Mind the gap
A couple of years ago someone sent me this video where Ira Glass talks about some kind of “great filter” on creativity: everyone that creates come to face the “GAP”, sooner or later. It’s this feeling of an overwhelming white when, at certain times, creatives get stuck, smashed under the pressure of their own — and of the others — demands and expectations on themselves.
I remember feeling relieved when I first watched it. Someone found an answer for this huge, transparent, wall that was keeping me from even trying to create anything that would put me in the other side, the side of the wall where all the people I admire — for being themselves and for doing what they do — stand.
It felt like I was ready to let my gap’s timespan start over. Oh, how blind I was...
I need you to understand that what will be written past these words is not saying that Ira was somewhat incomplete on his statements, but that his message — his beautiful and kind words for all those who strive on the pits and summits of their own creations — caught me on a moment where I was naively unaware of one thing that still gets me off guard now and then: the void we feel when trying to achieve or see something that still doesn’t exist.
Stay with me dear reader, a little about why am I writing this one:
I grew up on a lovely family, with a kind — for better and for worse — mother and a father that still has issues expressing himself, but was full of love on his own way nonetheless. So, I was surrounded by all they could give me, including all the positive words that I took as promises, all information speed millennials know very well — was born in 1986 — and all the promises society could provide at the time, about how college gives you a job, humans are the cream of the crop on the planet and how our brains are the most advanced thing that ever existed… I have to say, I shielded myself with all the concepts that, ultimately, fuel the ideas of predestination and deliverance. I was bound to be great! The only thing I needed to fulfill that was to keep on existing.
That was SO HUGELY FAR from enough, and SO FAR from the truth.
I swear I’ll get back on creativity on due time.
With age came the disposition for awareness. It’s a hard, pointy, razor sharp, terrain. To start to see how my mom and dad are fallible, how they are humans, with their anxieties, joys and griefs, so tiny as anyone in this blue and green sphere — that hit hard. Hard enough for me to let my naive thinking of my promised greatness go with the wind. Sounds fast? Wasn’t at all. And it’s still happening. More relieved than glad, but also glad, to say that it’s on an advanced state.
There I was, watching Ira, weaving promises out of nothing with people’s words etc. So far, when I thought of creating anything, I was sure even the most raw of creations which would initiate my revolution and take me to the other side of the wall would naturally come, smoothly, even solicitously to put me in my self-appointed place under the spotlight.
With my naivety in check, things started to change. I become more and more aware of the sheer unknown that is life and how the way we fare upon it affects the outcome of every single second. It was terrifying at first, but so luxuriously tasty to know that, for real, there are no boundaries beyond the ones we set in. And I’m not saying that we must be anarchists and whatsoever we want it’s meant to be. We are blank pages made of neural wired meat and stuff and we do needs biases supported by beliefs to operate in this wild world and interact with it and with one another. After acknowledging that, I remembered Ira’s video.
And I was hit, again, by a truck. Ira doesn’t promise anything — and nothing new under the skies until now. He does better.
He didn’t use the word “pain”, but it’s there, between the lines. Every time you step outside your comfort zone you’re prone to feel pain. A huge pain, composed of the fear of the unknown, of your possible wrong self concept of limitations, of how easy is to think rather than do. I thought it was wrong. I bought this idea that pain is something wrong. But no. Pain is a sign. Something is not ok. The tea is too hot. The position in which you’re sleeping is forcing muscles and bones it shouldn’t.
The thing you’re trying to show to the world is covered by the shadows of your not — yet — explored imagination.
So, the gap? It can be this dark area that when lit seems to be a bunch of crude ideas and concepts, far from what you taste drives you to seek. But if you explore, mine, dig it enough, it’s only a matter of time till you get to something you hoped for but never thought about it — it’s about creation we are talking about. I think this is not a universal truth, not always anyway, but frequently we want to do something that we do not know exactly what is, but we can sense it, underneath our mind’s skin, and it scratches and burns. Sometimes we think we want it red but our inner itch says it could be cool if it goes in blue. Try the blue. Didn’t like it? Return to red and find another pathway. Ignore what you think it should be at first, focus on the burn.
What I relearned from Ira is: let it burn. Beyond the pain of uncertainty, of starting something without the image of its final form, is the sheer creation your heart(h) strives for. It’s all about courage — concept that I really would like to write about later — at the end of that matter.
So, be kind enough to yourself. You don’t need to know the techniques at first, less to say the final form of what you’re trying to create. With a general idea of where you want to go, just jump on the train, let it burn and mind the gap.
