All year, I've been thinking a lot about focus - or lack thereof. In my adult life, I have seriously tried my hand at many (many) different creative ventures. Here's an incomplete list:
- Actor
- Singer
- Clown (I even auditioned for Ringling Brother's Clown School - and almost made it)
- Puppeteer
- Puppet/Mask Maker
- Director
- Printmaker
- Illustrator
- Painter
- Children's Book Writer
Throughout this time, I have also been working steadily as a progressive preschool teacher. I also went back to school to finish my bachelor's (in theater with a concentration on directing, and puppetry, sort of), oh, and then there was the little tangent of getting married and adopting my daughters. Teaching has taken a lot of my energy, and I don't anticipate giving that up unless I strike it rich, so I do need to focus on that work. And of course, having young children creates its own set of distractions (to say the least!), but I really don't think that has been my primary reason for being so singularly unfocused when it comes to my creative career goals.
I don't mean to toot my own horn, but I showed talent in each of the above fields. I made some strides and had some successes in all the fields I tried. I published illustrations, completed a children's book or two, directed a successful play at the college level, had a small art show, sold some prints, etc. But, needless to say, I have not reached any significant achievement in any of these areas. And further, I haven't been satisfied doing much of this work, regardless of my abilities. I procrastinate, I lose interest, I move on to the next thing, I get frustrated that I can't be better at it, and blah and blah and blah.
Reading Twyla Tharp's book The Creative Habit, I came upon this passage and recognized myself in it for sure:
I
wonder how many people get sidetracked from their true calling by the
fact that they have talent to excel at more than one artistic medium.
This is a curse rather than a blessing. If you have only one option,
you can't make a wrong choice. If you have two options, you have a
fifty percent chance of being wrong.
It's like a great high
school athlete who plays football, basketball, and baseball equally
well. If this athlete wants to continue playing sports at the highest
collegiate level, at some point he will have to commit to one sport
over the other. He'll weigh a lot of factors: what comes naturally to
him, what does he enjoy the most, in which sport does he have a natural
advantage over the competition in terms of size, speed, endurance and
other critical measures? But in the end the choice should be based on
pure instinct and self-knowledge. What sport does he feel in his
muscles and bones? What sport was he born to play?
When I read this, as Twyla Tharp talks about what we are "built" to do, it kind of hit me that perhaps jumping from discipline to discipline, building up just enough skills to be competant but never going further is not so much a fault, or even a curse, but a tactic of denial. For a long time, I maintained that I just wanted to have "a career in the arts," which is pretty ambiguous, right? I realized with clarity that I don't actually want to do many of the things I have set out to do - I don't really want to be an illustrator, or a writer, or a mask maker. Although I may have a knack for these things, and I don't regret having these skills, I don't "feel it in my bones," as Tharp puts it. Time to pare away the time and effort I've spent on other fields of focus, and hone in on the skills I really want to develop.
