Rembrandt, “Night Watch”
Never beat yourself up for your “bad” efforts.
“I’ve been (painting, sculpting, singing, playing) for X years. I ought to do better every time, and it’s my fault when it doesn’t happen.”
If art teaches us anything, it’s that our plans seldom match up well with reality. Every day is different.
In time, we learn that “perfect” is a moving goal.
When I was a runner, I entered a 50-mile race where the organizers failed to deliver our carefully prepared supply bags to the aid stations. For a moment I, was upset to miss the fuels I’d prepared to get me through the race. But then I thought of a motto that had rescued me on many occasions: “Adapt and survive.” I grabbed some goodies from the aid table and did fine.
In a November 1980 article in Psychology Today, “The Perfectionist’s Script for Self-Defeat,” David D. Burns, MD, professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, reviewed research showing that people who hold modest expectations of themselves are happier and more successful in their work and relationships than those who aren’t happy unless they’re able to achieve a self-defined level of perfection.
The lesson? If you want to be happy as an artist, stop chasing perfect rainbows. A goal of being productive is more helpful than crippling ourselves with unrealistic expectations.
We all make mistakes. When it happens, the productive response is to see them as opportunities to learn.
Kathryn Schulz, author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, described the perils of perfectionism in an article in the Dallas Morning News, The Bright Side of Wrong.”
We don’t get things wrong because we are uninformed and lazy and stupid and evil. We get things wrong because we get things right. The more scientists understand about cognitive functioning, the more it becomes clear that our capacity to err is utterly inextricable from what makes the human brain so swift, adaptable, and intelligent….
If you are a native English speaker, you figured out within the first several years of your life that you should add the suffix ed to form a past-tense verb. This was a brilliant guess. It’s largely correct, it taught you a huge number of words in one fell swoop, and it was a lot less painful than separately memorizing the past tense of every verb in the English language. But it also meant that, sooner or later, you said things like “drinked” and “thinked” and “runned.” You got a huge number of things right, at the price of getting a certain number of things wrong.
Progress comes quickest not by getting it right every time, but by playing the averages and pursuing our art in the right direction. If you’re making art in the ballpark of “good” most of the time, you deserve to celebrate your successes. You can comfort yourself that by making hundreds of attempts you’re improving a lot faster than the tortured soul who’s still struggling over that single unimpeachable opus.
Given the vagaries of diet, mood, illness, and the weather, et al., ad infinitum, “approximately” is plenty good enough.
Seymour Papert, an MIT computer science professor who invented the LOGO programming language for kids, believes learning to write code teaches children a priceless lesson he dubbed “a debugging approach to life.”
Papert pointed out that grown-up professional programmers routinely make 100 or more errors for every 1000 lines of code they write. Mistakes are an expected part of the process. Papert says this is how we ought to view our real-life mistakes: as necessary steps in learning to succeed.
A study by sports psychologist Thomas Tutko in the early 1970s found that second-tier professional badminton players tended to beat themselves up mercilessly for their mistakes. They were players who never quite managed to break into the world-class ranks.
The top-tier players, meanwhile, calmly noticed their mistakes, made mental notes, fixed them, and moved on without wasting time and energy on anger or regrets.
Professional portrait painter Chelsea Lang has a YouTube channel where she helps young artists ground their craft in the fundamentals that will enable them to succeed. She recently posted a video explaining why retirees seldom succeed in achieving their artistic goals, because they’ve been highly skilled in business, finance, law, medicine, etcetera, and they expect to achieve similar success in art with minimal effort. They simply don’t want to embrace a self-image of beginners who must struggle with the basics, making lots of mistakes along the way before they can “get good.”
Chelsea Lang practices a prima painting – she produces hundreds of paintings, each one at a single sitting. She reports that this approach has taught her countless lessons that artists may never learn if they take weeks to complete a painting.
Perfect art? When we chase it, it has an uncanny way of melting back over the horizon. It’s generally more productive to be grateful for the daily efforts that take us partway there.
Postscript
After I posted this, I had an uneasy feeling that it wasn’t complete, that something was lacking. I hadn’t included any thoughts about the mistakes that people are bound to make – that they must make in order to learn from them in the spiritual life.
This evening I picked up Asha Nayaswami’s wonderful book, Swami Kriyananda: Lightbearer, which I’m reading for the twenty-sixth time. Not, I hope, because I’m a blockhead, but because I find it endlessly nourishing to my spiritual aspirations.
But, to return to my concerns about advice for learning valuable lessons when we stumble, I happened to be at a point in the book where Asha records some wonderful thoughts on learning from our weaknesses, mistakes, and failures. For those who own the book, you can find them in the opening section of “1977,” where Asha writes:
On January 5, we celebrated Master’s birthday with a long meditation, followed by an Indian banquet. Afterward, Swamiji spoke. “My fellow disciple at Mount Washington, Norman Paulsen, had a vision of a great Light and all these people running toward it. A few ran directly into the Light and were absorbed into it, but almost everyone else ran for a while, then fell down. Most were stunned by the fall, and only slowly got up and started moving again. First walking, then gradually picking up the pace, until, once again, they were running toward the Light. Then most would stumble and fall, and the whole process would repeat.
“After Norman told me the dream, I asked Master, ‘Does everyone fall—repeatedly?’ ‘Yes,’ he said.
“God doesn’t mind your faults, He just wants you to love Him. Don’t put yourself down for not yet being a Christ. If you love God and love Master and try to serve them to the best of your ability, He won’t be angry with you for not doing it well enough. Don’t beat yourself up for having darkness in you. Just try to love God all the more. He doesn’t care how many faults we have. What touches Him is our love.
“More than just offering what you do to Master, feel that Master himself is doing it through you. Some people tell me that The Path has the same vibration as Autobiography of a Yogi. I am not surprised. Both books have the same author: Master. If you get rid of the worry that you are not pleasing him, but have a positive consciousness, he will be able to work through you better and better.
“Don’t bother to think, ‘I am not worthy.’ Just say ‘YES’!’ to life, to the divine life flowing through you. Make everything you do a puja—an act of worship—and soon you will be brimming over with inner joy. It doesn’t matter what we do; what matters, is the spirit with which we do it.
“This is God’s dream. Always live with one foot in Eternity. Tell yourself every morning and every evening, ‘This could be my last day.’ Eventually, everything we have done in this world will be left behind. The only thing that goes with us is how much we love: love God, love one another. The divine consciousness was born into this world through Master that we might all get out of this world and into Bliss.”