The Grasshopper #24: Inspiration
You have to be open to it
Going to get all Zen about it. But first:
“…the Greeks and Romans both believed in the idea of an external daemon of creativity- a sort of house elf, if you will, who lived within the walls of your home and who sometimes aided you in your labors. The Romans had a specific term for the helpful house elf. They called it your genius- your guardian deity, the conduit of your inspiration. Which is to say, the Romans didn’t believe that an exceptionally gifted person was a genius, they believed an exceptionally gifted person had a genius.”
Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic
In Liz Gilbert’s insight there is a little bit of her genius helping out. The notion is that you are not inherently a genius but that we can access a genius if we are open to it.
You’re not born one. Consider Einstein, generally considered the ranking genius of the twentieth century. Before he developed his theories of relativity, he had a job as a patent clerk because, though he had a doctorate, he had alienated the establishment in his academic world so thoroughly that he was ostracized from their halls. He took a lowly job to support his family.
But he embraced the nearby genius who helped him formulate ideas that literally changed the world. I’m not suggesting our goals should be to change the world, and I suspect Einstein did not set out to do so. Who would? But he did by following ideas against the grain.
Six months of Grasshoppering
24 issues of this and nearly as many Sunday extras. That’s somewhere around 54,000 words or a novella’s worth of stuff about being a writer. And, honestly, it has never felt like work or an obligation. It’s a weird gift to just throw ideas out there to a few people out of the billions on the planet.
Thank you.
That planet is a challenging place these days. Maybe it always has been but during my time here I think right now is pretty crazy. In the other half of my writer life on Medium, I deal with that stuff. In those same six months my work there probably adds up to somewhere north of 90,000 words. That’s a little nuts but it is my life these days.
The only reason I’m putting these numbers out there is to tell the writer in you that this is a doable thing if you embrace it and practice daily. Practice and passion might be the underlying themes of this newsletter. You cannot get good without them but you will get good with them.
Practice might be embracing your neighborhood genius instead of assuming you're not worthy of their company.
The following originally appeared on Medium.com. It is a bit of memory and an examination of things that led me to writing. And how writing is an exercise in personal growth.
The Personal Growth Quest
Is everyone searching for something?
I have only a partial interest in self-help articles and books. The problem is quality and quantity. Too many are rehashes of classics that are classics for a reason and don’t really need rewrites. And many are blatant attempts to cash in by creating a guru business.
But there is an upside to these kinds of stories, and the best are stories. They should be viewed as a medicine taken once or twice as needed, rather than guides to life. Every time an article or book has helped me it was a one-off. Let me explain.
When I was eighteen I drove down to Texas from upstate New York with a buddy who was going down there to join a band. It was an interesting trip to say the least. I had no idea what I would do when I got there, no resources, no plan at all.
Somehow we ended up in a suburb of Dallas in a ranch house with two extremely burned out older hippy roommates who smoked weed all day. There were no sidewalks and I had no car so I was basically trapped in purgatory. For the first time in life I fell into a severe depression, the kind where you are incapable of helping yourself.
It sucked.
I’m not a person who suffers from depression. But that situation was untenable. Oddly enough the only book in that household was Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Little Prince, a fable about a little prince who resides on a tiny planet. I sat on the floor and read it, crying uncontrollably.
Then I called my parents and got a plane ticket home.
To this day I do not know why that book spoke to me, though I know it has provided comfort to many. Saint-Exupery was called a mystic by many. He was a pilot who found spiritual release while flying, early in the dawn of flight.
Like many pilots in those days he was lost while flying, somewhere over the Sahara desert.
Years later, curious, I reread The Little Prince, searching for that magic it had once worked on me. Though I found it charming, that was it. No magic the second time.
One of the things that came out of that experience, negative as it was, was a desire to build inner strength to help me if I ever found myself in a place like that in life again. I began seriously educating myself about the teachings of Buddha and his followers.
I dove into esoteric Tibetan practices and minimalist Zen teachings. I eventually gravitated towards Zen mainly because I liked the fact that it was never literal. Instead the stories and teachings sought to break our picture of the world. Prior to my Texas trip, I tried to do that with psychedelics and had a major experience with my first LSD trip.
It changed my life and point of view, but like most adolescents I thought if once was great, more times would be greater. Unfortunately I never achieved that transcendence again in the many psychedelic experiences that followed. So I stopped.
As Paul McCartney famously said when asked if the Beatles would ever have a reunion, “you can’t reheat a soufflé.” Sir Paul nailed that one.
If you are on a growth quest, it needs to be sustainable and to be sustainable it must actually set goals for that growth. What do you want to grow into?
That question alone should keep you busy for a while. I tried a lot of things but I knew writing was it for me in the long term, even as I veered into a semi-career playing and recording original music. So my goal, to be a writer, was always there, which gave me a direction for my quest to be a better human.
Not a perfect human, a better human. I still love a cold martini in a nice bar and a conversation with a stranger I will never see again. But even that term ‘never’ is a tricky thing. I once met a woman in a hotel bar near my home who lived in Southern California but was here in town setting up a branch of her business. We walked to a nearby restaurant for dinner.
It never felt like a date. I made a judgement about her based on, of all things, the Patek Philippe watch she was wearing. Too high maintenance for me. It didn’t matter because, as we jokingly told each other, it was highly unlikely we would ever see each other again.
That was twelve years ago. We ended up staying in touch and eventually traveled together. She got involved in a serious relationship and we didn’t talk as much. Then she sold her company and through an odd series of coincidences ended up living here with her partner.
They eventually broke up and we reconnected. So much for never again.
My growth quest, and the new agey-ness of that phrase bothers me, continues. If you asked me twenty years ago if I would still be growing in my sixties I would not have been able to think about it.
This quest has no ending. It’s important to understand that there is no happy or unhappy ending, no nirvana. The meaning of the name ‘Buddha’ is The Awakened One. His teachings seek to help all of us wake up from our limited description of the world. That’s the real underlying quest behind all the self-help and psychedelic practices so woven into our society these days.
We are all trying to find and build inner strength for those times when things are hard. Not material wealth, spiritual wealth.
I see this searching within everyone I meet whether they know it or not. Too often drugs are prescribed to ward off feelings without investigating the source of those feelings. The result is a society cut off from the sharp edges of life, muted.
My goal is to not be muted, to see. My writing helps because you cannot write well without experience, intense experience and quiet experience. I have to live well to express myself.
So do you.
1550 words
Oh, if this flips your switch you can buy me a coffee…