Delving underground
Writing, drawing, and all kinds of creative work sometimes feel like mining for gemstones. Heroic amounts of backbreaking digging with pickaxe, hammer, chisel, and shovel are needed for any artist to reach the depths where treasures may be found. Even so, there are no guarantees that any individual miner, no matter how dedicated and hard-working, would ever excavate a diamond of life-changing proportions — heroic effort is necessary but by no means sufficient.
When exploring underground, often at first we follow existing tunnels laid out by those who went before us. But as we grow in ambition and confidence, the vast unexplored depths beckon, and we begin to dare to dig our own paths, with just a lantern and our own skill to guide us. There's no thrill quite like even the smallest act of discovery, of creating something new.
Yet it can also seem woefully easy to take a wrong turn, follow a mistaken hunch, and get ourselves well and truly lost. Back and shoulders and arms and fingers grow weary, our nerve and courage begin to give way to creeping doubt. Are all of these shining rocks accumulating in our cart actually precious, or just fool's gold? Is this endless, thankless striving what we really wish to spend our one and only life doing?
There is only one way: Go within. Search for the cause, find the impetus that bids you write. Put it to this test: Does it stretch out its roots in the deepest place of your heart? Can you avow that you would die if you were forbidden to write? Above all, in the most silent hour of your night, ask yourself this: Must I write? Dig deep into yourself for a true answer. And if it should ring its assent, if you can confidently meet this serious question with a serious, 'I must,' then build your life upon it. It has become your necessity. Your life, in even the most mundane and least significant hour, must become a sign, a testimony to this urge.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Fortunately, creative work can also at other times feel like dancing, like a sudden gusty downpour, like a walk through a fruit-laden orchard, like gentle patient turning over of the soil, like a mysterious quickening in the darkness as last season's planting begins to reach for the light.
And then the work hardly feels like work, and it becomes bone-deep obvious: there really is no other way we'd rather spend our lives than in this unending, quixotic, useless, crucial pursuit of beauty and truth.
(This essay is part of a series of 30 essays.)