Day 253: Swing and miss

An addendum to yesterday's post, in which I said that inspiration is like a deer in the woods. If you are quiet, and patient, and still, sometimes the deer wanders up, graces you with its presence. But sometimes it does not. And whatever you’re working on you have to just work anyway, regardless, and accept that it will be as it will be. Most times the work isn’t inspired, it’s dull and pedestrian and uninteresting, but you have to accept it anyway, and move on.

But this is difficult. It really is, and especially at first, when you lack experience. It’s tough to be someone who has the acumen to discern quality in a particular field - which you presumably do, if you’re enthusiastic enough to try your hand in that field, be it cupcake baking, dollhouse cabinet building, poetry writing - you presumably love cupcakes, let’s say, and know a good cupcake when you taste it - and it is tough, at first, to sense that the cupcakes you yourself are baking are objectively not good cupcakes.

Allow me to jump analogies, from deer to sports. Because you can lie there, in bed, after a hard day baking, covered in flour and frosting and sloshed egg white, and think about the tray of bland, unrisen muffins cooling on the side downstairs, and you can feel really bad about yourself. 

You can imagine yourself as a sportsperson, a batter, maybe, trying out for a team; these cupcakes you've been baking are your big opportunity to prove yourself, and you imagine the coach watching from the sidelines, clipboard in hand, and here you are on the field striking out.

Even if sometimes you swing and connect. Even if you’ve hit the occasional home run. Mostly you’re missing. Your hitting average must be depressingly low. No team would hire you. Maybe you just don’t have what it takes.

But this the wrong way to think about it.

You’re not at try-outs here. You’re not in the game winning final minute.

This is just one of many practice sessions on a dreary Tuesday afternoon in the rain. You have to do it, and a million more like it, before you’ll even know how good you are. Romanticised assumptions tell you that people with hidden beautiful gifts get noticed, and have to only display those innate gifts, and they win fame, attention, call-ups to world cup teams, positions on next year’s Bake Off.

But the truth is that it’s all a lot of work. For everyone, regardless of talent. And most of the work involves failing, and learning, and adjusting, and failing again, over and over and over. Batters spend all day every day swinging at balls. Not to prove their talent. Just to practise. To dedicate themselves. Have you got any idea how many footballs Beckham would bend in from outside the box in ceaseless training sessions, ingraining the muscle memory, honing the movements? How many of those do you think went in? Not all of them. Not nearly.

How many free kicks did Beckham score, in actual matches, out of the total number he took? Some of them.

And what’s more, art is not sport. The primary drive is not competition. There aren’t rigid rules within which precise skills may be tested. Art is more exploratory, imprecise, curative, playful. You are not aiming to best others, but to share with them. Whether you share through words, fabrics, musical scales, or cupcakes, you’re dedicating yourself to an act of communion.

So when you’re next lying in bed, sugar and dough beneath your fingernails, feeling the day has been for naught, remember that this is the job. Your cupcakes will sag. You’ll strike out. Why not give yourself a decade or two, and then see if that’s still the case. And if it is, but you still enjoy what you do, then who the hell cares?

We’re all only going to die.

So get down to the oven, to the pitch, to the page, and do your work, whether you hit or miss or fall. There is nothing more for it.

...... 

Music: This Is the Day, by the The. An upbeat new wave classic, imbued with optimism, but with a hint of melancholy twisting through the core. Gently profound. Lovely.