Soft focus, hard edges

On moving from softness to bone

Dear all,

It’s another Monday morning.

We are also approaching the end of the month so it’s another reason to reflect. I can already feel myself diffusing into the many goings on of the day, the week, and the month. And, so, I took “The War of Art” by Steven Pressfield off the book shelf and opened it to a random page. Perhaps, unsurprisingly, it opened to a chapter titled “A Professional”.

He says: “By performing the mundane physical act of sitting down and starting to work, he set in motion a mysterious but infallible sequence of events that would produce inspiration, as surely as if the goddess had synchronized her watch with his.

He knew if he built it, she would come.”

Of course, I sat myself down and bust open my laptop to write. In my travel writing piece, I found myself chasing the muse across the planet. But, lately, I have noticed that the air has shifted, the world has inexplicably opened up, a space has been created for my words.

I had written earlier about “Upward Spirals”. I have been wondering about how do we create these upward spirals in our own lives. I had also written about emotional-intelligence in “RULER”. Lately, I have realized that an upward spiral constitutes two parts:

1. Choosing our action in response to our feelings

2. Learning how our actions, in turn, can evoke our feelings

As a statistician in a previous life, this seems a two-way causal process — a feedback loop that can set off either an upward spiral or a downward one. For much of my life, I ignored my most powerful asset — my emotions — in a world that valued thinking over feeling. Now that I am learning to strengthen both parts of the process, I have finally started to move from looking at the world in soft focus, which is an artistic sensibility that guides my actions, to embracing the hard edges, which is the science of technique that hones my craft.

Indeed, looking at the world in soft focus as an artist has helped me immensely. An artist teaches you how to take away all the unnecessary details in a picture or a painting or a poem to capture the essence of a place or a person or an event. A good artist has learned to evoke a feeling within himself or herself across time. A great artist has learned to evoke a feeling in others across time.

Soft focus may tell us what is worth saving but it takes overcoming our hard edges to carry a feeling across space and time. In the past many months of creating from my life, I have learned to evoke a feeling in myself across time. I am still learning to evoke a feeling in others across time. In order to do so, I hope to move from the soft focus of my own inner life to transcending the hard edges of the outer world. And, so, I hope to blog more about the bare bones of my struggle with consistency, technique, and discipline in the next few months.

And, if you feel like it, I would love if you write back about your creative journey in the comments/chat!