give yourself over
Another great workout. We did these weird things called 'wall crawls' that I know I didn't do properly. Getting into an almost-handstand position against a wall kind of freaked me out. Kyle encouraged me to just do my best, which I did. I found myself wanting to go back and practice weird moves like wall crawls and so on, to just keep practicing until I get good at it. I have a preoccupation with the concept of mastery. My book, The Creative Process Diet, revolves around the concept of self-mastery. I began thinking a lot about mastery during my post-doc, while I was studying posttraumatic stress disorder in depth. I realized that mastery is the solution to pretty much everything. Not absolutely everything, but it is a key concept that is at the center of our existence. The idea of civilization is to impose or facilitate mastery. I remember when I was in elementary school, and we had just moved to St. George, Utah -- a place where sports was everything -- I had a friend named Grant. He and the other local kids who'd had years of immersion in this sports-saturated society were way ahead of me. Add to that the fact that I had a gentle, polite demeanor, and felt that it would be un-Christlike of me to grab a ball out of someone's hands and . . . you get the picture. I got used to getting picked last for all the teams. But Grant and I would hang out and play ball, and he was really good. I remember one day he explained to me that all you had to do was just practice, over and over, keep practicing, over and over. He showed me little things he did with the basketball to practice this a way and that a way. Just repetition, just keep practicing, just put the time in. Just keep practicing. So I did. I kept practicing at every sport. Then, in the 5th grade, we would play soccer at every recess. All of a sudden something began to happen, and there was no clear explanation for it: I began scoring every goal. It didn't matter whose team I was on. If I was on your team, you would win, because I would be the one scoring all the goals. Suddenly I went from being the last one picked to the first. I remember there were two alpha males, Yale and Steve, who would conspire to be team captains together and immediately pick me first. This did wonders for my self-esteem. And for some weird reason, I never feared that I might not perform. I just kept showing up, Yale and Steve would punt the ball over to me, and into the goal it would go. Over and over again. It was weird. I think everyone was like, what the . . . ? I certainly felt that way too, but I wasn't complaining. One day I made so many goals my classmates lifted me up onto their shoulders and carried me back to the classroom at the end of recess. A true hero. The whole thing is kind of funny actually, but naturally . . . I love it. Who doesn't love being admired and celebrated by others? I think that experience implanted in me an appreciation of mastery. An appreciation of the fact that all you have to do is just keep showing up, keep trying, keep practicing, keep going. Don't overthink it, don't worry, don't even necessarily expect success or any specific outcome on your own timetable . . . Just keep going and then watch and see what happens. That's a basic premise in The Creative Process Diet. Focus on the things that deserve to be focused on, and forget about the rest. Spend the majority of your time simply enjoying life. Give yourself over to a process in which your desired outcomes materialize on their own, through the deeper workings of the creative process. And then just relax and enjoy life in the here and now.
