Do you dare to not achieve?
Art, unlearning, and spring in the countryside.
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I came out to my parents’ farm to achieve something.
I came to spend 16 hours a day reading, writing, thinking, and most importantly, achieving. I wanted to go home with said achievement in hand.
This was my retreat, my intensive, to really dig in and prove myself: here I am! I’m worthy! I’m producing! I’m churning the raw stuff of life/thought/passion into a clearly definable product that will instantly confer me status as a Person Of Value!
Instead, in a great bait-and-switch of midlife crisis soul-questing, I mostly sat on a blanket in the grass with two dogs and felt grim. I read, yes. I read Free to Learn and The Last Child in the Woods and most mind-blowingly, Excellent Sheep. I took notes in what one ex-boyfriend called “your little I’m-an-intellectual book,” and I transferred those notes dutifully to my computer, and I thought of Big Ideas. But mostly I just felt stumped.
One of the great, super-fun paradoxes of being a writer (artist?) is that every project you take on has its own learning curve: nothing ever really gets much easier, no clear process is established, each work unearths itself with as much excruciating uncertainty as you can possibly stand and asks you to devote every last cell of your being to begging WHAT DO YOU WANT, UNIVERSE.
In this case, I thought maybe I had a template. I have written a big nonfiction book. I’ve taken on a major research and reporting project. Okay, I thought. I’ve got an idea. I’ve got a terrain. I’m goin’ in.
But of course, I’m not the same person I was in 2017, when I started my last book. I am laughingly, startlingly different, almost as different as that person was from the one living in Oaxaca in 2009. I saw an Instagram post today from Dan Harris, whose meditation app I love, saying “If you had told me 15 years ago, when I was an ambitious and skeptical newsman, that I’d end up becoming a full-time meditation evangelist, I would’ve coughed my beer up through my nose.” It felt like one of those uncanny truths the Internet delivers from time to time to make you feel not so bad about all the life you’ve wasted on Instagram.
An artist’s work is always a merging of inner life and outer world. Creation often happens on the charged periphery between the two. I came un-ironically into this targeted mission of achievement as someone who, over the course of the past several years – basically, beginning with the publication of my second book in peak quarantine, 2020, and onwards through meditation courses and homeschooling and travel – has become deeply suspicious of achievement.
Like with most processes of dismantling the ego, you don’t realize how many layers are still left until you find yourself face to face with yet another one on a Monday morning, staring despondently at your Google docs wondering why this fantasy of yourself writing the next NYT bestseller is not cohering and all you want to do is go stare at the pond. Turns out, I was still very much hoping to achieve! Still seeking justification through achievement! Hi, I’m the problem, it’s me!
Meanwhile I am reading these books that are reiterating at every turn: we are a society focused on all the wrong things – on, in a word, achievement in its most useless and often damaging incarnations – and it’s making us miserable.
Our kids are trapped in institutions dedicated to teaching them more abstract, rote knowledge they are not interested in and do not need, while the natural world is devoured by fire and unconcern. Our higher ed institutions are hotbeds of human angst – my own students tell me there is often more than a six-month wait for an appointment at the counseling center – as they churn out dutiful little performers seeking jobs in a tech industry that is rotting the foundations of our society, over which few of us feel we have any control.
These are oversimplifications, but not by much. We are seeing epic rates of mental illness, and epic rates of medication use. The society we have in motion, which all of us grind through even as we wake up from time to time, blinking, thinking, this cannot be it, this cannot be right, is a society dedicated not to beauty, meaning, connection, purpose, the thriving of all life, but mostly to money. Really.
In his book Excellent Sheep, William Deresiewicz writes, “Society is a conspiracy to keep itself from the truth. We pass our lives submerged in propaganda: advertising messages; political rhetoric; the journalistic affirmation of the status quo; the platitudes of popular culture; the axioms of party, sect, and class; the bromides we exchange every day on Facebook; the comforting lies our parents tell us and the sociable ones our friends do; the steady stream of falsehoods that we each tell ourselves all the time, to stave off the threat of self-knowledge. Plato called this doxa, opinion, and it is as powerful a force among progressives as among conservatives, in Massachusetts as in Mississippi, for atheists as for fundamentalists. The first purpose of a real education (a ‘liberal arts’ education") is to liberate us from doxa by teaching us to recognize it, to question it, and to think our way around it.”
More and more of us can see that the current paradigm is just. not. working. On a real, physical level, and on an emotional, social, spiritual level as well. If we are honest with ourselves, is this the status quo we want?
And me, taking my notes, sitting before my stack of books as late March unfolds outside the window, the spring peepers cheeping in deafening falsetto, the fields blonde and clear under cold sun: I am trying to force achievement where most of us have found and continue to find it – in front of a screen.
But that ain’t it, folks. Tough, the truth creativity demands of us. Asking us to not be whiny and self-pitying as we stomp down the road wishing we could just write the damn proposal and be done with it.
Brutal, how each new project comes with its own rules – if you no longer believe in achievement, what would it look like to create outside of its matrix? If you no longer live by achievement, what do you live by? God? Nature? Family? Meditation? Kindness? Plants?
No answers. That’s where we begin, without achievement. No answers, and no clear method for obtaining them. Books are beautiful, essential guides; I can’t reject them. But I can’t rely on them, either. Knowledge is beautiful, essential; but it’s not everything, not even the main thing. Words are my world, my clay, my purpose – and yet not enough, as I know them, as I’ve known them.
Now what?
In The Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv quotes ethnobiologist Gary Paul Nabhan: “Science is the human endeavor in which we are frequently reminded how wrong we can be.”
Substitute “art” for science.
How much life-changing art has come from being wrong, recognizing that wrong, interrogating it?
I achieved very little. The red-winged blackbird dipped on its cattail towards the pond, calling. My dog snored and comforted me as I slept under a full moon. I longed to be in the world. I longed for my daughter even as I savored this rare independence. I hiked through the pastures each day, feeling the disconnect – books inside, life outside. And I learned, once again, the artist’s humility: nothing worthwhile comes for the sake of achievement.
It comes because I stand outside, looking in, thinking of the books I just read, and because I sit inside, looking out, thinking there is so much more than the notes I am taking, and in that tension, something brews.
Something essential, difficult, raw, a scent I’ll follow because what else could I possibly do?
And with that, gratitude. And with that, calm. And with that – a beginning.
I would love to hear about your relationship with achievement. Where does it stand right now? Has it changed over time? Reflect and share 🏆🙃🏆
I think some specter of achievement will always be with me; it’s a coping strategy I’ve used forever, but toxic because of the way it begs validation from the outside.
Health issues and homeschooling keep teaching me the same lesson over and over again.
I like working, which maybe sometimes looks like it’s only towards achieving. But I’m trying to tease out that it’s the practice of it (writing, mothering, teaching) that actually matters to me; the showing up, open, lit from the inside, trying to make something that connects.
Tu commence. Bien!