7. Exposure
This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Surrender. Please forward this email to someone who might appreciate it. You can sign up free below.
“With Joan, I think she always writes to find out what she thinks and what she feels.” — the book editor Shelley Wanger, in the documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold
“This is information about your temperament.” — my yoga teacher Stephanie Culen, after a 2016 downpour that soaked everyone to the bone on our way to class
For a long time, I didn’t expose myself to running because I believed that it was incompatible with my body’s broken mechanics. That was self-reinforcing: Nothing could provide evidence against this belief because the belief blocked action that would form new evidence. (I wasn’t alone. Ask any athlete what they can’t do because of their physical history.)
A second element of improvising—the yes, and that enables creative and athletic growth—is exposure, and it’s important in two senses.
First is what you expose yourself to—and the information it provides. One day in the spring of 2021, I was in Los Angeles and away from my Peloton for the first time in a year. I felt like doing some cardio. It jolted me when I realized my belief system about injury and pain had been evolving (more on this later), and yet I’d never truly revisited the question of running. So I jumped on the treadmill. Thirty minutes later I’d gone three miles. It left me sore, but not for long. My legs didn’t fall off. Soon I was booking my trip back for the Malibu Triathlon, which I am repeating next month. The only thing different on that particular day was exposure.
Second is how and when you expose yourself and your work to the world. On this one, many people’s barrier works in the opposite direction—blocking the exposure of what they have created until they’re “done.” (“Meat is done,” my late friend Nanette used to say. “People are finished.”)
As an experiment in the opposite way of thinking, I improvised music from scratch for half an hour in front of some friends and family a couple of weeks ago. The most interesting thing I learned was that I’m way more relaxed—and thus technically organized and expressive—improvising in front of an audience than playing music by somebody else that I’ve practiced for dozens of hours. Putting yourself on the hook to make up a concert of music in real time does not sound relaxing. But it took out a layer of separation between me and my performance. Good information.
More broadly, the benefits of showing your work even if it’s not “done” generally boil down to a kind of oxygenation: The work will just plain look different to you when you know it’s on display or is about to be. (Even at The New York Times, I would routinely spend a half-hour workshopping a headline and only realize in the very instant of hitting Publish what the headline should be.) Exposure will sharpen your own thinking about what you’re trying to create and for whom. It may remind you that the reason you are creating something in the first place is so that other people can receive it and be changed.
From either form of exposure, the consequence is greater freedom.
Coming Friday: Two kinds of time.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram: @leggy_blond.