It was a weeknight, and I was chopping vegetables for dinner when my husband burst through the door. “I thought of a new concept for my students,” he told me.
As I continued chopping, he described that during band rehearsal, he wanted his students to “let go” and get a louder, fuller, freer sound.
“I told them, ‘I need you to care while also not caring,’” he said.
I stopped chopping. My knife hovered mid-air, while I tried to make sense of this phrase.
“How do you care while also not caring?” I asked.
My husband thinks about the creative process a lot. He has taught band at a high school for nearly 20 years now. He’s constantly thinking about the creative process and how he can inspire his students to free themselves of the roadblocks to making music.
Caring while not caring — can it be done?
Our whole lives, we’ve been conditioned to care. Caring is good, right? We care about our grades in school. We care about doing a good job, or getting the right answer. We care about being successful.
On the other hand, we can care too much. We can care what others may think of our art, or care that we will do something wrong and be embarrassed. We care that we’re probably not good enough or that we don’t have anything of value to offer. The little voice in our heads can convince us that we can’t — can’t do whatever it is we’re trying to do. Sometimes we listen to that voice. What a shame that is.
How many beautiful things don’t exist because the artist cared too much about what others would think?
Caring too much can lead to the worst of all outcomes: not doing anything. Self-doubt can paralyze us so much that we expend our energy worrying or feeling defeated instead of creating. Whether you’re a musician, an artist, a writer — creating something involves a certain amount of risk. That risk factor can feel dangerous, and humans don’t like danger. We avoid it whenever possible.
I’m reminded of a great quote from the writer Kurt Vonnegut: “We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”
It’s an apt comparison. Taking a risk can feel like jumping off a cliff. Who hasn’t felt their stomach lurch at the thought of figuratively falling and crashing? We don’t know how this will end. We very likely could fail. But if, on the way down, we cast aside our self-doubt and get to work on making wings, we’ll make a softer, albeit bumpy, landing. Even if the wings are a little lopsided and tattered, they will still keep us from plummeting toward disaster. Sometimes it takes a big risk like that — jumping off a metaphorical cliff — to silence our inner voice. Trying to look cool to those watching us distracts us from the real objective. We have to focus on the deep work at hand, which means tossing aside those pesky obstacles that pop up between us and our art.
The worst outcome from not caring and taking risks is failure. But what does failure look like, exactly? It’s easy to look at the greats and only see their successes. But we know that even the greats fail: Steven Spielberg didn’t make it into film school … twice. Walt Disney was told by a newspaper editor that he “lacked imagination and had no good ideas.” Oprah Winfrey was fired from her job as an anchor at a Baltimore TV news station.
“Get it down,” said William Faulkner. “Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.”
Can it be done? Can we find the sweet spot — the space smack dab in the middle of caring and not caring so that we can learn to embrace (or at least tolerate) the stomach-lurching state of risk taking? The more we do it, the less likely we are to run in the opposite direction when we see a roadblock up ahead. We’ll think twice before avoiding the danger and might actually approach these challenges with our shoulders back, knowing it’s a necessary part of the messy process of creating. We’ll make mistakes and fail, but if we keep at it, something amazing could happen. We can learn to walk right up to the edge of the cliff and leap. We’re all developing our wings.
