Estimated Reading Time: 3 Minutes
There’s nothing to gain by avoiding the attempt. That much I know. However juvenile, however embarrassingly transparent my desire might be, there is no real virtue in pretending I don’t want what I want. Wanting — to create, to disturb, to mean something — is the most ordinary thing about me. The refusal to name it is not humility, but fear dressed in a sophistication of sorts.
So I return to the page, again and again, not because I am sure of what I have to say, but because I suspect there is something just beneath—a heat, a hum, a syllable still forming. Maybe it’s naïve. Maybe it’s presumptuous to believe that pressing language against the real will yield anything but noise. But it’s also necessary. Because to live without attempting the articulation is to slowly flatten, to forfeit the friction that makes life intelligible.
I have always envied those who seem adept at living, as in the ones who catch on to the hidden rhythms of a day before noon, who sense pattern in the chaos, who move as if they are not afraid of misstepping. They treat the everyday as an improv without apology. I used to think this was instinct. Now I think it’s a transcended practiced attunement to what is, rather than what they wish it would be.
And there’s a kind of grace in that. But it requires surrender. It requires standing naked before the moment and resisting the urge to dress it in abstraction. It is easier to narrativize, to translate what is happening into something already known. But the real work — the dangerous work — is to stay with what’s raw, to create not from the conclusions we’ve curated but from the edge where the thought is still slippery, still cutting.
Some will say this is indulgent. That it reeks of immaturity and self-regard. And maybe it does. But I have come to believe that the instinct to disrupt one’s own habits of sense-making isn’t childish, but sacred. Because if you listen closely enough, if you let yourself be pierced by what doesn’t yet make sense, you begin to touch the pre-language space where this art lives.
That space isn’t clean. It is not something you schedule between meetings. It is messy, volatile, pulsing just beneath the surface of your obligations. But most of us forget it is there. We layer ourselves in interpretation, in routine, in the careful accumulation of experience. The older we get, the better we get at filtering. We mistake discernment for dullness. And somewhere along the way, we lose access to the primal code of felt meaning that used to rise unbidden, even in silence.
I am trying to remember how to reach it again. How to look at a thing and not already know what it means. How to stay long enough with an image or a phrase or a gesture until it reveals something that wasn't mine to invent, only to uncover. It is harder than it used to be. But every so often, the beginner in me stirs. And I know that he is still there. And I know that if I quiet the knowing part of myself, he will speak.
It is easy to worship mastery. To believe that time spent is proof of wisdom, that polish is synonymous with power. But I no longer believe the best work comes from those who know the most. I think it comes from those who remember what it felt like not to know, and who hasn't stopped craving that feeling. The wide-eyed alertness. The ache of unfamiliarity. The stubborn desire to press forward even when the map ends.
This is why I keep returning to certain melodies. Why I still linger in white noise when I read Oliver or hear Chopin. These acts are ancient. They have been performed countless times. But they still reverberate because they are anchored in something timeless. And if we’re lucky and if we’re awake, we get to become acolytes of that eternal music. We do not need to understand every glyph. But we need to try. To read the world as it presents itself, not as we’ve filtered it. And to shape what we find into something — however small — that might stay.
That’s the work. That’s the risk. Not to say something new, necessarily, but to say something honest. Something still warm with the breath of becoming. Something that doesn’t just observe the world but charges it with intention.
It’s not mastery I’m after. It’s contact. And the only way to make contact is to begin again, on purpose, as a beginner. Every time.
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