TOUCH THE HEART
EPISODE 024: TOUCH THE HEART
Songwriter Leonard Cohen once asked “How do we produce work that touches the heart?” It’s a question I think we need to pursue if we’re going to make anything that finds traction or resonance, most especially for ourselves but for others. So how do we do it? Let’s talk about it.
Prefer to Listen Elsewhere?
Listen on iTunes | Spotify | Google Play | Stitcher
Do me a favour? Would you take a moment and give this show a rating and review in iTunes.
Want More? A Beautiful Anarchy is published 3 out of 4 weeks. On those fourth weeks you can still get your fix through On The Make, my monthly missive about the creative life. Subscribe now and I’ll make sure you don’t miss a thing, and every month I’ll draw the name of one subscribed listener and send them a signed copy of my book, A Beautiful Anarchy.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
I woke up this morning under one of those dark clouds that occasionally hover menacingly over people who make a living from their creativity. It’s the one from which heavy rains fall in the form of doubts and questions about our ability to sustain our efforts, navigate next steps, and retire with what we need to avoid spending our last days in a box under a bridge. These are my worst mornings, the ones when even coffee is no consolation, but staying in bed with my thoughts is worse. These are the mornings I wonder why Xanax doesn’t come in one of those colourful Pez dispensers shaped like Fred Flintstone. They're the mornings I turn to my old friend Leonard Cohen. Today it was this quote from one of his biographies: “How do we produce work that touches the heart?”
I’m David duChemin, and this is episode 24 of A Beautiful Anarchy. Let’s talk about it.
There are two reasons that Cohen’s question jarred me from my melancholy and helped me clear the funk that was hanging in the air around me this morning. The first is that it served as a needed distraction. I found myself sitting here, with my coffee, thinking, “yeah, Leonard, how do we do that? How do I do that in my writing, or in my photography which feels harder?” The question set me off in a direction that was considerably more helpful than the others I was asking myself, like whether I’m even employable anymore after 25 years as a creative entrepreneur, so I’m grateful for the distraction.
The second reason is that I think the pursuit of that question, and the work I need to do and explore in order to find anything resembling an answer, is the only way I will continue to be able to keep the other questions at bay. By making, or at least pursuing, work that touches the heart.
And I guess there’s also a third reason I’m grateful for Cohen’s question and that’s that it sent me here, first to write this and then to record it for you. Writing and doing and gaining traction will always be more productive and less emotionally exhausting than sitting around worrying.
I don’t want to give you the impression that I’m at the edge of a dark hole, or that I’m circling the drain. Far from it, right now I’m in the middle of one of those periods or seasons in life when everything is going really well. My latest book just came out and is getting enthusiastic reviews, I’m creating work that’s meaningful and, I hope, touches the heart on some level. But it’s often in these times when the worry is the worst, when it feels like there’s more to lose and further to fall. I’ve learned to predict these times; they're one of the reasons I keep words from people like Cohen around, to distract me, like you would a baby, with a set of jangling keys when it looks like I’m setting up to have a good cry.
Everyone I know has these ups and downs, the ups higher and the downs lower, the more they care about their work. So on the chance that one of these days is around the corner for you, let’s explore the question together: what will it take to produce work that touches the heart?
First, I think it’s important that we know whose heart we want most to connect with. I think it’s got to start with yours. As the creator, the maker, it has to start with you. You have to care. That work needs to be about something about which you care in a deeper way than just a passing curiosity. I think there’s got to be something at stake. I think if we’re doing work that could result in some small failure that we just lightly shrug off, it’s not important enough to be doing at all. I’m not saying don’t make more of those stock photographs of the ethnically-diverse woman in a telephone headset, or discouraging you from writing another fluff piece for the Huffington Post. I’m just saying there’s probably not much at stake if it doesn’t go well, and I doubt you're going to touch hearts. If there’s nothing at stake, it’s a good sign whatever you make isn’t going to touch a nerve. Seth Godin once wrote words to the effect that if it’s not worth crying or laughing about, it’s probably not worth doing. He was talking about us as the makers of those things, not the consumers, though if it’s important enough for us to have those reactions, there’s a good chance others might as well.
