15 hours left
15 hours left
Artikkel 7
The diesel engine of the old HiAce bumps steadily along the highways on the border between Finland and Sweden. It can be lonely at times, and the long stretches require patience. In my AirPods, The Creative Act by Rick Rubin is fighting for my attention. Rick speaks about how we are all artists. We collect information from the world around us and inside of ourselves and make something from it — bread, music, machines, relationships, ideas, ways of living.
What most of us miss are the subtleties nature provides. We skip forward. Our continuous quest for efficiency discourages us from looking deeply, while the artist actively works to experience life slowly — to sip from the subtler layers of information. We can’t force things to happen. Patience is developed much like awareness. To practice patience means accepting the natural rhythm of things. Easy for Rick to say when Google Maps says there are 15 hours of driving left.
Still, I resonate with this on many levels from my own experience. We live in an age where many of us can get what we want in the blink of an eye. Patience is becoming a dying virtue when we live surrounded by endless options, many of them engineered to fight for our attention by working almost flawlessly. As Rick puts it, impatience is, in some sense, a wish for reality to be different from what it is right now. At the same time, it’s worth considering what was required to make the iPhone or MacBook I’m writing these words on. Even the things that feel instantaneous to us are the result of extraordinary amounts of time, material and human effort.
Further on, Rick talks about inspiration and its relationship to breath. The word inspiration comes from the Latin inspirare — to breathe or blow into.
To breathe in, the lungs need space.
For the mind to welcome new ideas, it needs space too.
Inspiration is rocket fuel for our work. Sometimes it blooms in a single inhale. The breath is a creative force, and Rick reminds me that it is available at all times. So I’m taking Rick’s advice. Somewhere along the road, he breathed a little inspiration into me — and I chose to act on it by writing this little essay.