Every moment has a life of its own. It’s hard to remember that sometimes. In “Zen Guitar” the author states the importance of keeping an empty cup or a white belt. Although I like to study what would make me a better creative, part of creativity is getting lost in the flow and getting out of your own way.
Be Water My Friend
Bruce Lee
I have a mind that I can’t get to shut up. I believe part of that is due to my high-functioning autism. Sometimes I go into rants about the tiny details in things at a rate I can’t control. An endless flow of thoughts is harmful both socially and creatively. While my analytical brain helps me lay the plumbing, it could never help me become water. On the contrary, it often gets impedes the creative process.
The Two Things You Can Control
In my effort to “make something of my life” I’ve been putting out more blog posts, videos, music, and photos than ever before. Admittedly, some of my passion has died out. I’m not sure if it’s due to growing up, the lack of success, or the wrong perspective. When the going got tough in sports the coaches would always gather the team and say something along the lines of.
The two things you can control are your attitude and effort.
Every Good Coach Ever
Having a great attitude and effort in sports was easy. Sports are fun. There’s a reason we say “play” when referring to sports. Finding the flow in sports for me even when “things aren’t going right” was easy because sports fit’s all of “Flow State Conditions” set by Mihály CsÃkszentmihályi.
- Clear Goals
- Immediate Feedback
- Balanced Opportunity and Capacity
- Deep Concentration
- Being in the Present
- Control
- Altered Sense of Time
- Egolessness
People that have never played competative sports will never understand that in the heat of the moment everything goes out the door. Practice, strategies, what’s being said in the crowd or on the sidelines just disappear. Furthermore instinct takes over, you and the basketball, football, or skateboard are one. The athelete’s high that I’ll never quite capture again. In sports it was easy to take things “one game at a time” because there is always another one. Until there isn’t.
Finding The Present
Last week I found myself ascending a Ski Lift with my CoWorker Chris. Due to the lift, we had some downtime during the climb, it was almost like a car conversation. I had talked about the regret of not savoring every single sports match a bit more. Perhaps it’s not just sports, but appreciating all the colors of life a bit more.
“You never know the last time you’ll be able to do something, It all goes so fast” I remember saying. All the sorts of things flashed through my mind sporting events, memories of my ex, even silly moments of 8 of my friends all playing the same videogame in one online voice call were like ghostly phantoms I couldn’t touch anymore. Simultaneously all the things I should appreciate more floated into my brain. Big things like my family, my mom who calls me all the time, my sisters, my dad who could only manage to talk about a couple topics with me, and even the extended family.
Equally important I started to appreciate small things like sight and hearing. I was waking up to the fact that every moment has a life of its own. It was fitting that I found out the present was a present during the holiday season.
Lean Into It: Every Moment Has a Life of its Own
A sport was the thing that woke me up to the conept of “every moment has a life of its own” In snowboarding you are forced to let go to that present moment. There is a balance of planning out where you want to go with hitting unexpected bumps and carving a new path. I had hit the slopes on Christmas Eve with my coworker Yurika. Instead of taking the small lift to get to the bunny slope we took the Gondola all the way to the top of the mountain.
“Are you ready?” Yurika asked. I thought for a moment and thought of one of my favorite movies. Sometimes you won’t be ready and that’s okay. You have to go for it anyways.
There was one section of the intermeddate slope that I spent entirly on my ass. Followed by falls, speeds, and situations I wasn’t used to. There was some hesitation in my body as I changed directions. As a result my snowboard would catch awkwardly as my weight floated in the weird limbo between left and right.
Just Let Go
The further I surrendered to that present moment the less hesitation there was to really lean into things. The turns I was taking were much deeper than before. So much so that I reached out and touched the ground as I carved my path down the mountain. When I started to get the hang of things I thought of the moment when I learned to drop in on a skateboard. Dropping in on a small half pipe was similar to turning on a snowboard. It was essential to surrender to the moment, to gravity, and most importantly the failures that come with pushing your boundries.
As my confidence grew I started to try to do basic jumps. While I landed around 20 percent of them, the other 80 percent had me laughing and tumlbing around the snow like a child. Why was it so easy to think like this during snowboarding but I had a hardtime bringing this into art, youtube, music, or the rest of life?
Like Seeds: Every Moment Has a Life of its Own
People are probably questioning my intellegence after I said you can get profound life lessons from spongebob. Kung-Fu panda is another piece of crimanally underrated media that carries profound life lessons. The lesson below is about letting go of control.
“You might want an apple or an orange, but all you’ll get is a peach tree”
I wished they had taken the lesson a bit further. Because despite what you do with watering, feeding, and tendering you can’t control whether the seed will grow at all. Furhtermore even if the seed does grow, the rate at which trees grow is largly out of our control.
If we can’t control how fast a tree produces fruit, why then do we try to do the same thing with their lives? With our careers? Unsuccessful YouTubers, Artists, and Musicians like me try to force this same philosophy onto our videos, music, and artworks. When we should treat every piece and every moment more like seeds. When you realize every moment has a life of its own, you let go of expectations. Some moments like talking about guitar might grow into friendships, other things like wearing a lacrosse sweatshirt could grow into a relationship. But if we place great expectations on moments, we begin to lose the wonder of what makes life what it is.
Great Expectations
I seem to gain a lot of my life lessons and insight from a media that is looked down upon by “serious scholars”. Just like the other media I interact with, gaming, our institutions seem to put down animation in favor of scholarly activities and scientific discovery. I find that quite odd when you look at the power of expressing the human soul. Economically animation is a force to be reckoned with, it is also a medium that can explore themes, cultural issues, but most importantly connect with people. The superhero film I’ve always connected with most is Into the Spiderverse.
I will usually make a point to see every Spiderman Movie, he is my favorite superhero. But more than any other spiderman I connect with Miles the most. Mile’s mom is a Purto Rican nurse, my mom is a nurse but from the Philippines. My father isn’t a cop, but as an African American with a mustache when I saw Mile’s dad I couldn’t help but think of my own pops.
The universal thing that anyone can relate to in this film is Great Expectations. Growing up I went to a fancy private school called Bellarmine Prep. It was hard to feel like I belonged there, but like Miles who goes to visions academy, the expectations for me to do well academically and in afterschol activities was there. Both miles and I struggle to deal with these expectations, although I’m not Spiderman I ‘ve continued to carry the expectations into adulthood.
Every Moment Has a Life of Its Own Just like Every Person
The moment that makes this film is when Miles realizes he doesn’t have to go about things like everyone expects him to. The moments leading up to Mile’s leap of faith is when he realizes he can be Spiderman his own way. The whole movie he’s been trying to be Peter Parker, when he only needed to be himself. Like in snowboarding, he can carve his own path down the mountain. The leap of faith is so important because it inspires us to have faith in ourselves. Furhtermore it encourages us lean into that uniqueness and our path in life in hopes that we will be able to impart that knowledge onto others.
My whole life I’ve been trying to be other people. I could never be MiTiS, Illya Kuvshinov, Naoko Yamada, WestBallz, Faker, or MrBeast. The only person and path that is right for me is my own. Adding to that I could never be what my parents wanted me to be it’s only recently I’ve been able to step into myself. Much like miles sometimes you have to manage the expectations you set on yourself.
Treating Creative Work Like New Moments
When your expectations are too high it can prevent you from creating anything. Expectations can stop you from entering the creative flow or worse prevent you from starting. I’d been wrestling with posting almost anything online, but then I started treating every moment as if it has a life of its own. Zen Guitar reminded me it was okay to not be as great as you wanted, but to play anyway. Snowboarding taught me to lean into the present moment and think of every run as a unique instance. So why not think of every piece of creative content in the same way?
I Made a Video
Often I hesitate to make videos because it’s disappointing to work on something for in this case three days. To have it come out the other end and not meet those great expectations is crushing. But then I remembered that if I want to “make it” there’s no amount of forcing I can do to make it happen. Like Shifu from Kung Fu Panda. I just have to put in my best efforts to water the seeds, fertilize the soil, and hope something will grow. The three days were tough one day of shooting, another for voice over, and the last one for dialouge. But I had been through tough things before, and if it failed, well I had fallen repeatedly on the snowboard, but I had always gotten up.
I could chose to say “I’m not going to create videos, because I don’t get enough traffic to make it worth it”. Or I could realize every moment has a life of its own and create the best video I could for the audience I had currently.
Thanks for making it to the end.
Much Love LBM💖
