The Concept of Showing Up
We Are the Trigger
In his story Two Odd Shoes, my friend Derek Clark wrote the following:
My observation on my short walk is this. The photographic muscle is like any other; you must exercise it or it will go flabby and fail.
He’s describing a return to his old stomping grounds on the streets of Edinburgh, a faithful X100F in his hands, and realizing his reflexes have taken a serious hit. What was once effortless is now arduous. He continues:
I was learning to walk again. To see the way I used to see. To feel the way I used to feel…about photography.
We should never take our abilities, our craft, or inspiration itself, for granted. Left unused a garden withers.
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There’s a TED Talk I remember from years ago, where Elizabeth Gilbert—she of Eat, Pray, Love fame—talks about the pressure of following up on her massively successful book, in the context of where inspiration comes from. Muses and ghosts and all of that. Her conclusion is that people aren’t geniuses…they have a Genius at their service. It’s actually entertaining and quite funny if you get a chance to catch it.
An absence of inspiration is every artist’s most profound fear. It’s also, unfortunately, self-fulfilling: the less inspired we are, the more frightened we become and the less inspired we are. Enter the wonderful world of loops.
Inspiration is like exercise: you can’t reach a runner’s high if you don’t run.
Effort
I’ve written about this before, but in one of his last interviews Henri Cartier-Bresson was asked about the decisive moment. He shrugged off the question, replying that it was mostly luck, but that a photographer needed to be ready, first and foremost. I heard this as pushback against the implied magical aura of that one, fateful instant, when clouds part and angels sing; when muses whisper in our ear, almost snapping the image for us. To me, he was stressing the importance of effort in the process.
I love the idea of illumination—that almost divine intervention that sweeps us into the unknown, revealing secrets that propel us forward. As I previously wrote in this post, the idea endures because it is a possibility. But it’s also inherently passive.
I think that creativity, in any form, first requires showing up. An active participation on our part. Picking up the camera, sitting at our desk to write, strumming the guitar haphazardly, even when our mind is blank. Especially when our mind is blank. Because ideas, pictures, or songs, reveal themselves when we look for them. Not every time—and yet, in my experience, often enough. The effort itself is a possible trigger, but it also refines the reflexes, nurtures the habits that will drive us to act when lightning strikes—instead of letting the moment pass. The concept isn’t as romantic as Athena softly murmuring in our dreams (1), but it’s a lot more manageable. Through effort, we build the ecosystem where creative work can flourish.
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I write this post on the final week of #kage202202. That project is what prompted Derek’s return to the streets, in the story I quoted earlier. We didn’t undertake this task because we all suddenly felt inspired—but precisely because we didn’t. After almost two years of hoping for mana from the Heavens, it had become abundantly clear to us that nothing was ever going to happen unless we moved. We’d allowed entropy to take hold. We had atrophied. When we decided to show up, however, content followed.
The more we run, the better we run.
The more we see, the better we see.
#FightEntropy.
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I’m reading Stephen Fry’s Mythos at the moment. Hence the Greek mythology references. Great book btw.