I think in order to make that kind of work, the stuff that makes us laugh or cry, it needs to contain a vulnerability on the part of the maker. Maybe that’s the risk in making work that might not go as planned. But it might also be the exploration of some deeper truth or emotion, the honest admission of our fears, our loneliness, doubts, the great love of our life, or whatever other feeling is so wrapped around our hearts that to try to pull it off would just unravel us entirely. The artist willing to put that into their work, to bleed freely and without shame - will make work that strikes a chord that resonates with others who feel the same way but haven’t had the courage to admit it, or feel it as deeply as they must to be fully alive.
I think that’s what this is all about, really. It’s about being fully alive. To do that we need to be open to deeper themes in our work. I think there’s a reason that the most enduring art has always been the art that doesn’t shy away from love and loss, death and sorrow, loneliness and the brevity of life. The work that endures is the work that comes from people that don’t pander, and don’t avoid the messier questions and fears. Going back to the question: how do we make work that touches the heart? We make that work about the things that have always unavoidably touched the heart, and we don’t turn away from them or smooth out the rough edges that keep snagging our souls.
If you opened the front cover of any of the little black notebooks I’ve scribbled in over the last couple years you’d find the words of the Persian poet Rumi, though that shouldn’t surprise you, his words seem to be everywhere lately. The poem says “Be a lamp, a lifeboat, a ladder. Help someone’s soul heal. Walk out of your house like a shepherd.” Not everyone will resonate with these words as an invitation to do their best work, but I sure do. My big question in life, with what I do and make, is this: does it matter? Will it be a lamp or a ladder? Will it help someone’s soul to heal? And I ask that question because it keeps me grounded. And focused. But pragmatically, it keeps the rain clouds away. It keeps me from worrying neurotically about whether my work is selling or whether my branding is current, or if I should revamp my website or any of the other legitimate but de-focusing activities that many of us need to give thought to once in a while. And it does so because next to making work that touches someone’s heart, or brings laughter or tears, gives them freedom where they had none, or gives them an encounter with beauty or makes their life simpler or better, whatever difference you create with what you do, those smaller matters aren’t even a drop in the bucket you’re hoping to fill.
Whether you make a life or a living (or both) with your craft or art, your coding, your writing, painting, whatever it is your hands do at the bidding of your heart, the concerns are always there. I don’t know many people that don’t worry about the future in some practical way. You aren’t alone if you wake up once in a while under the cloud. Please understand I’m not saying there aren’t also practical things we can be doing to make this easier. If your finances or marketing is a mess, or if you have other concerns stopping you from making your work at all, all the paradigm shifts in the world aren’t going to help.
But whether your concern is art for art’s sake, or also leaning on that art to make a living, dwelling on the shadow that is cast by that cloud isn’t helping. But chasing work that touches hearts, most especially your own, is its own source of light. And practically speaking it is that work, the work with the most at stake, the work that contains a vulnerable piece of yourself, and the work that touches courageously on deeper themes, that solves a heartfelt worry or concern for others, it is that work which will command higher prices and get more attention, because we’re drowning in fluffy stuff right now. We’re being overwhelmed by the same-old same-old. Stock photographs with no soul of which we’ve seen some version a hundred times before, products that solve no real human problem except the appetite for more stuff, fiction that offers no hope and explores no deeper struggle, banal art that’s as clever as the price is high, but fewer - much, much fewer - are the makers and the artists and the everyday creatives that are reaching for a raw nerve within themselves, and letting what they make be a response to that, and in so doing letting it become a lamp, a lifeboat, or a ladder.
It’s easy to look into the uncertainty of the creative life and feel helpless. But what if we are the help? What if that’s the role of the artists and the innovators? In a world with its share of darkness, flood, and holes from which we’re desperate to escape, anyone who makes lamps, lifeboats, or ladders, will never lack for an audience or a heart to touch.
Thanks so much for letting me keep you company for a few minutes today. If these short conversations are helpful to you I’d love to hear from you. Drop me a note at talkback@beautifulanarchy.com if you get a moment. As always, I release new episodes of A Beautiful Anarchy 3 out of 4 weeks and next week’s a week off, but if you still want your fix, I’d love to send you the latest issue of On The Make, which is my monthly chance to encourage you in your everyday creativity by email. Just go to aBeautifulAnarchy.com, scroll to the bottom of the page, and tell me where to send it. I’ll also send you a copy of my eBook, Escape Your Creative Rut, 5 Ways to Get Your Groove Back. Thanks ever so much for being part of this with me. Until next time, go make something beautiful.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0