Invisible Progress
Getting started is like trying to burrow a hole in a rock with a needle. There are days when it feels like I can’t possibly get in. The only hope is to out-will the granite. Who will be the first to blink?
The standoff happens so often that it is almost a routine. I sit down to write and ideas escape me. Sooooo… I fidget. I change chairs, rooms, T-shirts. I go outside and move from the sun to the shade. I check my email, swap the laundry, change the channel on the muted TV. I get a snack and a bottle of water. I walk to the street, look at a leaf, check the old-school box for mail. I pull up my calendar (for the 400th time) on my phone… click on the text message icon, the ESPN app, re-read the list I made of things to do. It’s a crazy-person polka. Sometimes I even chastise myself out loud.
Then eventually something loosens.
Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones (CC BY-NC 4.0)
What has been solid starts to soften. It’s the tiniest shift at first. A movement so slight that if I’m not super still I miss it. I’m like Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones, carefully feeling around for a secret passageway, a rock with give. After awkwardly poking at words until I find compatible partners, a solitary sentence forms. I’m in.
I don’t know where I am or where I’m going, but I’m in. The “work” begins.
This is the part I love. This is 50 one-dribble jumpers right followed 50 one-dribble jumpers left in a gym with no AC. Once in, it’s roll-your-sleeves-up get-the-job-done grinding. Tangible seductive work that I can’t get enough of. This is my happy place.
But the work before the work? I don’t so much love that. To get started writing, I have to run in place for a ridiculous amount of time. Opening a vein is neither quick nor easy. Sometimes the getting-in takes three times as long as the writing itself. This grueling stare down with a boulder can’t be quantified and so I find myself at odds with it. It’s progress that looks and feels a lot like wasting time.
Most creative experiences require a tolerance level for massive time spent with little to show for it. Sometimes not just hours, but days of toil result in not much more than a giant pile of trash. Even though we know that the failed attempts move us closer to something that works, the goose egg on the scoreboard of “what did you do today?” is sometimes hard to swallow.
When shaped by a measurement paradigm, invisible progress isn’t an activity we naturally give ourselves credit for.
My writing process almost always has three spots where I have to deadlift air: the entry, the turn, and the close. Once I get into a piece, words flow. But then they pool predictably in the place where I have to decide what I really think about whatever it is I’m trying to say. While this turn is a lesser form of angst, it’s a fence I have to push myself over. It’s another stop-and- stare. From there, sentences roll again like floodwaters over a dam until it’s time to wrap it up. The writing puts up one last fight in the final stubborn lines.
Feeling around while blindfolded is an essential part of the work. (Any work, really.) What’s true of the creative process is true of all kinds of things. Not every activity that moves us toward the goal line fits in a box that we can check.
One of my earliest mentors was a high school boys basketball coach who told me that he did his most important work while fishing. “Fishing?” I asked, thinking a punch line was coming.
“Fishing,” he repeated. “That’s where the problems get solved. That’s where I draw up sideline plays and create drills for defensive transition. I plan practice and put together game plans while I’m casting and reeling a line.”
Guilt-free space for thinking disguised as a pastime. Hmmmmmm. Progress that doesn’t look like progress to the naked eye.
Seneca told us to gladly pay the tax - the inevitable cost that comes with everything we do. While I don’t resent the time spent looking out the window (and thinking hard!), I can’t say I’m entirely at peace with it either.
Perhaps I should grab a pole and find a pond.