Workables #1: The Power of Yet

My writing has been flagging, y'all. I've found other things to concentrate on. Mostly healthy things, to be honest. Meditation. Spin cycling. But I've also distracted myself with new apps (loving Craft and Things, by the way). If I look at my stats in Scrivener or in Ulysses, I'm not hitting daily goals. I'm writing practically nothing.

This, of course, is the result of our most unwelcome guest: Resistance.

If you're not familiar with Resistance, you can see the mugshot above. That's him. He's a devilish little turd, to be sure. You may not know him as "Resistance." You might call him by another name: "Sloth" or "Laziness." You might recognize him as the distraction that keeps you from doing what it is you really want to do. Around here, we call him Resistance because that's the name Steven Pressfield gave him in The War of Art (which you should read).

Resistance is strong.
Resistance is powerful.
Resistance is real.

In the midst of these creative doldrums, I somehow came across a link to a book by Seth Godin called The Practice. I went to my local library and picked it up. Here was a text that took The War of Art seriously, that understood the life of the artist, and that spent more than 200 pages providing artists with a gigantic pep talk. In and amongst all of this pep, on page 67, I found "56. Embracing (Yet)." It knocked me on my ass.

I've been at this writing thing for a while, and one thing I know is that if you keep working at it, if you keep tinkering, then it will eventually come out. It may not come out the way you want it. It might be a bit funky. But, like kintsugi, it'll have its own beauty. But you gotta keep working at it.

This is the power of yet.

It's not working (yet).
It's not ready (yet).
It's not finished (yet).

No. Not yet. The "yet" is not "never." It's the opposite! It tells us that we can keep writing, painting, sculpting, honing, working. We can build, we can grow, we can make and remake and remake again.

As Godin puts it in The Practice:

Now, all that's needed is more.

More time, more cycles, more bravery, more process. More of you. Much more of you. More idiosyncrasy, more genre, more seeing, more generosity. More learning.

That's what inwy is all about: the process of making something. In these posts and in these pages, I want to provide a balm for the artist's soul, a shot of encouragement. I want to do that with openness and vulnerability, with brutal honesty about how we go about making things.

If you're interested in that conversation, if you're a maker of things, or if you're just damned curious about the creative process, then subscribe and follow along!

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