A Process, A Budding, A Flowering, An Unpredictable, Unquenchable Unfolding
When he first saw this 15th-century Hispano-Moresque tile, the architect Christopher Alexander thought that it was “well-conceived,” that “its beauty [was] a result of the design of the tile.” But then he took it to his studio. There, Alexander tried to reverse-engineer how the original maker made the tile. Pressing a slab of soft modeling clay onto the tile, he created a negative or reverse imprint. Realizing it was this—a clay mold, not a ceramic tile—that the original maker made first, he then set out to understand how that master mold was created. He experimented with carving tools, rope, premade wood stamps, plastic cutout templates, and other materials and techniques to try to replicate the mold’s complex shapes and perfect symmetry. “The further I went to understand the actual process which had been used to make the tile,” Alexander writes, “the more I realized that it was the process, more than anything, which governs the beauty of the tile.” Rather than it being “conceived,” Alexander realized, the design of the tile “unfolded.” In making art or a life, Alexander writes, this is a common source of frustration and misery: thinking that “desired end-states”—the fully formed, beautiful, and coherent work of art, relationship, career, etc.—can be abstractly conceived or predetermined, forgetting or failing to realize that they are products of “a process, a budding, a flowering, an unpredictable, unquenchable unfolding.”
How things bud, flower, and unfold—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
Make Contact With Reality
After a successful departure from a company he helped start four years earlier, Jackson Dahl started thinking about what he might want to do next. A week passed. Then a month. Then a year. And what started as a brief break unintentionally became a year-and-a-half-long sabbatical, mostly spent trying to think up a fully formed, beautiful, and coherent future. But around the 18-month mark, rather than looking forward, he began to think back. To the things that had previously gone well in his life. He thought about how he came to co-found that company. He thought about how he came to work the job he had loved before that. He thought about how his friends became his friends, how his favorite books became his favorite books, how his interests became his interests. The further he went to understand the actual process which had led to some of the best things in his life, the more he realized it was a process, a budding, a flowering, an unpredictable, unquenchable unfolding. They weren’t abstractly conceived or predetermined. Instead, they were products of, Jackson once told me, “making contact with reality.” Doing things. Trying things. Bumping up against things, paying attention to what felt alive, and iterating in that direction. “One metaphor I use when I think back on that period of trying to think my way into the perfect next move,” he said, “is it’s like I was holding a seed, desperately trying to determine what exactly the seed was going to grow into without ever actually planting it in soil and watering it.” Today, he said, “I’m not completely out of the woods yet, but I’m making progress. Before, as a mentor once told me, I was planning a roadtrip to Disney World and obsessing over perfecting turns one, two, three, and four, before even getting into the car. Now, I’m in the car and on the way.”
You Can’t Jump Over Your Own Shadow
In my own period of sitting around, desperately trying to determine what exactly a seed was going to grow into before ever actually planting it in soil and watering it, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the core traits and qualities making up my unique essence or nature. Then, I thought, I would try to find a career or profession that perfectly matched those traits and qualities. In hindsight, I see I was making a mistake the 20th-century historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt writes about in The Human Condition, which is to think one can determine their own “natural essence.” Humans, Arendt writes, “are conditioned beings…Everything they come in contact with turns immediately into a condition of their existence.” Since we are forever making contact with “conditioning forces”—people and books and conversations and ideas and objects and “works and deeds and words”—Arendt continues, “It is highly unlikely that we, who can know, determine, and define the natural essences of all things surrounding us, which we are not, should ever be able to do the same for ourselves—this would be like jumping over our own shadows.”
Sail To The Horizon, Over And Over Again
Hugh Howey spent 20 years desperately trying to determine what exactly a seed was going to grow into before ever actually planting it in soil and watering it. A lifelong avid reader, when he began trying to write, Hugh immediately noticed the gap between the quality of writing in his favorite books and in his own initial attempts. “It drove me nuts,” Hugh said. “I wrote a chapter or two before walking away in disgust.” In an attempt to close that disgusting gap, Hugh stopped writing and devoted himself to studying fully formed, beautiful, and coherent works of art. He read and dissected the classics. He wrote book reviews, hoping doing so would sharpen his eye for structure and technique. He interviewed great writers. He went to conferences and book festivals. “And for 20 years I did that,” Hugh explained. “I spent 20 years not writing.” With each passing year, Hugh became increasingly blocked by the feeling that the period of his life in which he was best positioned to pursue a writing career was years and years in the past. “Often,” he said, “the feeling that we can’t break our stasis and launch our lives in a different direction is really due to the feeling that we should have done it five or ten or twenty years ago.” Then, at the 2009 Virginia Festival of the Book, an audience member asked the mystery novelist Caroline Todd, “How do I write my first novel?” Todd stood up, slapped the table, and shouted the advice “that finally broke 20 years of not writing,” Hugh said. “You stop talking about writing,” Todd yelled. “You stop dreaming about writing. You stop talking about writing. You stop telling people you’re thinking about writing. You just write. You just sit down and you write!” You just make contact with reality. When Todd “yelled—not even at me, basically near me—to just write,” Hugh said he realized that instead of needing to do something drastic to break his stasis, he could “start nudging his life in a new direction,” by simply writing a little before work and on his lunch break. He analogized it to sailing around the world. “You can’t get to where you want to be in one day,” he says, “just like you don’t sail around the world in a day. You just look at the horizon and say, ‘I can sail that far.’ Sailing around the world is just sailing to the horizon, over and over again. Writing a novel is just writing a sentence, over and over again.” In the margins of his day, Hugh began writing a sentence or two. By doing that over and over again, he said, “I accumulated a lot of words, and in a five or six year period, I wrote about 15 novels.”
On The Frontier Of Uncertainty And Confusion
What Hugh was doing—comparing his writing to the quality of writing in his favorite books—made me think of the actor Jeremy Strong, who for a long time held up his acting heroes and felt like a fraud by comparison. So instead of actually acting and working on his craft, Strong said, “there was a long period in my life where I sought out teachers, wanting to get the magic beans from them. I wanted to find the masters and apprentice to the masters.” At some point, “I realized that the masters, like all of us, are just on the frontier of their own uncertainty and confusion.” The greats are just on the frontier of their own budding, flowering, and unpredictable, unquenchable unfolding—“just like all of us,” Strong said. “And so there is no kind of axiom that they can impart that’s going to unlock the mysteries. There are great practical tools, of course, that you can pick up from the masters, because a lot of work, especially film work, is practical. But then there’s the element that only you can unlock by going to the frontier of your own uncertainty and confusion.”
The Fruit Is Inevitable
“Art need not be intended,” Robert Henri writes in The Art Spirit. “It comes inevitably as the tree from the root, the branch from the trunk, the blossom from the twig. None of these forget the present in looking backward or forward. They are occupied wholly with the fulfillment of their own existence. The branch does not call your attention to the magnificent red apple it is about to bear. Because it is engaged in the full play of its own existence, because it is full in its own growth, its fruit is inevitable.” You need not predetermine your desired end-state—whether a fully formed, beautiful, and coherent tile, career, skillset, work of art, or life. You need to make contact with reality, plant seeds and water the soil, sail to the horizon, write a sentence, engage in your own existence, bump up against the frontier of your own uncertainty and confusion—over and over again. For the fruit is only a budding, a flowering, an unpredictable, unquenchable, inevitable unfolding.