Sunday Reflections, 2.25.24 - Part 3 of 5

…All to bring me, long-winded, to tell a bit about this week.  I had just returned from a multi-day trip to the east coast with best friends, my college rowing teammates, doing little working out, but much celebration, including my 38th birthday on Saturday February 17th.  Coming back from a long weekend of uninhibited fun meant that my expectations for rowing practice this week were realistic.  Thursday morning, we revisited a workout that we’ve executed many times, one of my favorites, but also a workout that rewards explosiveness and freshness… two things I felt completely without, upon waking at 4:05am that morning.  The challenge is to row three strokes at absolute maximum pressure, rate (cadence), and speed, followed by three strokes off, completely easy, then four “on” at max, four off… and so forth up to seventeen strokes on, seventeen off, back down to three.  The highest cadence or rate I’ve ever seen for this workout (having performed it since my high school days) in the single scull has been 49 strokes / minute.  Warming up, that number seemed to me like the moon.  I would be lucky, I thought, to hit 44 today.  Our coach reminded us before starting - push our capacity today, expand what we were capable of doing, don’t play it safe in other words - go for it.

I thought, what is on the other side of fatigue?  What happens when you refuse to quit at something, when you have no real hope anymore… just the simple present, of throwing your all at the task at hand?  I thought of something that had happened just a few months beforehand.  One of my ambitious, impossible goals for 2023 was to make twice as much income from my art sales as I had in 2022.  However, tracking sales in January and February and even into April of 2023, the numbers were so disappointing, so far from being “on track” to double, or even equal 2022, I stopped paying attention to that metric, and gave up on the goal.  Of course, I kept painting, I kept doing all the parallel practice* (business!) aspects of being an artist, and tried to sell what I could.

*(my art consultant’s terminology for everything that is being an artist that is not actually making the art)

One of the grants or other artist opportunities I applied to this winter asked me to look at exactly what my gross income had been in 2023.  After the massive success of the Holiday Sale, I checked on December 31, 2023, to see what the yearly total income had been.  Low and behold: double what it was in 2022.  The impossible (and I do mean impossible!) Had become a concrete, objective, measurable reality.

During this Thursday’s workout, through all fatigue, through whatever else is going on, I hit 50 strokes / minute, a lifetime high, twice.

So, while this, in the grander scheme of getting faster in an obscure sport, or selling slightly more art, or just enjoying life a little bit more, is not hugely relevant, maybe not even worth sharing, I felt compelled to share this story, because for me there is a minor but significant victory - in that the two worlds, the two pursuits I’ve spent most of my time alive chasing, informed one another.

January and February are always challenging months for my art business.  There are larger forces at play that have nothing to do with who is seeing my work, the quality of my art, or how hard I am trying in the moment.  The lack of response from the void of the world could be overwhelming, could paralyze me into inaction.  My first year, 2018-2019, of making art-as-career, this is exactly what occurred.  I couldn’t handle the rise and fall of the waves of commercial success or barren failure, and didn’t have the perspectives I try to maintain now, the larger views, the patience to keep working through all hopelessness, to simply keep going and give each day my best effort.  Just when things seem like they can’t work, or won’t work, or will never work… I’ll keep going.  I’ll do my best anyways.  If rowing has taught me anything about myself or the larger patterns of the universe, it’s that giving up is the only certainty of a result.  You will achieve the mild catharsis that accompanies certainty of an outcome.  You will be right, and you will have an excuse - it was too hard to keep trying.

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.