false idles

You gotta write something, you know.  You work, come home, scarf down whatever meal is there and then stare at the screen.  Is there inspiration?  There's always inspiration.  It tickles the corners of your eyes, it shouts into a towel right behind your ear, it twists your nosehairs around and skates up and down the insides of your arms.  And it waits inside that bowl of chili, offering its agonizing promises up with every crunchy jalapeño seed...

Sometimes you're too tired to notice it.  More often, you're too tired to write it down, and instead you just allow yourself to be bombarded with the cries of a million mewling children, each furious in its desperation to not be overlooked.  How do you choose?  Who deserves to be born?

The creative act is the spark of the divine.  No cosmic balancing force, no sapient embodiment of wrath, and no forgiving light or warmth are here to be found.  But we can each duplicate that prismatic act of forming something from what we find.  That includes the only true judgment that is possible -- the pre-judgment, the artist tearing out the pieces that don't belong.

That's right, I referenced a Dilbert strip from 1991.  I took on The Game.  Whatch'all got??

An artist's works are infinitely more his children than any biological offpring he might sire.  The creator chooses with care all elements that make up his creation, but the parent is, at best, a majority shareholder in the corporate entity his child will someday grow into.  But people still blame themselves!  It's a wide world out there, friends; save your self-castigation for the truer reflections of yourself.

The wife frets about it regularly, but I'm not at all concerned with the possibility that I might prove to be a poor parent when the time comes.  After all, at times, don't the worst parents produce some truly wonderful children, and the best parents some truly terrible ones?  I'll do my best, of course, but there's only so much control you can hope to exert over a person.  Trying too hard to influence somebody just makes everybody miserable.  When that child springs out of the nest into What's Next, there comes a point when you just have to relinquish responsibility.  You can't chart a course for someone you love; if you try, you'll find out that you only really ever loved yourself.

Working at a university, I deal with a fair few student issues; it's part of the job, and I sure don't mind.  What really grates on me is when I get parents contacting me about their kids' problems -- parents who seemingly want to involve themselves in every mildly adverse situation their kids might encounter.  The popular word has been "helicopter parent," but that's been superseded by the idea of the "snowplow parent," so called because they "clear the way" for their children.  That calls to mind a certain fable of the struggle of the butterfly, but I understand why they do it.  These parents are terrified, but they aren't truly terrified that their kids will fail.  No, they're afraid that their kids will fail and it will reflect poorly on them as parents.

Failure is important.  It's critical!  My post yesterday was, in large part, a matter of learning to come to grips with our failures.  But the easiest way to do that, the best way to learn from them, is to recognize them as necessary steps on the road to improvement.  A steady stream of little successes is a nice and pleasing idea, but just a handful of well-meant but ultimately disastrous calamities will teach you more than a lifetime spent putting one foot in front of the other.  Better to leap than walk, and if you're scared of falling, learn to tumble.