I just watched this TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert (author of Eat, Pray, Love), and I thought it was a really nice follow-up to my previous post. I love the way she describes following your creative passion as "finding your home" and "finding where you rightfully live." It implies so much more about what it really means to follow your passion.
"Following" implies a state of constant motion, pursuing, and it also implies something that is separate from yourself.
"Finding your home," on the other hand, implies stability, constancy, and something that is innately part of yourself. It implies that your passion and your identity as defined by your actions is something that you build and maintain throughout your life--not something that you have to chase around from place to place. I think perhaps this is where true inner strength comes from: knowing where your creative home is. If you maintain this foundation, this bed-rock, it can keep you "safe from the random hurricanes of outcome"--both good and bad. Outcome is always half-random, and if you define yourself and your worth based on the external happenings of the moment--such as how other people react to you or your work--then how can you really know who you are?
She ends her talk with a beautiful summary of her philosophy. I'm glad that she specifically mentions addiction and infatuation--as the dark, tainted sides of love and passion, I think it's important to address them.
"I don't know where you rightfully live, but I know that there is something in this world that you love more than you love yourself--something worthy, by the way. So addiction and infatuation don't count, because we all know that those are not safe places to live, right? The only trick is that you've got to identify the best, worthiest thing that you love most and then build your house right on top of it, and don't budge from it."
Here's a rather timely companion piece from David Brooks: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/03/opinion/brooks-the-art-of-focus.html
ReplyDelete"The lesson from childhood, then, is that if you want to win the war for attention, don’t try to say “no” to the trivial distractions you find on the information smorgasbord; try to say “yes” to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing, and let the terrifying longing crowd out everything else."
Oh my God, that is the coolest article I've read in quite a while.
DeleteI love these ideas:
"Focus on the external objects of fascination, not on who you think you are."
“You can only recover your appetite, and appetites, if you can allow yourself to be unknown to yourself. Because the point of knowing oneself is to contain one’s anxieties about appetite.”
"there’s something very frightening about one’s appetite. So that one is trying to contain a voraciousness in a very specific, limited, narrowed way. ... .An appetite is fearful because it connects you with the world in very unpredictable ways. ... Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.”
True, true, and VERY true. Thanks so much for sharing that!