly how I got there but somehow I ended up in a little corner of the internet, mesmerized by photographs of Siamese Fighting Fish, fascinated by the elegant swirling forms and dazzling colours, all impossibly jewel-toned. I was intrigued by the fact that like many creative people they seem so solitary for most of their lives. But most of all I was captivated by the latin name: betta splendens. If it’s been a while since latin class, you can be forgiven for wondering “what’s with the fish on the album art?” So get this: betta splendens means beautiful warrior. Could there be a more perfect visual metaphor for the daily life of those who struggle to bring things new and authentic into the world, who every morning rise to find our fears are still there, the work still needs to be done, and none of it comes with any guarantees.
Anyone that has every had a fight, wether that’s with a bully or the person you love most in this world, knows that it is ultimately a struggle of competing ideas. Sometimes one idea or desire wins out over the other, sometimes the skirmish ends in a compromise. In our creative work we have no shortage of ideas with which to wrestle. Some of them have to do with our own inner voices, some with fear or ego, some with the material itself or the medium we work with, when it just won’t yield to our hands or our will. Other struggles are against external forces telling us to do things the right way, do things their way, the way its always been done. We fight resistance to change, we fight the clock and all the demands of time. Somedays we fight the urge just to stay in bed.
One thing seems certain. We must always fight. We must always push forward. And though the fight can be scary, the alternative is even worse.
I know it might look like the writer in the corner, sipping her coffee and clacking away at the keyboard, is just writing, but she’s waging battles we’ll never see. She’s fighting the pressure to be the person her family expects her to be, when she hasn’t been that person for years, she’s fighting the pressure not to write the truth of her life, and the knowledge that if she doesn’t, she’ll implode.
The painter you see putting tentative brush strokes on the blank canvas is fighting for his life, trying to reconcile ideas he’s long believed were irreconcilable, and his painting is an exploration or an expression of these new truths, ideas that will seem dangerous or uncomfortable to the people in his world. That photographer is struggling to find her vision, and to find some means of expressing it beyond all the literal stuff she’s done before and she’s fighting the suspicion that it’s all crap, and the temptation just to go back to what’s safe and do more of the same.
Sometimes the fight is so hidden you’d never know, though there she is, there he is–there you are–showing up everyday to fight, to make forward progress, to tell the truth and get your stories out into the world, stories you've never before had the courage to put into words, or to do something new that might not work. To take a chance. That’s a fight. It’s not the stuff of movies, there’s rarely any melodrama, the voices raised or easels thrown in rage against the studio walls, paint going everywhere, usually in slow motion. Instead it’s the quiet showing up every day and doing what is hard, and for which we might pay a higher price than we ever imagined just to be fully ourselves and make our art.
When, a friend recently asked me, do I get to live my dreams, when do I get to be the person I want to be, not just the one everyone else expects me to be? When do I get to say the things I need to say, not just what I feel I ought to say? That is part of the daily fight. The all-out effort to be ourselves when every force is pushing us back into a mold that we didn’t choose.
I was never taught to fight. When I did fight it was all fists and rage and flailing around through tears of anger. I was a reluctant and ugly fighter. And then one day my mother enrolled me in Judo. And I learned to fight.
I learned to respect the fight, and when I did that I stopped fearing it so much. The first thing you learn is to bow. Over and over again you acknowledge your opponent, your teacher, even the place in which the fight happens. And they bow to you. I wonder what would happen if we all bowed when we walked into the studio, took a deep breath and acknowledge it. Today. Right now. I’m going to pick a fight. There’s something to be said for being in control of that.
Then you learn how to fall down because if there’s one thing that’s guaranteed it’s that you’re going to fall. "This is Judo?" I thought when I started. All we did was learn to fall, over and over again. “I could be falling down at home,” I thought.
We didn’t learn how to avoid falling, but how to do it without getting hurt. When I look back at those hours in the dojo I can still hear the sound of us all hitting the matts over and over again, our hands slapping the ground to dissipate the energy before we stood up to do it again.
Here’s the thing, when you fall a thousand times, and you learn to do it well, you stop fearing the fall. You stop fearing the risk of trying something new or taking on an opponent bigger than you. And in the absence of that fear, you start to think instead. Your head becomes a little more clear, and you lean into your training, to all the other moves that you’ve done a thousand times, moving into your opponent with a pivot of your hip or the sweep of a leg, each of these moves designed not so much to meet force with force but to take that force and redirect it, combining their energy and yours to throw the opponent to the matt.
Or sometimes it’s the other way around, you land on the matt so fast you can’t think, but you don’t need to: you’ve fallen so many times it’s automatic. And you get up and do it again. The only time I remember getting hurt in Judo was when I allowed fear to replace my training, stiffening up as I fell, resisting the flow instead of going with it.
We tend to think that we’d be better off without the fight. I think we’re wrong. I think the fight itself is what gets us to new places, gives us new skills, helps us see ourselves better, and leads to better art. As Marcus Aurelius taught, “the path of least resistance is a terrible teacher."
Like all my metaphors, this one isn’t perfect. But it’s helpful, to me. Maybe it’ll help you too, just to recognize that it’s a daily fight, that the first step to winning it, at least for today, is showing up, every day, respecting it, rather than fearing it, because you see how important it is, that the fight itself is the way of the artist, that without the fight there is only acquiescing to the status quo and a life without the forward momentum that you alone can direct and steer. Your best art is always on the other side of whatever it is you must fight today.
It helps to know that you’ve hit the matt a lot of times, and though it stings, you’re still here, still fighting, bouncing back and learning new lessons, and you’ll hit the ground many times more before this is over, and that every single one of those so-called failures can be important lessons and help make you stronger. Sometimes it just helps to know that our fight is not the only one. You look around the dojo and there are dozens of pairs of fighters, and you realize this is what we’re all doing, trying to find our way, and most often, to make our way.
One thing is certain, we can’t not fight. Not if we want to move forward. Not if we want to honour the most pressing voices and desires for our lives. Not if we want to live without the regret of not following our dreams, curiosities, and the what ifs of which the life creative is made. It's not easy, I know that. For many of us the struggles to live that life are complicated and painful. But in the absence of any other options, what choice have we but to show up again each morning, bow to that familiar opponent, and throw our hearts and minds into the fray once more? Not so the fight will be over, but so when the next match comes, as it does every day, we'll be stronger, and more sure of our ability to take a fall and get back up.
Thanks so much for joining me. It’s a privilege to fight beside you, and remind each other we’re not alone.
If you’re enjoying these early episodes, and want more I’m about to begin something new, a small monthly project called On The Make - think of it as a monthly kick in the pants sent to your inbox. Call it a dispatch, a missive, perhaps even an epistle, On The Make will be a chance for me to address other issues in the creative life, recommend some great books, and continue to do what I created A Beautiful Anarchy for - to encourage you, to remind you you aren’t alone, and that the fight is worth the effort. Every month I’ll draw the name of one subscriber to send a signed copy of my book, A Beautiful Anarchy, and all you have to do is go to ABeatifulAnarchy.com , scroll to the bottom and just let me know where to send On The Make each month. I’ll also immediately send you a small pdf ebook called Escape Your Creative Rut, 5 Ways to Find Your Groove
Again. If you’d like to send me a question or feedback you can do that by email at talkback@abeautifulanarchy.com.
Thanks again for joining me. Until next time, go make something beautiful, and fight as hard as you must to do so.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0