Do you enjoy expressing yourself creatively? Have you ever become so concerned about whether what you are producing is good enough that you stopped producing altogether? I hope you haven’t, but I have.
I used to write a lot and create a lot of visual art. Compulsively, even. Some time shortly after leaving university, my creative output slowed to a trickle. I can blame many factors. Uncertainty about my life direction. Marijuana. A new relationship that led me to choose little alone time. The time I did spend “alone” was increasingly spent with the Internet, and I was spending less time exploring exciting uses for it, and more (and more) time consuming information, drinking in the creative work of others. I compared my work with that of others everyone in the world.
Eventually even the thought of writing something or painting something filled me with anxiety. Had it already been done? Did I have anything new to offer? I stockpiled art supplies and lined my walls with empty canvases. I shrank back into the dark corners of my mind, let old bad habits flourish and adopted new bad habits to keep them company. I filled journals with non-updates about my epic stagnation and general failure as a human being. And there was the biggest factor holding me back from expressing myself: I didn’t like myself. I felt sure that anything I produced would be fatally poisoned by my character weaknesses, and therefore a waste of everybody’s time.
Today a dead Danish philosopher gave me a resounding slap upside the head.
Søren Kierkegaard’s Works of Love is a deep and detailed set of sermons, if you will, on Christian teachings about love. In Christianity, love is a duty, a person’s highest and most important duty, in fact. Works of Love emphasizes that loving one’s neighbour entails loving real people as they really are, not who we want them to be or think they could be with a few minor tweaks. This also means we’re misguided if we idealize our love as something so precious that it can only be bestowed upon the perfect object of our affection. This has nothing to do with the fact that certain people may be more compatible with you than others… it’s a warning against believing you’re devoted to the ideal of true love when in fact you’re just an egotist holding yourself back from truly loving. Kierkegaard uses the analogy of an “artist” who travels the world but cannot find any subject beautiful enough, worthy enough, for him to paint. He contrasts this “artist” with someone with no pretensions to the title of “artist”, who nevertheless lovingly paints everything and everyone he sees around him. Ahem.
He goes on: “…when love dwells finitely on self, all is lost. Think of an arrow flying, as is said, with the speed of an arrow. Imagine that it for an instant has an impulse to want to dwell on itself, perhaps in order to see how far it has come, or how high it is soaring above the earth, or how its speed compares with the speed of another arrow that is also flying with the speed of an arrow—in that same second the arrow falls to the ground.”
And also: “Beware of comparison! Comparison is the most disastrous association that love can enter into; comparison is the most dangerous acquaintance love can make; comparison is the worst of all seductions.” …Here follows quite a poetic rant about the deadliness of comparison, culminating with “Comparison is a loathsome rash that turns inward and is eating at the marrow. Therefore beware of comparison in your love!”
Ok. So, idealism and comparison are death to love, and I would argue, by extension, to creativity. But surely this wisdom is available on a million self-improvement websites already. I probably read similar advice several times a week. Yet this time it resonated with me in a way that none of those other authors managed to accomplish.
I never – seriously, that is – considered that my problems could be symptoms of a lack of love. In the light of Kierkegaard’s discourses, it seems clear to me that they are. Also, the concept of duty brings an immediacy to the teaching that is completely absent without it. For a very long time, I have been shirking my duty to love, and the consequences have really caught up with me. I should also add that my unwillingness to create implies a lack of faith as well, in that I should trust by now that if I feel impelled to create something, there may be something in it which does not come from me, which maybe comes from those around me, or somehow otherwise through me, which is inherently good… Even my outrageous blunders may have a value in provoking others to some insight into their own blunders or opportunities for growth. I might learn something important from them! Further, none of the work that I consider my best ever came from me-in-a-vacuum. Rather, in every case it was either a collaboration, a loving meditation on something outside myself, or some other kind of interaction with the great Other. These shared creations far outshine anything I’ve ever come up with sitting alone, trying to channel genius. Which only drives home the point for me that the core engine of creativity is love.
Some possible objections:
1. Even if you allow that you have a duty to love, that doesn’t mean you have a duty to write or create art. The two are not necessarily the same thing.
This is true. All the same, at least in my case I feel that the creative activity follows as a corollary to love. When I am tapped into the flow of life around me, i.e., when I am loving, ideas flood me to the point that I can hardly keep track of them. I feel compelled to give back in any way I can, which definitely includes artistically. It also, of course, includes kindness, patience and less glamourous pursuits like keeping the house clean enough so that my partner doesn’t lose his mind from the disarray. In fact, those things come first. But this insight hit me initially with respect to creativity, so here it is.
2. I’m not religious, so I don’t accept that I have any such inherent duties as a human being.
My own relationship with religion is rather confused these days. I’ve gone from an intensely Christian upbringing as a child, through atheism and a lengthy tour of world spiritual traditions in my teen years and beyond, to a point where I now feel a need to give Christianity every benefit of the doubt, with a rational questioning mind and an open heart. However, I do wrestle with questions like: if I accept that I have a duty to love, do I also have to accept the possibility of eternal damnation? (Kierkegaard certainly thinks I ought to… ) In this particular case, though, it is enough for me that when I ask my heart if it believes it has a duty to love, the answer comes back unequivocally yes. That duty gives meaning to life in a way that makes it real, and worthwhile, and I’m a little mystified that I went so long without keeping it first and foremost in my mind.
3. It sounds like you’re just beating yourself up again for your failings.
Maybe so, but my previous guilt was sterile, putrefying even, giving rise to nothing but more misery. This new guilt is fertile, prodding me to do more. See, I wrote this post! More to the point, I take great inspiration from the reminder to love people as they really are. This lesson stretches a lot farther than just to other people (not that loving other people isn’t a huge, lifelong task on its own). First of all, we’re people too, and we don’t get off the hook – we have to love ourselves as we really are, even when we don’t like ourselves. And I think that spreads to loving the work that we produce. It may not necessarily make the cut and be considered worthy of sharing, but it has worth in being produced. All of it.
Please feel free to share your own experiences or thoughts. If you’re someone close to me who I haven’t loved enough day to day, know that it is way more important to me to make things right between us than to engage in any kind of creative expression, and that will be first on my agenda.
♥
(p.s.: in honour of blank canvases…)
Like a refugee 