Sunday Reflections, 2.25.24 - Part 4 of 5

…Not giving up, on the other hand, can feel like dashing ourselves on the rocks, bloodied by the surf and shore, with no end in sight.  I can’t say, or promise, that everyone reading this should always bang their head against the wall when there’s little or no reward for doing so!  However… everything that was anything in my art career, in the learning of how to paint or draw better, or in the past and current practice of making the boat do magical, seemingly previously impossible things, only came after a multitude of uncomfortable, hard moments.  Some of the paths that led me to today were beyond what I might be capable of doing again.  However, there I go again, thinking I know what is and isn’t possible before I’ve done it.

I look forward to rowing; I look forward to making more art; I look forward to the strange path that I’m following in the invention of my art career.  I find myself surrounded by the best people for all these things, the best partner, a loving family, an incredible team, expert consult in career and training, and a city and future art opportunities that offer incredible inspiration, everywhere I look.

I don’t recommend trying to make art as a career, and I don’t recommend that everyone take up rowing, but I do recommend that everyone experience, at least once, what happens when the temptation to give up is fought, wrestled with, maybe lost to several times even.  If magical, impossible, dream-like realities are something that appeal to you, you can have them.  Maybe part of why the contemporary cultural landscape is so stressful, hazardous, and backwards is that this is not the messaging you are being given.  We are indoctrinated to believe that there are secrets in life, that there are “hacks”, that you can have your cake and eat it too, that “success” is reducible to one number (your bank account) and once you get that number up, buy a bunch of things with it, get it up again, you will find whatever it is you’re looking for, and the ache you feel each day in the quiet moments with yourself will ease.

Don’t believe it.  Peace is achievable, but not by just throwing yourself and your personality into the internet, not by landing some job, not even by winning races or competitions over others.  There are no such shortcuts, not if you want what you believe is impossible.  To do things like that, you will have to forget what you think you know.  I once had a coach who repeated, over and over and over, to our team “you have no idea what you are capable of.”  We were fairly smart kids, but he was right, we didn’t know our own capacity.  We explored what we might be capable of by trying to do “impossible” things, over and over and over, until the impossible became routine, and the extreme challenges and intimidating physical battles became our comfort zone, allowing us to step on, further, into new challenges.

Going through this process doesn’t feel heroic, or even enjoyable, especially when things don’t seem to be going well.  There are plenty of times, in both pursuits, my art career and in early morning practices, when I ask, truly, what am I doing here?  Why am I doing this?  Is this what I want?  Might there be an easier way?  Should I be doing something else, instead?  When I find myself asking these kinds of questions, I try to gain some distance from this mindset, to zoom out, to get more in touch with what’s really going on, externally, rather than dwell internally and attempt to rationalize why something is so damn hard.  Maybe the answer is a bit simpler than I realize in those moments: doing hard things is hard.

Consider this: I’m asking for one of my longtime hobbies and passions, making art, to support me financially when I have no background in business and I live in one of the most expensive non-art cities on the planet, in an age where the kind of art I want to make is de-valued and ignored by the machines of commerce.  Rather than rely on talent or schtick I’m attacking new experimental territory across a variety of media and scales and subjects and asking my audiences to bear with me as I learn, without engaging in the conventional methods of self-congratulatory social media, representation by others, or institutional job security.  I’m doing it on my terms, in the way that aligns with my integrity, with my beliefs, attempting to give my audiences something they’ve never seen before and make art as a bridge to a better understanding of their own lived experience.  Ambitious, sure.  Foolish, you betcha!  Impossible? Probably!  Sounds like fun to me.

I have, in my corner, a loving girlfriend, a loving family, and a core group of people who have consistently and valiantly defended my work and invested in its ongoing production.  I work with the best art consultant (and business coach) that money can buy.  My weekdays begin early, playing around in boats with young people on the water, to try to make their experience slightly better than it might be otherwise if I wasn’t there.  The team, the program, the values I could not believe in more strongly, and I look forward to seeing where it leads over the next several years of the program, as well as this impending spring, getting to watch our athletes amaze themselves with what they are capable of.  Maybe I can get in on some of that magic, too, old and differently motivated as I am, just by hanging in there and continuing to invest time into the pursuit.