Let the paint dry (Part I)
# Intro
You’ve finally done it. After days of struggle, you have managed to push out a poem layered with emotion. After hours of effort, you have put together numerous ingredients into a delectable whole. You have exposed the painting that was hidden within the canvas and yanked out the melody hiding among the silence. You have poured out a part of yourself and left an indelible mark in time and space.
You feel liberated and ecstatic. You feel emptied out and yet complete; like a creative orgasm. You come back a few minutes later and the feeling has passed. Like all things, it didn’t last. You stare at the portrait or read out loud the lines of the poem. You replay the song but it never quite feels the same. Something feels amiss as you hum along.
It doesn’t feel quite right; it doesn’t feel perfect. Suddenly your masterpiece feels like a mistake. Impelled by your inner strife, the same that drove you to create, you try to “correct” the imperfections. You throw in some more salt or shave extra cheese. You alter the flow of the poem or tinker with the chorus of the song. You add more color to the portrait. Disaster. You are left wondering why you didn’t let the paint dry.
# The dual-headed monster
You gave in to the two-headed monster of fear and desire.
Fear
You keep tampering with your work the same way a child keeps running their tongue over a cut in their mouth. What you might mistake as inner restlessness is actually an underlying fear that you have been suppressing all along.
A deep-rooted apprehension that your work is not good enough; that it will never be good enough. This fear compels you to go back to your work over and over again.
In much the same way that the child keeps meddling with their oral wound hoping that it would heal faster, you keep tinkering with your work believing that would salvage it. Wounds, once inflicted, heal when left to their own. Art, once “completed”, is best abandoned.
It is prudent, advisable even, to edit, because art, contrary to popular notion, is one part inspiration and nine parts persistence. It is foolish, however, to keep chiseling away.
A chef who keeps adjusting a dish ends up with one too many ingredients. An author who keeps rewriting an essay writes a lot but says nothing at all. A composer who adds one too many instruments creates noise and not a melody.
Art is never finished, only abandoned.— Leonardo da Vinci
When you give in to that restlessness, it is not because you are chasing perfection, but because you are running away from fear.
Desire
Desire is the other head of the dual-headed monster. Desire narrows your vision and stretches it out till your eyes can perceive only the product and turn blind to the process.
Desire is what turns out to the hiker who has her sights set solely on the peak; the runner who can only envision tearing through that red ribbon; the writer who only daydreams of book launches. Desire is what robs you of your patience and plunders your ability.
“Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there someday.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh
Once you gave in to desire, you will always misjudge your steps. You will always sprint either too fast or too slow without consideration of the conditions, external and internal. You will perpetually skip crucial plot points and silence the characters as they begin to speak their mind.
Delirious desire renders you perpetually impatient, unable, and unwilling to be in the now. It leaves you incapable of creation because creation happens at the moment; it happens when you are present (pun intended).
You give up the process in place of the ever-elusive product. You forego the journey for the destination. You surrender the realization that true art is incomplete, imperfect because you will crave perfection and completion.
A song is never complete neither is a novel ever done. It merely stops at an interesting place. Till you realize that you will always mess around with wet paint. You will always overbake the cake and paint till the colors coalesce into an ugly blob. Every stroke will be a painful effort, every word typed will feel like a task. Till you cultivate patience, you will never create art that lasts.
