Downtime is where we become ourselves, looking into the middle distance, kicking at the curb, lying on the grass or sitting on the stoop and staring at the tedious blue of the summer sky. I don’t believe you can write poetry, or compose music, or become an actor without downtime, and plenty of it, a hiatus that passes for boredom but is really the quiet moving of the wheels inside that fuel creativity.
–Anna Quindlen, Loud and Clear
As I hinted yesterday, I am going on a short hiatus from the blog. I don’t know how long it will last, maybe a week or so. Whenever I have taken a break here in the past it usually ends up shorted that I initially intended so I imagine this will be the same.
This isn’t really going to be downtime in the way Anna Quindlen describes above. I have already had an ample amount of downtime but it wasn’t the kind that refreshes. The emphasis recently was more on the down part of downtime.
No, this hiatus is more about reestablishing the better parts of my work habit and getting back into a creative groove, the kind that becomes a motor that propels everything forward.
Besides, I build downtime into my day as a rule. It’s time to idle and think, time to look up things that pique my interest, time spent listening to music or reading, or time just looking out the window or laying on the floor with the cats.
No, this hiatus is not downtime. It’s a return to dedicated work because work is the answer to what ails me. It is the answer to all my questions. And the question to all my answers. It is the alpha and the omega, a beginning and an end.
I always go to a piece of advice that the late artist Chuck Close gave in an interview as advice to young artists:
The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the… work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.
That pretty much describes the motor that work provides for me. Work begets work.
And I am ready to get back to work.
For this Sunday Morning Music, here’s a song that I’ve played here before, Work Song. It was written by the brother of jazz great Cannonball Adderley, who originally performed the song as an upbeat jazz piece. But it has been interpreted by a number of artists over the years, including great performances from Nina Simone and Tennessee Ernie Ford, whose version I played here only six months ago. I don’t like to replay a song so quickly but this version from a little know group called The Big Beats has its own funky feel that separates it a bit, give it a whole different flavor. The singer here is Arlin Harmon. I don’t have a lot of info on either him or the Big Beats though from what I can glean Harmon was a highly regarded performer out in the Northwest in the early 1960’s. This is a solid rocking performance of a great song.
Gets my motor running. And that’s just what the doctor ordered.
I’ll be back in a week or so. Hope you will be back, as well.
Redtree Times 