I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Saturday Reflections, I take time out to reflect.
I’m feeling a bit stuck with my art and my writing, even though I’m keeping up with it on a daily basis. So today I’m investigating some ideas around figuring out what to do next.
Julia Cameron writes in It’s Never Too Late to Begin Again:
We can ask for guidance for the first small step toward overcoming the pain of feeling stuck. I like to ask in writing “What do I need to do?” I am always surprised, but I always “hear” a response, and it is always small and doable. Taking that step moves me from stasis into action. It is true that when se take a step, we then desire to take another step, then another.
This aligns with the advice psychologist Carl Jung wrote in 1933 to Frau V., a woman who asked for guidance on how to live. First offering that she might join the Catholic Church if she wanted someone other than herself to prescribe how to live, he then says of the individual path:
But if you want to go your individual way, it is the way you make for yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance, and which simply comes into being of itself when you put one foot in front of the other. If you always do the next thing that needs to be done, you will go most safely and sure-footedly along the path prescribed by your unconscious. Then it is naturally no help at all to speculate about how you ought to live. And then you know, too, that you cannot know it, but quietly do the next and most necessary thing. So long as you think you don’t yet know what this is, you still have too much money to spend in useless speculation. But if you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate.
This is an existentialist approach to life–using the freedom you were granted to figure out your own way. Moving step by step into your future, creating that future as you go.
Nietzsche wrote, in complementary vein:
No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life. There may be countless trails and bridges and demigods who would gladly carry you across; but only at the price of pawning and forgoing yourself. There is one path in the world that none can walk but you. Where does it lead? Don’t ask, walk!
I’ve felt not terribly inspired in my painting lately, although I do love Mountain Cabin, another winter landscape that arose intuitively and without plan.
What I like about it:
- the somewhat strange color combination (desaturated lavender, a bit of warm red, forest green
- The perspective and suggestion of a road leading into the painting
- The large amount of white
This makes me think of getting back to my roots by turning actual mountain landscape photos into abstract paintings.
Meanwhile I’ve started two new series that aren’t really engaging me the way I would like:
- Reckless Flowers – intuitive abstractions that include a single flower, unplanned, but discovered during the painting process itself
- The White Paintings – paintings in different shades of white and off-white
Maybe I just need to give them more space and time?
Maybe I need to allow for only a small portion of my paintings to make me really happy?
What if I used Cameron’s approach and asked, “What do I need to do?” This is a different question than “What is the next right thing?” which is how I mangled Jung’s quote in a previous article on this topic. Instead Jung referred only to the next thing that needs to be done. So – Jung and Cameron are basically saying the same thing.
I smuggled the word right into my version of Jung’s advice. “Right” has the same root as reckless, reckon, rectitude, rectangle. Doing something that is the right thing to do is likely different from the next and most necessary thing. Right implies some sort of moral or cultural exhortation.
And now, investigating, I see that The Next Right Thing is actually a Disney song from Frozen 2! So I probably have come across it somehow.
But how do you know what is next and most necessary?
Even that maybe goes too far in implying there is one path for you to take, one that has import outside yourself, one that somehow you discover rather than formulate, one defined externally to you and your psyche.
And “next and most necessary” makes me think of Byung-Chul Han’s achievement society, where the internal master drives the internal slave. The internal master determines what is next and most necessary. Then the internal slave has to do it.
Perhaps you might ask “what do I want to do?”
What would be a better question? What would be a reckless question?
Reckless, in my philosophy, means refraining from analyzing, calculating, optimizing, and controlling.
How about: What am I inspired to do? Similar to wanting, but maybe with some aspect of aspiration and ambition towards creating meaning.
Or, how about randomizing your choices? That’s truly reckless.
I get random guidance using the Tarot. When I don’t know what to do, maybe when I’m choosing between alternatives, I draw some cards to give a new perspective.
That is the most reckless way to do it, but it also gets at what you want to do, what you’re inspired to do, and what you need to do. That’s because once you take the random Tarot cards you get and apply your own interpretation you’re going to be applying your own desires, needs, and inspiration onto it.