DAY 029 – DESIGNING DANGEROUSLY

Effective vs. Ineffective

Grades are turned in, my summer syllabus and materials aren’t required until Monday, and so I feel like I have a bit more time to jump back into this...as long as I don’t think about the four professional shows, two service projects at school, and house projects that are all clamoring for attention. Yikes.

I’ve been feeling incredibly empty. I had two dates over two coffees (one was actually a chai) with two lovely faculty from other areas today, which felt like it rejuvenated me a bit. I confessed to one of them, a colleague I had never met before, that I was working on this writing project. She’s a screenwriter. She said the same thing that Pressfield has been saying in The War of Art. Grind it out. Keep pushing even if you hate it. So, here I am catching up. 

Action is effective. Passivity is ineffective, that is, if you want to move. It’s great if you want to be static. Passivity is its own sort of urgent grasping, electing to stay put even though we ultimately know it’s a fallacy. Everything moves. Like whitewater rafting or anything with erratic physical contact, the key is to move with the shocks, pliable, not rigid. It’s our rigidity that injures us, counterintuitive as it may be. A silly rebellion against time careening us madly forward.