Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do.
Make good art.
I'm serious. Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art. Somebody on the Internet thinks what you do is stupid or evil or it's all been done before? Make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, and eventually time will take the sting away, but that doesn't matter. Do what only you do best. Make good art.
Make it on the good days too.
--Neil Gaiman, Make Good Art
Last year, I made a series of attempts to work through The Artist's Way. From the beginning of Lent to Easter, I made it--with a skipped task here and there--about halfway through Week 3. Somewhere in the back of my mind I have known this for awhile, but my attempt with a workbook brought it into clearer relief: Persistence is a problem for me. I don't lack persistence, really, but I am more persistent about some things than I'd like to be, and much, much less persistent than I'd like to be about a few important things.
I'm capable of being extremely persistent when obligation or loyalty are involved. I have persisted, sometimes for years, in jobs that didn't make sense but paid the rent, hobbies that had become chores, relationships that were damaging and even dangerous. At times I have come to a hazy realization that those obligations I'm persisting in are crippling my ability to be persistent about relationships, work, and activities that are more important to me. My usual reaction when that dissonance starts to grate has been to abandon everything and everyone all at once, even things I would like to have continued. I quit playing violin, moved (many times), quit or got fired from jobs, changed voice teachers, tried to start over, and over, and over. Of course it never worked, this tearing myself out by the roots every two years and starting over. The past leaked into the present. I was full of regrets over letting so many things get to the point where I could not leave gracefully, and new obligations gradually clouded over the clean slate I had tried to create in a kind of personal/spiritual "mission creep." It's the kind of pattern that intensifies every time it repeats itself until no amount of moving, changing jobs, leaving friends, or abandoning hobbies is enough. That's when the serious trouble starts. I dove headfirst down the rabbit-hole of an eating disorder. It was my own little world. It was very quiet, and very simple. I thought about dying, and when that scared me too much, I mistook a manipulative man in a plastic collar for Jesus and followed him halfway across the country. (He liked that very much. I barely survived.)
What does all that have to do with that Neil Gaiman speech?
Art has been the one constant following me through my entire life. I remember learning how to ride a bike, but I was so young when I started the violin I have no memory of not knowing how to do it. My earliest memories are of the Mahler symphonies my dad would turn on softly on the radio after I'd been put to bed. I have played Fauré's Dolly so many Sunday evenings that the Berceuse is often literally my lullaby, the last little thing that runs through my mind before sleep. The only job I've ever really felt called to, born for, was my church singing job in Philadelphia. Four-part Anglican psalm chant and Gerard Manley Hopkins have more to do with my being Christian than any theology. I married an artist. I knew I would marry him when, instead of nodding and smiling like most men I've met, he jumped off the couch and started grabbing books to show me when I told him about my interest in a grad school program where I thought I might be able to study and write my way toward a theology of craftsmanship.
And yet, I have not been nearly as faithful to art is it has been to me. I've never quite been able to stop being an artist, but I've never fully embraced it either. I run away as soon as it gets hard. Choir director doesn't agree that you were born for this? Spend six years trying to prove yourself to him and then quit in despair. Run into a bitter old violin teacher in college? Forget transferring to a bigger music school, being a professional musician is a crappy life anyway. Admissions officer tells you you can't go to grad school because you didn't major in music? Bomb your auditions and go back to the soul-crushing office job. The office jobs probably wouldn't have been soul-crushing on their own, but what has always ended up happening is that I try to cram art into the corners, the two hours before and after work.
Gaiman compares art to a mountain in the distance. If a job moves you toward the mountain, or at least doesn't move you away from it, take it. If it moves you away, look for something else. I am far, far away from my mountain, and not sure how to start moving back towards it. Financial security is really hard to come by in this town, and we have just barely started to feel financially secure. We are also having a child, so leaps of faith seem reckless. But at the same time, I don't want to teach my child the lessons that led to this pattern in me. I don't want to teach her that the "good life" is impossible without a salary and a 401(k), or worse, that the good life is what you manage to cram into the few hours you have between work and sleep. We have plenty of friends who are living lives our parents couldn't even imagine--homesteading, cobbling together part-time jobs so mom and dad can be equally present at home, "just" being artists, making things by hand, living on just enough. I don't want my child to be afraid of a catch-as-catch-can life if it's a happy one.
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