I know how desperately we all want to put the Coronavirus pandemic behind us. We want to be free to interact with each other as before. To gather in meetings, weddings, school, theaters, restaurants, etc. would be more than welcome for all of us. A haircut would be savored for sure. For some, this day has already come, for others it will still have to wait. No matter though, we all have to adjust how we will behave with and towards each other for a very long time to come.
There is fatigue, ennui, even boredom in the slog of it all. The exhaustion comes not from effort but the vigilance required of all things we simply did not think about just a few months ago. The price of a hug? A song? A dinner with friends?
Now throw in what is happening to your creative business. If you are in the event business, you are experiencing ripple effect after ripple effect. Even if you are flourishing as I know many creative businesses are, still you are touched by those who are not. Are you wondering when the proverbial bottom might fall out? School children still played in schoolyards during World War II and life did go on in the United States. When the atrocities of war are not at your doorstep, it is easy to belie those atrocities. The Coronavirus pandemic is not all that different.
Day by day by day we are reminded that our lives are and will be radically different and we are being forced to confront the idea that different is going to just have to be different. Yes, the Phoenix, but more the somber reality that rebirth is not yet here. And it complete sucks to sit still in what feels like chaos and molasses all at once. The end of the beginning to paraphrase Churchill.
What does it all mean then? Now is not the time for platitudes, minute blurbs of wisdom, or even well-meaning insights. Instead, it is the time for hard-thinking, to challenge whatever solution you might have come up with even a few weeks ago. Think about finger torture — the harder you pull to separate your fingers the tighter the bind. The only way out is to push your fingers together. You might be strong enough to rip the bind apart, likely not. To get out, you have to think your way out. The world, your world, is now the ultimate escape room. Except there is no-one on the other end of the microphone to give you a hint or let you out if you do not win the game.
Resilience is not your willingness to keep banging your head against the same wall. Resilience is your willingness to bang your head on a new wall with the pain of the old wall still fresh in (on?) your head. Perhaps your vision for the new new of your creative business is flying, sputtering or D.O.A. Are you ready to work with what tomorrow might bring? Though I have come to really despise the word, to pivot on a proverbial dime? Even more, are you willing to stop, sit in the pain until you see clarity, then move again to the new wall?
If we really are at the end of the beginning in that what did not work yesterday will tomorrow and will not the day after that, then what can you do that will carry you through? That one I do know. Be vulnerable.
Vulnerability does not mean baring all of yourself to the world. TMI is TMI. Vulnerability means sharing what moves you, what drives you to create joy. Why your gift matters to you and why you feel compelled to share it with us. The underneath. I have been working with a client who recently talked on social media about how making dolls helped her through a really rough time in her life. Very very intricate dolls with fantastic fabric and materials and details. Plain enough for me to see that making something beautiful helped through her pain and darkness. Losing herself in the idea and the creating literally saved her. She had the courage to share the story today, not really thinking about why she was sharing it. And there it was and is for all of us to find ourselves in. Did it result in sales for her new art? Yes. But that is not really the point. It also resulted in meaningful conversation with those who really care. Who knows whether they will buy. She saw them and they her. After all, isn’t that what we all want today, more than ever and the deeper, the better.
Vulnerability also means you have to go first. You are the artist, you are the force, you are the one with the gift. You have to choose to share. When we are at the end of the beginning, making that choice, being vulnerable, going first, is really really hard. It is so much easier to just be picked. If you could just make the lights bright enough, the sound loud enough to get your creative business (your life?) back to what it was, then the end might just be the end. Of course, the strategy of being the shiniest penny was dying way before Coronavirus. CV just accelerated the inevitable. When in the end of the beginning as we are, you go forward every day by giving us a vision of why your work matters to you and to those that you know need it most. From there, you will become the beacon you were always meant to be.
When platitudes, one minute fixes, and a million insights fade, you are left only with yourself and the responsibility of going first, despite your pain, you fatigue, your ennui. Art will always transcend its medium if the artist is compelled to share.
