How to Unstick the Stuck
When it comes to unloading your idea ship, captain's gotta captain.
Note: The Podcast audio is at the end of the story.
This creative canal is shallow. The banks are too close. I see it. Barge, boat, ship, canoe—ideas stacked upon those decks, cocooned in their colorful containers, stretched out as long as the Empire State Building is high and visible from space.
And us—all of us—captains, piloting our precious cargo with no maritime qualifications whatsoever. Stern. Bow. Port. Starboard. Which one’s which again? Course correction. Eye the horizon. Land ho! A gust, then a chop from a rogue wave, and the wind pushes us off course, straight into the muddy bank to be laughed at by strangers. Broadcast by networks. The sheer scope of our failure of navigation—the visible shame of our ideas run aground—is immense.
We get stuck. Too many ideas, too few stevedores.
Idea ships are brutes. The containers of our brains are loaded like some kind of sadistic Mondrian Jenga upon on their decks and we are oh so protective of their delicate structure. What if we take an imperfect idea out at the completely wrong time and our whole creative being collapses? Micro-adjustments are made. The checking of straps. More noodling around in canals, never to unload a thing. Oh Captain! My Captain! I see you standing on your desk. Isn’t it about time you got off that desk and started using it? Assume your command? Engage?
Easier said than done, I know that. It feels like I’ve been stuck for a year. Ego blows and the relentless sense of time dying shadow my movement. I touch this and that and never finish a thing. Dylan said it best: “Existence led by confusion boats, mutiny from stern to bow.”1 Yes. Stuck in a canal in a confusion boat. But I’m mixing all my boats and yachts and SUP boards here. Time to right to the idea ship. Time to write, full stop.
Are you stuck? Captain, it’s time for you to get back to the bridge and engage with your work. Let’s remember what capable captains we can be. Let’s recognize that as well as being the captain we, as artists and writers and creators of things, are also our own crew. We are the deckhands and cooks, engineers and navigators, we control the comms and most importantly, binoculars. It’s time. Time to get out of this creative canal and back to the ocean, and above all, it’s time to dock instead of running aground, so we can get those ideas out there, moving, and seen.
Don’t be afraid to be the captain. Sometimes it’ll be hard and confusing and soul-crushing and miserable, and your hat won’t fit, and you’ll get stuck like the Ever Given2 and perhaps destroy your vital creative economy in the process. But sometimes, just sometimes, getting unstuck will be as simple as waiting for a higher tide.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
This Week’s Amends…
In this there is no measuring with time, a year doesn’t matter, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!"
-Rainer Maria Rilke, from “Letters to a Young Poet”
Oh, that we may ripen like trees. More juicy excerpts here >
Nature is healing, or so they say. Open your windows, my wild ones!. Let out a howl of mixed anguish and joy—hope is on the wind. While the message held in the fabric of this song may not be particularly cheerful in tone, that didn’t stop it sneaking behind my defenses last week to squeeze my poor heart like a lil’ ol’ squeak toy. I played it over and over for a good while, I don’t mind confessing.
Songs sure are powerful medicine, and this one will help with your howl practice. It’s good to have a daily practice.
While I’m sure the crew shooting my behind-the-scenes film is bored, this is far from boring. Exactly the kind of BTS that I love in that it shows process and spirit without being the “and then we did this, and such-and-such said that,” kinda deal. It also makes me want to watch HER again, if for no other reason than to drown in the glorious color palette.
It’s nice to see a story about masks that doesn’t involve thinking about the potential for viral load. It’s also great to see The New Yorker doing the important work of looking into the origin story of the cat filter, and how Zoom Lawyer-Cat ended up in that situation.
Ever Given keeps on ever-giving and remains somewhat forever unforgiven, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/03/ship-still-stuck-leaving-suez-canal-blocked-updates.html
I enjoyed this, thank you
Good stuff. Keep it coming! Thanks