Training for the Creative Marathon

brookeshaden — Thu, 25 Jun 2015 14:41:04 +0000

We can learn a lot from athletes. They know, factually and without dispute, that they must practice before they compete. A runner knows that he or she must run most days leading up to a marathon to build endurance. A high jumper knows that he or she must practice in order to be able to achieve the jump of their dreams. Yet a lot other professions, passions or hobbies aren’t necessarily seen in the same way. Photographers and artists, for some reason, seem exempt in this category. We get an idea, and then when it doesn’t work out, we consider it, or ourselves, a failure. So rarely do we try again, each day, practicing until we get it right. We simply assume we are not good at it.

Part of the problem is how we view the arts. We are taught that art is something very natural, that if we are to be good at it we are born that way with a certain intuition and magic. Yet it does not have to be so. I am not naturally good at very many things. Photoshop is not intuitive to me, and I have to work hard. I always have. In school I got mediocre grades, didn’t get into any great colleges, and I worked twice as hard as anyone I knew in school then. So working hard isn’t an issue, but self-confidence can be.

Like any athlete, if you do put in the practice and you don’t see any obvious changes, it is easy to get discouraged. We practice and fail and don’t seem to get better – we can’t log our running times our measure our high jumps – so it might all seem for naught. But, instead of getting so down on ourselves, we must simply figure out a way to measure how much our practice time is helping.

One way to do that is to create a running list of everything that you’ve learned from failing. Each time you try something new and fail, write down one thing that you learned from the process. For a photographer, it might be certain lighting, a tool in Photoshop, etc. The second thing to do is to actively seek a solution. If you can’t figure out how to do something in Photoshop, go searching for the answer to that specific thing. What if we all took more notice of what exactly has gone wrong and how to fix it, *and* we practiced each day for the thing we love most?

I did this in high school. I practiced everyday, took note of things I was bad at, sought out extra help in areas I needed to improve, and yet still, despite all of that, I did not get into a great college. I still got bad grades. What I have learned since leaving the school system has been life-changing. When I was trapped in that way of thinking, I did not have the capacity to judge myself outside of the standards imposed on me: testing, grading, report cards, etc. I thought that the measure of my worth was directly proportional to how “fridge-worthy” my report card was. And so I judged myself based on rules that someone else created.

What I know now is that there is no way of grading your passion. There is no way of knowing if you are certainly getting better or worse. All we can know is this: the way the tide breaks on our life is a particular pattern that only we can learn to love. We cannot change the way the tide breaks, we can only jump in the waves or stand aside and watch it happen. We can choose to pursue our passion or we can give up trying. And no one can grade us on hard we played in the waves. That is for us to know, and so our worth is not measurable by mathematic standards, but instead by how much we practiced what we love.

Promoting Passion Week 62: Blue Sky Days

brookeshaden — Mon, 16 Mar 2015 14:39:58 +0000

My life is built on the foundation that I have control over my actions, reactions, and thoughts. I take extraordinary pleasure from that control. I love to test my limits, see what pushes me and what scares me, and live according to my own rules. The reason why I believe in this philosophy so strongly is because I believe in imagination. I believe that reality is what we make it, that we can choose to see or hide.

I’ve heard people counter the idea that with imagination we can create anything we want. Someone once said to me:

“I know that imagination is nice, but it won’t make the gray clouds outside go away.”

And I remember thinking about how very wrong that person was. Yes, the clouds will still be there no matter how much I will them away. But the way I see them can change, drastically, in an instant. Instead of wanting them to go away, I can accept them. Instead of seeing them in bad light, I can learn to love them. And instead of casting doubt on the power of my thoughts, I can believe in them to the fullest. Gray clouds are just blue skies in disguise.

We can see through the darkness if we bring our own light. We can imagine and create and believe and see the world as we want to see it. If I didn’t believe in this, I would not be living the life I am living, and that is a life I wouldn’t trade for anything in the world. We build our own fortune. We carve our own book of words to live by. We write the song of our life.

Art allows us to manifest these desires and visions. It allows us to spread our messages. It gives us power where once we felt nothing. It gives us hope where once we saw despair. And above all else, it gives us a voice. It allows us to speak through universal words that contain a thousand different meanings.

Imagination is the life-blood that flows through the veins of an artist. I believe all people to be artists. We do not manifest our art in the same ways. We do not all see the artist in ourselves. But it is there, sometimes sleeping silently, but always there, waiting. It is up to us to wake it.

What is your relationship with IMAGINATION?

encourage – Promoting Passion

Training for the Creative Marathon

Promoting Passion Week 62: Blue Sky Days

What is your relationship with IMAGINATION?