This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Tired. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
The faster I run, the better my form. Cadence, ground contact time, stride length: All the metrics inhabit their ideal ranges in a race. Same for swimming. On speed intervals I can feel myself almost surrendering into a harmony—arms and core and legs and breath firing from the same rhythmic underline—that’s elusive at moderate paces. It’s like if things are too spaced out, or each is executed too assertively, the components can’t find one another and join up; the engine rattles and smokes. My cycling technique is more consistent, but in a tough studio class or a triathlon I do notice a change, a feeling like the tightening of a shoelace.
When I’m at the piano, the correlation is reversed, and very linear: Spontaneous increases in speed are mostly degenerative. In high school my teacher would encourage practicing very small segments of the score at performance tempo rather than getting everything right but slow over a longer passage. I don’t know the biomechanics of it, but this principle has always held up for me. Playing slowly can help you learn the notes and figure out fingering and other details, but it doesn’t prepare you to play fast. Only playing fast does that.
Writing is an interesting case: Headlines and push notifications and newsletter paragraphs and middle-manager memos—my writing practice of many years—were easier and more effective the less time I had to overthink. And my favorite passages so far in my novel couldn’t wait to be written, unspooling almost faster than I could jot them down. Yet the overall project of that book has been cooking in my brain for at least eight years and spilling onto the page for more than two. I have practical incentives to speed it up, but not, so far as I can tell, the means. I could write a book faster, but I couldn’t write my book.
So, if I may generalize from my own experience, it seems that acts of the creative body can become both better and worse when we hurry them. Is this paradox in need of explaining?
One thing that athletics and writing, for example, have in common is the tension between (a) a steady practice—which is our responsibility to cultivate—and (b) the inspiration that glides in now and then from parts unknown to crown that consistency, which is otherwise so foreign to it. Personal records almost always work like this, for me: I get on the Peloton and look at the output number on the screen and can’t quite compute, because how could it feel so easy to ride this hard? (More common, and as capricious, is the bonk day, joints afire and legs made lead.) This is inspiration in the sense that it facilitates a temporary capacity, enabled but not assured by preparation.
Racing and deadlines, if they don’t bring on an anxious breakdown, can make a synthetic version of the inspiration effect, but it gets tricky. The weight in the equation shifts to how prepared we are, how aligned our intention and passion are with our assignment. And the desired outcome is brittler, more susceptible to bad weather or an Internet outage (or, as for me at the piano, long-term limitations in our ability and confidence). Still, if all goes well these pressures can spur us to our best form and put us in touch with our optimal selves. You know the Army recruiting slogan, “Be all you can be”? I love that slogan. One of the best things about a race, or a deadline, is that it concretizes the “all.”
But there’s another thing about form, which is that it’s not an absolute and eternal good. You learn something writing an obtuse senior thesis or a metaphor-mixing headline that you don’t when the words prance out like the Royal Ballet. Education in form comes from lacking it, all the better to highlight its benefits when they start to appear.
If you enjoy Western Coffee, please make a donation on my fundraising page for the nonprofit Achilles International, which is how I’m gaining entry to the New York City Marathon this year—my first. All donations go to the nonprofit and its work with disabled athletes; I’m paying my own race fees, etc.