Beginning...

I was reminded on Tuesday (thanks Facebook) of a Neil Gaiman quote I read in a class I taught on New Years Eve at Mission Yoga in 2013:

I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're Doing Something.

I’ve read some of Neil Gaiman’s books and always loved them, and I can’t recall how I found his quote some six years ago. Since that time I’ve followed him on Instagram, and a post came across my feed yesterday in which he shared that he’d had a history of New Years messages. He linked to a post that collected some of them, so I followed the mouse (clicks) down the rabbit hole.

It turns out, that quote - which he shared to mark the new year as 2011 turned to 2012 - had more to it that I’d originally shared. Here it is in full:

I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.

Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're Doing Something.

So that's my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody's ever made before. Don't freeze, don't stop, don't worry that it isn't good enough, or it isn't perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.

Whatever it is you're scared of doing, Do it.

Make your mistakes, next year and forever.

The freeze that comes from attachment to the delusion that all work must be perfect has kept me stuck since I was very young. In college, my painting professor Kathleen Olsen gave me a paper - which I understood to be the transcript of a speech, by Agnes Martin. I still have it somewhere, and I started to seek it out so I could be sure I was summarizing it properly - which would pull me out of this process of writing and give me another excuse to abandon it due to the concern that it wouldn’t be perfectly accurate. The gist of it is that many artists let the way they think the final product should look (for visual artists) get in the way of engaging in the process. The fear that the work isn’t good enough pretty much assures that we never produce anything good because it prevents us from engaging in the process at all. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.

Did I read this paper at 21 and allow it to reshape my relationship to perfection? I did not. But I did hold onto it, through countless moves and long after I let my paints dry up in a box in a dark corner of a closet. Agnes Martin’s words, though, are still vital and vibrant and ring true with a tone more meaningful today than ever.

Four or five years ago, I attended a weekend workshop with Mark Nepo about the creative process. One of the things I still recall clearly from those hours is his advice to embrace the “unfinished” nature of a piece of writing. He shared that familiar feeling of coming to the end of a passage and not really knowing how to tie it up, or bring it together. Leave it, he said. Let the meaning rise from the opening that remains. I actually don’t know what he said specifically, but that’s what I took from it. And again, I found myself called to run up and dig for the notebook from that weekend so I could get it “right", but perhaps the essence or intention is what really matters here and more often than I allow myself to realize.

The habit of hoping for every word and act to be just right has a hold on me that I’ll probably wrestle with forever. If I could only slip through the bars of the cage. But the stories I’ve absorbed - some experienced, some imagined - have landed in my body/brain and been a part of how I see for as long as I can recall. I think that this is essential to our experience of humanness. I’ve come to believe that the lessons we need to learn will always resurface - ghosts of moments and habits (lives) past that can’t be exorcised fully because they are melded into the us that lives here and now - this iteration of being. We will continue learn the same lessons over and over again, but hopefully more quickly and with less collateral damage, not unlike leveling up on a video game.

While the lessons may be different from person to person, the cycles are relatable. Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth has always made sense to me and validated my deep faith in the creative process as one of the best - and in some cases the only - means through which we can free ourselves and find ourselves in a state or place that feels like a version of perfect that lands. Santosha, perhaps? We can see, through creative practice that comes from commitment to process rather than attachment to product, both the uniqueness and the universal nature of our experiences.

This is where I suppose yoga - despite my disgust with the industry at the moment - will always live with me. It validated my desire to embrace the grey rather than feeling I needed to run to the light and hide from the shadows. It suggests that there is in inextricable link between ideas that seem on surface to be in opposition, but actually exist in deep and meaningful relationship. It eliminates the notion of simple solutions, of a version of “right” that is unfailing. As I tell students from time to time, you can grow to acknowledge that we’re never perfect, but also begin to consider that we always are. We either learn to bathe in that mud or drown in it.

All of this is my typically long-winded way of saying that I’ve decided, after writing frequently but rarely posting, to begin to use this space as a place to plant the seeds of thoughts and ideas, whether or not the words seem right or perfect or even logical, even if they never grow to bear fruit.  Part of the stickiness of all of this stuff is undoubtedly ego, and I’ve already learned this morning to write and post without re-read or re-write, as those processes usually leave me retreating and regretting.

The funny thing is, when I really think on it, what holds me back is less a concern that I’ll post a typo or something controversial or inaccurate, and more a fear that I’ll just be one more self-absorbed yoga teacher waxing poetic about their lives while the world burns. Our new world social web is sticky and icky and sometimes downright discouraging in that it can validate the shallow and shiny, forgoing and forgetting the worth of depth, of process, of the unedited life and work and particularly the people around us and beyond us, who starve while we seek enlightenment. But I suppose it also exposes us to artists and poets who find their way through that crowded landscape. There is so much potential there for radial personal, even community-wide change, if we seek to find it. Today, for example, it brought me back to Gaiman and then also to Martin, who wrote in a different piece on perfection:

Of all the pitfalls in our paths and the tremendous delays and wanderings off  the track I want to say that they are not what they seem to be. I want to say that all that seems like fantastic mistakes are not mistakes and all that seems like error is not error, and it all has to be done. That which seems like a false step is just the next step.

Perhaps my biggest mistake has been holding back. I have a desire to affect change, to learn more, to have any false truth I blindly protect shattered so that I might get closer to some sense of deeper understanding of the world and my place among others. One of the great tragedies of our current time, in my opinion, is the desperate need to be right at all costs, and the ability to validate our misguided ideologies by way of these lauded technologies. So I’ll start by being willing to be wrong, in the hope that it will guide me to a clearer right, a light, that supports a more perfect union.

Here’s to change, and the potential for such transformation in every moment, not just at the start of a calendar year. It’s often easier to physically move a house full of boxes from one side of the country to other than to shift a small habit that changes our state of mind, of being, or of seeing. But we can, and we will, if we embrace that creative process .