The way to dissolve our resistance to life is to meet it face to face. When we feel resentment because the room is too hot, we could meet the heat and feel its fieriness and its heaviness. When we feel resentment because the room is too cold, we could meet the cold and feel its iciness and its bite. When we want to complain about the rain, we could feel its wetness instead. When we worry because the wind is shaking our windows, we could meet the wind and hear its sound. Cutting our expectations for a cure is a gift we can give ourselves. There is no cure for hot and cold. They will go on forever.

—from When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron

One of my favorite life projects has been to create a gentle, nourishing system of creativity. My dream is that my work will have a container, a process, an environment that allows it to flow out of me naturally (and prolifically!), simply from the pure joy of making it. This has been a near-constant goal for me; I've given many creative hours, weeks, months, years, maybe a decade? I don't know, when you add it all up, it could be that much time.

In a way, The Self-Taught Life is another attempt at this very thing, as is perhaps everything I've ever made. Except in the case of The Self-Taught Life, what it's making room for is a gentle, nourishing rhythm of personal scholarship despite and because of all the other things that must be centered in our lives.

But. In order to actually start this little newsletter up again, and to start putting out my little prototype, I have had to decide that when it comes to my creative work, the work itself is the only thing that qualifies as "the work." All the rhythms and practices and tools and systems are nice-to-have, if there's time for them, but they can't be centered. They don't count as "the work." And they never have.

This is sad! I can't tell you how sad it is. My knowledge graphs, with all of my interconnected notes, and all of my questions, and all of the cross-pollination of all of the books I am constantly reading. All of the free-writing, and my poetry reading rituals, and the collecting of beautiful sentences, and the procurement of little snacks and tiny cups of tea. My many notebooks! My fountain pens! My pots of ink! My blotting paper! I am grieving them all.

It's not that I don't have these things anymore, ever. It's just that they are categorized differently in my head. They never can be confused with the work. They don't even "spark" the work, if I look back on these activities honestly. They theoretically could, but if I'm not acting on that spark in the moment and actually fanning it into a flame right then and there, it dies out pretty fast. And those sparks are wayward; they may have nothing to do with the work I'm trying to complete right now. I've had to get strict with myself that these practices are pseudo-work. They are hobbies. They are fun little things that make me happy when I get to do them, which is after I do the work.

I hate that this is true. I love it when someone tells me that it isn't. For example, I have read How to Take Smart Notes by Sonke Ahrens so many times. There are many good-sounding arguments that this kind of note-taking system can make you the most prolific writer around; your writing builds itself from the bottom up out of all of your questions, thoughts, and observations. I have had these kinds of systems for years, and what I've discovered is that they take so much more time and maintenance (a delightful, beloved chore!) than just facing yourself on the page day after day.

My first iteration of the Path of Action that I wrote over a year ago was based on just this type of learning/creative gardening system. And did it result in action? No. Not at all. Not until I gave it up and approached it entirely differently. The Action must be the central thing. It must come first, and daily. All the learning around it must be treated as a kind of break; a joyful thing you get to do when you have time for it that could possibly feed into your Action, and possibly it won't.

I have also gone through The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron so many times. There are many good-sounding arguments that your artist self is a child that needs to be gently coaxed through creative play and aesthetically pleasing rituals (free-writing! longhand! every day!), and that ultimately this will result in a natural blooming of the artistic vision, as well as plenty of actual work in the world.

As I've mentioned before, I have diligently written morning pages (three pages, long-hand) near-daily most of my adult life. I will not say it hasn't had value, but it has not resulted in any of my work that's actually made it out into the world (except for, maybe this). Free-writing hasn't made it clear to me what my most important work is, even. That has come over a long, long time of just being me in the world and doing different things and seeing what will not let go of me, even when I wish it would.

The way I experience doing the work these days is more like literal resistance training. I have a "if you haven't done your work yet, you have to do it now" time on my calendar, every day. And when it's time for work to start, I work. And by "work," I mean I write the next piece of the big project that I mean to publish. I hesitate to even call writing this newsletter "work," because it's not the main thing. For some people it is, but not for me.

Every time, it's hard and I don't want to do it. Every time, I have to push myself just a little bit more than I want to. Every time I look back on what I wrote yesterday and wonder if it's really true, or if it was just true that day, or if it was ever true at all. I am constantly embarrassed by my repeated attempts; it seems I'm always circling around the same thing, and I can't get exactly what it is. When I'm working, it doesn't feel poetic or lovely. It usually feels cold. Methodical, practical. I don't feel inspired; I feel varying degrees of reluctance. Nothing about it feels beautiful (despite all the beauty that I see during every other part of the day). Mostly it feels like opening up my laptop and typing into a stupid screen, because that's what it is.

Maybe if I was doing some other type of work, it would be different, I don't know. But this is the work I've decided is the most important work in the world for me to be doing, despite all the metaphorical fires and fire alarms going off, basically all the time. Despite the fact that it doesn't matter to a single other soul in the universe that I do this work, except for the people who love me, who want me to be fulfilled—but in that case I could be doing anything that is fulfilling to me, it wouldn't matter what it was. Despite the fact that pretty soon maybe a robot can do this job better than me. Maybe they already can.

I wish I'd accepted this sooner. There are certainly many people who tried to tell me (Steven Pressfield, Seth Godin, etc. etc.), but I didn't want to live in their world. I wanted to make a different one. And anyway, I have a prolific creative friend who never even thinks about these things. She is not strict with herself. She never worries about periods of time when she's not working; she just trusts that she'll do it when it's ready to be done, and she does. Maybe I could be that way one day, who knows. I will probably keep trying in some ways forever, because it is apparently one of the great problems I am compelled to solve.

In the meantime, I must admit that the work does feel good afterward, in a way. It feels good in the "I just did something hard" kind of way. But also in the "I'm really glad I'm done and I can happily go do something else" kind of way.

And you know what feels even better? When I know what "the work" is, and can face the cold hard face of it bravely, I can do more in one hour than entire days of pseudo-work. This is why these distinctions matter. It may seem that I am being too strict on the surface, but it is not a kindness to let myself spend 8 hours "working," even if it's in the gentlest and most soothing of ways, when I could be doing other things I enjoy better. What do I plan to do with this one wild and precious life? Hopefully not deceive myself that I'm working when I'm actually not, and end up wasting most of it.

The book that finally spoke to me on this subject is Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland. It helped me realize that creative work isn't supposed to feel good, and it doesn't feel good to nearly everybody (except for maybe my friend). Not the beginning, not the middle, and not even the end. Not the validation or the lack of validation. Not the pressure or the lack of pressure. Not the money or the lack of money. Not good writing or bad writing. Not truth, or beauty, even.

There's some small thing in there...some small kernel of something that makes our most important work worth doing anyway. That little kernel is a protest against all of the lesser reasons we have for doing anything; because it's cozy, or aesthetically pleasing, or pleasurable, or people like us for it, or it makes us money, or it will result in our being remembered better and longer than most humans get to be. This kernel is the brightest, most brilliant thing, even though it's hard to name what it even is. It's me being me, and you being you, and nobody else being able to be us but ourselves. In this moment, which will be different than me being me and you being you tomorrow or ten years from now.

On that note, I'm almost done with the final path in The Self-Taught Life! I will (hopefully) be releasing it next week.

Thanks for being here,

Sarah Avenir