Heidi and I took a quick jaunt to the coast last weekend, partly to celebrate my 49th birthday, staying in a fun little Airbnb right next to Yaquina Bay State Park. Amazing weather in Newport, which of course can happen anytime of the year on the Oregon coast. A little below is a shot of Rosie on the sandbar that separates Yaquina Bay from the beach. My intrepid Irish Setter and I had a great time on those dunes.
A spectacular sunset dinner at Georgie’s, a visit to Cobblestone Beach at the Yaquina Head Lighthouse at extremely low tide, and a pleasant Sunday afternoon stop at Airlie Winery, a favorite of ours, capped off a great weekend.
Hard to believe I’m approaching half a century. Looking back, I think a lot of us have an age where we feel we’ve become the person we are mentally. I think for me it was around age 27. I feel pretty much the same inside as I did twenty-two years (!!) ago. I don’t think that was even the most significant year in my life (that would probably be 1994, the year I graduated from college, started working full-time, and met the love of my life), or the year that changed me the most as a person (that would probably be 2003, when I looked down into my newborn daughter’s eyes for the first time and was never the same person again), or even a year when I knew I was getting someplace as a writer (probably 2008, when I sold my first novel to Simon and Schuster). But it’s the year when, looking back, at least, I feel most like the person I am today.
That’s also when I started having to worry a little more about whether or not to eat the cake. Before that, I could eat as much cake as I wanted and never be concerned about my weight. Now I can’t so much as post a picture of cake on my website without gaining a few pounds. I wish I was joking.
On the writing front, the short book I was working on turned into a long book which is turning back into a short book. Alas, that’s sometimes how it goes. As I mentioned last month, these days I don’t have a lot of great advice for other writers, except to put in the time and enjoy the process, whatever your process is. You’ve got to find your own way. It might be a cliche to say the work should be its own reward, but it is true. You can’t control how the world responds to your work. You can only do your best, keep challenging yourself, and trust that with time, and a little luck, the results will come.
And if the results aren’t as great as you’d hoped, whether that’s the results of a particular piece of work, or how the world responds to it, well, you’ve still got the work. The process. The art itself. The thrilling, challenging, frustrating, teasing, agonizing, amazing art itself.
Most of us don’t like to talk about luck in the arts, but if you find yourself saying nonsense like “I don’t believe in luck,” then please tell that to the eight-year-old who just lost both her parents in Ukraine because a madman in Saint Petersburg sees threats where more sane and compassionate people see opportunities. Chance is part of life. Some people get lucky, some people don’t. Without chance, life couldn’t even be; randomness, chaos, call it what you will, is also what makes life so interesting. That doesn’t mean you can’t influence how your life goes. Of course you can! Get good at what you do and give yourself as many chances as you can to get lucky. You just don’t get to predetermine the outcome. Thank God, though! Because to paraphrase Alan Watts, if you were both omnipotent and all-knowing, eventually you’d get bored and want to be surprised . . . which is life! And you can’t have meaningful surprise without real risk. To say otherwise is to engage in wishful thinking, and to talk only of the success stories is to engage in survivorship bias.
So for me these days, I just try to do my best, enjoying the process of creating — even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard. It’s hard because as much as I’d like to predetermine the outcome of my creative work, I can’t. Not if I want to be surprised, and sometimes through surprise great things happen. In all creative fields, I think it’s best to embrace that feeling of risk and just live in that present moment with the process as much as you can. Enjoy the fruits of your labor when they come, of course, but don’t blame yourself and beat yourself up all the time when material success proves elusive. That’s why accepting that luck does play a part can actually be very freeing. It doesn’t give license for laziness, however; you still have to do the work. But you can just do the work and surrender yourself to the outcome, knowing that you did your best in that moment in time.
Since I mentioned Alan Watts, one of the twentieth century’s great philosophers (or as he liked to think of himself, as a philosopher-entertainer), I’ll finish off this post with a quote from The Wisdom of Insecurity that encapsulates what I’m getting at. I think it’s one of the most profound things he’s written, and it’s probably no surprise that this book is still selling well (Amazon lists it as a bestseller in its category) some seventy years after it’s original publication.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to see if I can go find some cake . . .
This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.
I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.
If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o’-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.
The art of living … is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.
We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.
Tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present, since it is in the present and only in the present that you live.
— Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity
