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Afraid to Walk Into

"Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working." — Pablo Picasso

A spectator waits. He believes the interesting thing happens somewhere else, to someone else, and that his part is to watch it and hold an opinion when it is over. This is a comfortable way to live. It is also empty.

Picasso is describing a different posture. Inspiration exists, he says. He does not deny it. But it does not arrive first. It finds you already moving.

I have always said life is an adventure. An adventure is a thing you enter without knowing the end. You go anyway. You accept that you cannot see where you will land. That willingness to move before the outcome is clear is not a small thing. It is the whole condition.

Because inspiration is not a bolt from the sky. It does not knock on the door of a person sitting still, waiting for it. It catches up to motion. You are already working, already turned toward the problem, and the idea arrives to a mind that is in the middle of something. It has to find you working because there is nowhere else to find you.
The spectator has none of this. He has no problem to solve, only opinions about the problems of others. And creativity, to me, has always been problem solving. It is composition. It is deciding what to carry and what to leave out, what to balance against what. You cannot compose a problem you refuse to enter. You cannot solve the thing you are only watching.

So the two thoughts are one thought. Life is not a spectator sport, and life is an adventure, and both of them say the same word. Go. Step into the unsolved thing. The risk is real. You might land badly. But the work only lives in the place you were afraid to walk into.

That is where inspiration is waiting. It has to find you there. It has nowhere else to look.

by: Gene Sasse

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