How important is timing to our lives? Can I miss out on an idea or an opportunity if I don’t seize on it right away? And if so is that the only one or will there be others?
This fear doesn’t exactly wake me up in the middle of the night, but I notice it like a machine hum in the background of my thoughts- much like the boiler room in Stephen King’s The Shining, which is a book I read and a movie I watched repeatedly in my teens and 20s, and was reminded of recently while listening to an episode of The Residuals. In the book, the boiler room is a metaphor for the emotional and psychological tension of the storyline, and in particular Jack, the writer-turned-hotel manager whose all work and no play turns him into a possessed, alcoholic madman.
In past posts, I have written about where ideas might come from. But in addition to the mystery of where and how they originate, there is the question of how long do we have to act on them? We all have had the experience of either working on something in the studio only to see it out in the world months into the project at a gallery or in a magazine, done to the 9’s by someone else with a bigger budget or a year’s head start. And on a larger scale, that maybe the same can be said of our life’s purpose. You see that person having the career you want, or the family you can’t yet afford. Can we miss our life purpose by taking the safe route or ignoring our little voice that says ‘do the thing’?
When I was younger, this idea consumed me. I think in part it was because I wasn’t yet doing the thing, so I felt like there was a real chance that life was going to pass me by. Instead of pursuing my passion for art right out of high school, I got my undergraduate degree in French. While I was creatively pretty active up through high school, I didn’t make art for the entire first year of college because I was so intimidated by what it meant to be making such a big life choice like a major. (ha.) Surely a career in art was doomed to suffering and failure, so pursuing something more “serious” like French would be a much safer career choice. So many misguided notions there, and ultimately I strayed away from what I really wanted to do: be an artist.
Finally in 2003, while home in Minnesota for the summer after graduating from UW-Madison, I had a dream about Kara Walker and her black paper silhouettes. There weren’t any specific pieces, and I didn’t see any of the dark, antebellum imagery that she is known for. I just sensed the underlying concept that her work was a representation of an archetypal shadow self and that somehow it had something to do with my own repressed self. I woke up knowing that I needed to express myself as an artist on a more serious level, and began researching art schools. That fall I applied to art school at SFAI and ended up enrolling the following year.
Up until then, and in those first couple years, I felt very confused and had lots of misplaced creative energy. I was constantly journaling and reading books on self-improvement. I felt it hard to relax and enjoy myself because I always was worried that there was something just outside my reach, dangling on the edge of my peripheral vision. I journaled and charted my future potential into different scenarios to try and figure out what really motivated me. What would make me feel the most fulfilled? At the tender age of 22 or 23, I was sure that time was running out to find it.
It’s not that I think this time was wasted, but I worry I caused myself undue stress with the false sense of urgency. All work and no play makes anyone feel like a dull sociopath. But I didn’t think I could spare the time to relax because I believed what I wanted would not just naturally bring itself to the foreground. I had to excavate it, unearth it, mine it, and then polish it like a precious jewel before it would make itself clear to me.
All this angsty soul-searching was done primarily in notebooks that were packed into a box and mostly forgotten once I moved from the Midwest to San Francisco. Then last year, when visiting my mom, I grabbed an old notebook from one of those boxes to write some notes in. It had about 10 pages of to-do lists and notes written in bubbly handwriting but was mostly blank. As I looked through those pages I was surprised to find some connections to grown-up me. I was still taking French classes and writing lots of to-do lists. My handwriting had changed a bit, becoming tighter and more serious in pen rather than pencil.
Then one night while up late editing my podcast, I had arrived at the last page in the notebook only to find some more old writing. It was a series of thoughts about big-picture goals that I had for my life, probably an exercise from I book I was reading at the time. One sentence jumped out at me that seemed to be some kind of mission statement: “Do what Oprah did for housewives but for women artists.”
I laughed at how specific it was, and how lofty. And while I would say that my goals have expanded beyond any specific discipline within the arts or any gender identities, the core mission behind The Side Woo was there. My younger self, confused as she was, had the same vision.
Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday podcast has been a benchmark for me in terms of quality podcasting content for years. And I will admit to a quirky mental trick that I use to keep from spiraling about an old trauma story in which I imagine myself as a guest on Super Soul. In order to regain perspective on an issue, I try to think how I would tell the wisest, least victim-y version of my story to Oprah and her audience. I find that it helps me elevate my narrative and zero in more quickly on what I might have learned since you only bring your best self to Oprah. (Let me know if you try this.)
What struck me is, at the time that I wrote that mission statement, podcasts didn’t exist, nor did the internet in its current form with Youtube, social media or any of the platforms that would have made it possible for an average person with no budget to share conversations and stories of unfamous artists without an agent, radio station or TV pilot.
While at the time I am sure I felt burdened with this sense of urgency and a fear that life was going to pass me by, it would have been almost impossible for me in the early 2000s to act on this dream. I had no money. I was not yet an exhibiting artist. I had little experience writing anything for an audience other than French papers. And no one was going to let me on TV.
It seems clear now that to realize this dream it required decades to create a foundation, as well as the right timing of the world to provide the tools I would need - free podcasting platforms, and accessible at-home recording tools. Not to mention, 20 years of life and art experience- not something you can fake.
So back to my original question - can we miss our calling? I think we can miss opportunities, or that people can beat us to an idea, but it is my belief (and hope) that it is impossible to ever truly miss our calling. Life has shown me in moments like this that our purpose can take us one year, twenty years, or even 80 years after your death like Hilma Af Klimt before it actually starts to make sense, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
My next challenge is to learn how to slow down and enjoy it. How do you know when you’re on the right track?