3. Getting up

This is Western Coffee, condensed notes on movement and creativity. Last time: How to break a bone. Sign up free below.

Here is our first intersection with creative work: It’s like riding your bike with osteoporosis. This is true whether you’re writing an opera or managing an app release or trying to heal a relationship. Not only will you fall; you will also find unexpected, catastrophic pockets of fragility within yourself. You’ll sit down at the piano after three decades of practice and, for no reason, fumble every note. You’ll write your daily quota and discover that your novel’s characters are zombies living in a sea of plastic prose.

So what do you do? In my case, with the bike, there were three options: 1. Abandon this ill-fated experiment in athletics. 2. Get some better answers about what had happened, and try to fix it. 3. Poke around on crutches for the mandated six weeks, endure some ribbing at work about the need to be enclosed in bubble wrap, and then get back to business.

For six years I kept choosing the third option, and I can’t endorse it. But it does suggest something else about both movement and creativity: You cannot generate in yourself, synthetically, the desire to run a marathon or become chef of a Michelin-star restaurant. But if these desires have taken hold in you, neither can you suppress them (at least not without injury of another kind). Which points to the value of Option No. 2, of being neither hopeless nor heedless—of finding and breaking through the obstacles with tactical acuity and patience. We will take this as a major theme.

Coming Friday: “Even before meditation, writing.”

Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com.