I’ve been trying to write the past couple of days, nay week, and have been failing. Not for lack of inspirations or ideas, for those have been spewing forth like an active volcano in my mind, rather a failure of translation. For as soon as my pen hits paper or my fingers gently rest on the keyboard my mind shuts down.
In fact my whole body has been shutting down as of late. Coming into class I am full of vigor and life, wanting to get up on stage to play and live. However, as soon as my feet land on the stage and my eyes look out with the lights framing my face everything leaves me. My body shuts down and I am either flat and boring, or closed off and withdrawn. Left to spend the rest of the class angry and frustrated with myself; sinking into a state of despair and rage.
Yet, the next morning I’m up with a newly cleared mind to tackle this craft all over again. It’s a nightmare of a cycle; full of artistic creativity in the mind yet unable to pass it through to the fingers for writing or the whole body for acting. Something is blocked. It feels like a brick wall is stopping my progress with the skin of my knuckles flayed and bloody from beating this wall mercilessly to try and get through. And of course there is no sign of any dent or headway into this brick wall. Strong it stands staring me right in the face.
So after enough brute force I give up my futile self-beating and decide to just play in the sandbox I am in. It’s far from perfect, usually adding nothing to my work but it at least keeps me from going insane in trying to break down a brick wall with my fists. The beautiful step comes next. A step where after playing in the muddy garden you are forced to play in you look up and see a beautiful sunrise. You see the colors more vividly, time slows down, the sounds are crisper and clearer, your eyes are alight with all the life that is around you. The black and white of the world falls away and even the grey of the progressives falls away. I begin to see life in the full spectrum of colors. It’s awe inspiring.
More importantly as I look around this beautiful landscape I notice that it’s not mud I’m playing in but a glorious sandbox full of toys and different kinds of sand. And the wall, the wall that seemed so grand and impenetrable, is mightily tall but 5 feet wide; I can simply walk around it.
I have found that breakthroughs are not about mercilessly beating down a wall to come out on the other side. Rather it’s a shift in perception. Whether that perception is a perception of my circumstances of life, of my art, or who I am as a person. As my perception shifts I get a more expansive view, I’m not tunnel visioned like I was before, and that is the beauty of breakthroughs. That is the beauty of our art. As we progress our perception shifts and grows, not just of our world but of ourselves; maybe most importantly of ourselves!