THE CONSTELLATION

Showing Up

Steven Pressfield's The War of Art found me much later.

One of its ideas stayed with me: show up.

Show up when creativity is pouring out of you. Show up when absolutely nothing seems to be coming.

Practice your craft.

Make yourself available to the Muse without demanding that she appear according to your schedule.

I understand that differently today too.

Showing up is not only how work gets completed.

Showing up increases the possibility of encountering something you could not have known to look for.

You cannot schedule the burst.

You can cultivate the conditions from which bursts become possible.

That is part of what I now understand about Jack Kerouac and the famous weeks in which On the Road poured onto his scroll.

The burst was real.

But so were the years before it.

The travel. The notebooks. The conversations. The earlier attempts. The failures. The friendships. The music. The observation.

The scroll was not the entire creative process. It was evidence that the process had been happening for a very long time.

I think many of the most important things in life work this way.

Slowly.

SUDDENLY.