The Industrious Revolution

On seeking my next up-level through ease, consistency, and joy.

This morning, I ran around my neighborhood. It’s been a long time since I could say that, but I started again on Wednesday — waking up early, lacing up my old running shoes. Just a few days later now, I feel new somehow, and already wanting to shout from the rooftops — movement is changing my life! Then the sneaking suspicion kicks in: I’ll keep it up, determined and industrious, for a couple of weeks, then will fall off. I’ll forget about the way endorphins make me feel like the shape of my brain is changing. Three more sedentary, stuck, somewhat anxious years will pass.

I am trying to be gentler with myself — not about giving up, necessarily, because I want to change the part of me that shrugs my shoulders and one morning never runs again. This tendency toward falling-off applies to so much, all of which I’ve been trying to practice this week in a manic state of being all-at-once-alive-inspired-and-present-again. Doing my morning pages. Going on my artist dates. Taking long, meandering, meaningless walks around my neighborhood without my phone and letting the wonder flood in. Calling my senators. Engaging in mutual aid.

What I’m trying to experiment with this time around is being gentler with my imperfection in doing these things. Always the over-achiever, I have a hard time shaking the part of me that wants to do everything right. I then become righteous — with myself, and also likely in my energy toward others. And when I inevitably slip up — when I don’t do my daily poem, my weekly essay, when I sleep through my alarm and so forget my morning pages, the whole thing suddenly collapses in on itself.

One day missed means I’ve failed. One day off means I’m wrong to believe I can do the things I set out to do. Cue years of frenzy, blocks, sleepwalking through my life. Then another determined resurgence.

I don’t want my well-being to be a house of cards — one false move and it falls. I know myself to be sturdier than that, so why do I always act like I’m not? I’m trying to bring out of my sub-conscious stories I have about myself: I’m not doing enough. I’m not measuring up. I’m delusional to believe that my dreams will come to me. That my projects will succeed.

It’s easier, I convince myself, just to give up. To throw in the towel at week three when the results aren’t immediate.

What results, though? I’m digging further. It’s fun to do this while running and the mind has such space for wandering. When I ran as a teenager, it was because I wanted my body to look a certain way. In my early twenties, I ran to help with anxiety, perfection, stress, heartbreak. It’s been years since I’ve done it now — evident from the mold which grew in my running backpack’s plastic bladder. The mold itself turned into a convenient excuse about why I couldn’t go — I don’t have water! Oh my god, I thought to myself last week, what is wrong with me? I ordered a replacement online; it cost less than twenty dollars.

And then out I went on Wednesday — legs aching, and with no urge to change my body. I went not seeking relief, necessarily, but because I thought it might make me feel good. I was right. There I was, running along the Brooklyn waterfront, alive! alive! What I gorgeous morning, I thought, what a wonderful place, and I am so lucky to be here experiencing it. What a gift! What delight!

What a fabulous immediate result.

I don’t know why in the past my own joy, my own pride in myself hasn’t been enough reason for doing something. I experienced this also on Monday, when I took myself on an artist date to The Whitney. I wandered around, pondering the paintings, then stumbled upon Calder’s Circus, a collection of acrobatic wood and wire puppets that flip and turn and run and bow. Holy shit — it filled me to the brim with giddiness. Look at these little puppets! Look at this absurd world built just on play, exhibited in this famous museum! I went afterwards to the café on the main floor — ate a whole pizza, drank rosé. I am so lucky to be alive, I thought to myself, sipping. I feel like I got the best life.

It's surprisingly simple, how easy it is to trigger this feeling within myself. It takes almost no time at all. Could be as simple as a walk — any time spent intentionally and divorced from capitalism, from stress. I feel absurd toward myself: I’ve lived in New York for almost five years, and I can count on my fingers the number of artist dates I’ve gone on. The number of times I’ve gone running. The morning pages done.

Here I am, a self-employed poet, having intentionally carved out time for my own creativity and whimsy and still for some reason I’ve been hell-bent on avoiding it. I know what the tools are: they’ve worked for me before. It’s not my first rodeo. But this week, it feels all at once like it is. Like I’m experiencing this wonder and freedom for the first time. And oh, it feels so goddamn good.

The funny thing is, I haven’t even sat down to make headway on any certain project yet. But doing so suddenly feels possible. Whereas for years I’ve had idea after idea and then refused to make progress on any one, I feel now like I could. Like I could realistically build a life where I’m happily making, creating — and where, in fact, the more I make and create, the less stressed and frazzled I am.

It’s possible that I’ve been anxious because I’m an artist refusing myself the luxury of really making my art. The crux of the problem here, being: I’ve been seeing art as luxury, not lifeline. I’ve failed to remember that making is a way of existing that is necessary and mine.

At the Whitney, some of the paintings I loved most were of factories from the 1920s. Artists were commissioned to paint them by the companies that owned the factories, and their portrayal in the paintings underlined the belief at the time that industry was the new way for people to touch God.

By the time many of the paintings were finished, however, in the early 1930s, the culture had shifted — The Great Depression had set in, and workers revolted against the foremen. God must have been elsewhere.

I thought of these paintings this morning as my run took me to a part of my neighborhood I’ve never seen. I live between the riverfront and an extremely industrial area, and I chose this morning to head the opposite way down the street. Everything’s all good and easy when one is running along the East River. What about through the train yards?

The thing is, I loved it. I wanted all at once to be a photographer, or even a painter, because every scene was so rich and begging to be captured. Everything: a poem. Why was that recycling plant so beautiful? I thought fleetingly of the article I once wrote as a journalist about recycling — how I went into the local plant and watched people sort through the trash with their plastic-gloved hands. Little pleasure to remember this.

And look — a bridge! I ran across it and over a creek, past the storage locker and the tire shop and the diesel fuel and the real railroad line, moving along with the semi-trucks and held together by the smell of freshly poured asphalt. And then — holy shit! — a cemetery? Enormous? With three million burials, making it the largest in the country? I had no idea I lived anywhere near a cemetery, let alone the one where they put all the mobsters! I laughed. Would I cry? Not quite, but I felt so connected — like I’d touched perhaps God.

Running back home, I thought of my last apartment, which bordered directly a cemetery. We could see headstones from the fire escape where my last partner and I drank our coffee in the summertime, talking. Little grief. I crossed the bridge and thought of the creek behind my childhood home — the cattails, the crawdads. It was so much smaller than this one but still big in the landscape of my earliest years — how we’d sled down the hill in the winter, and if we weren’t careful, we would hit it and break through the ice.

I’ve been trying to zoom in on how the point of doing anything is the process itself — not the finish line; the publication; the accolades; but the doing. The crossing of the creek with sore legs, the fingers flying over keys. I keep discouraging myself from doing — writing my book, making my show, growing / growing / growing — because I am afraid of how hard it will be.

But hasn’t this week been easy? Haven’t I joyously been pondering where some God might be — a concept that for me has never resonated before? Haven’t I felt connected — part of something much bigger — and hasn’t that been such an enormous relief? And I got there by showing up eagerly, excited, with so much compassion and softness.

I am remembering what it feels like, to make good art. To love the self. This: the result that I’ve been yearning for, I think. It feels good. It feels a lot like living.