Cultivating Reckless Ambitions
There is a time and place, gentlemen, where one is obligated to abandon common sense, restraint and a level head. When it comes to creative ambitions, we are most certainly obliged to operate with more heart than head, lest the current realities of our situation prevent us from realising and creating new ones. Without a certain recklessness, there is little means of unearthing the passions and curiosities that might usually be dismissed by those who know better.
They’ve certainly made their mark in this world: those with the foresight, clarity, restraint and impulse control to resist the notion of starting a novel or picking up a paintbrush. Everywhere you look around you there are completely justified, rational people who have resisted the call to artistic and creative endeavour, no matter how bad their hands itch and their bodies hum in the vicinity of word, art and resplendent noise.
There are many who are recovering and reformed. Perhaps they played an instrument growing up, a guitar case now gathering dust in the garage where they once cultivated their own beautiful, cacophonous compositions. Perhaps their recovery is encapsulated by the camera bag that will never again be opened. There are also those who have walked away from the perils of a physical discipline, letting their speed rope and heavy bag die a still and silent death whilst their bodies safely ache and spread, evermore languid, corpulent and weary.
When the notion takes you that it’s time to give it up, to let it go and grow up to accept that we can’t all be artists, writers, contemplatives and creatives, sound advice would be to strike yourself in the face with something hot or sharp. Mark your body and your consciousness with the utterly simple, humane and redemptive fact that there is an impulse within you that cries out to do more than eat, breathe, labour and slumber.
Some will ask you where you find the time, before compulsively picking up their phones and glazing over in a stupefied acquiescence to drudgery and banality. Others will scoff at the notion of living with both family, day job, discipline and creativity, as if sharing in the act of creation and cultivating the lives of your children isn’t in and of itself a creative act of the highest calling.
You can pretend all you want that you don’t have the time or the energy, but this is, for most of us with the safety and stability of a first world shelter, diet and convenience, an exercise in self-delusion, melodrama and complacency. There is great satisfaction and liberation to be found in submitting to the reckless ambitions that raise you above the daily demands to which we submit and serve, to create and define a life and an endeavour that speaks to the dignity and possibility of our humanity, rather than just its requisite necessities.
Stop questioning and sabotaging the beauty of your creative impulse. Write your book, even if it takes you five years. Carve out the time and the space and the peace in which you can bring it to life. Get back on the bike that brought you back to earth and air and the joys of muck and mire. Pick up the camera and find an expression of life and being that demands to be captured. Give yourself twelve months to write and record twelve songs that give life to the the technique and voice you’ve developed whilst nobody was watching.
Embrace the creative ambition that you’ve always wanted to achieve. Let it live and breathe through you, and conversely, learn to live and breathe through its trying, exhilarating, frustrating and enervating demand to find space in your daily routine. Watch a little less tv. Turn your back on the fiction of a personalised newsfeed.
It is time to usurp the most wasted of minutes, hours and days to create art, poetry, music and mayhem in the calamity of your deepest creative impulses being brought to a world that deserves no less.
Or don’t. Die knowing that you never did. It’s your call. It always will be.