What better proof could you ask for than a regularly occurring event suddenly leaps into the future by over a year. Remarkable, but obviously true. Obviously. Time-travel is real – well at least for me.
I've just finished listening to the History of Rome podcast (oh, for you that was last year, right) and somehow in the last two weeks I've listened to it all over again even finding it more interesting the second time around. Oh the pleasures of finding out what we don't know, which for me is quite a lot or at least seemingly endless, but now that I've got time-travel in my kit bag... Say, wait a minute I jumped forward in time. Does that mean I have less time or more time available to me?
Anyway, I've also just had an "opening" for a photo show in the film building yesterday (certainly have been busy the last two weeks). The whole experience of putting up a show validates for me again the power of formal presentations of work. In the process of getting work up on the wall the work gets better. It's a combination of repeated practice and increased self-evaluation; all with a little more internal pressure than usual over a shorter period of time so that in the end you grind out more work of a higher caliber.
Part of the success comes simply from the faster turn-around time of the shoot, edit, print, evaluate cycle and the enforced concentration of effort and thought, repeated and repeated again until you amass a significant body of work you actually like. It's both easy and hard. (If it were that easy everybody would be doing it, but also if it was really hard no one would be doing it.)
It's also a reminder of how much emotions play in the process of doing good work, any kind of work. The emotional landscape is not to be overlooked as an influencing factor in the growth of any significant body of work or even the accumulation of skill sets and professional practice.
If you get depressed or deflated by a few wrong turns, failed outcomes, or lack of seemingly forward progress you can not give up. You need to keep working and try and solve your own problems or perhaps first, find your own problems. This is what really separates the amateurs from the pros. The amateurs just stop. The pros never stop, even in the face of seemingly insurmountable problems. That's why they end up being the pros. Remember they didn't start out that way; they ended up that way. It's not over until it's over, but if you quit it's immediately over and you lose.
If you're lucky and skillful you produce a few "good" pieces of work early in the process that give you enough inspiration and pleasure so that you keep catapulting yourself forward. Once you get going you can build up some emotional momentum to let you glide more easily over the rough times and keep accelerating with the good times. A rolling stone gathers good will.
Oops, I just realized one of the problems of jumping ahead in time – all my library books are really overdue now. Gotta go pay those fines.
gunther
