Trusting the process OR asking the control freak inside you to STFU
I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.
— Gilda Radner
With yet another weekend starting, and me not having any clue about what to do with all the time, and being shit tired to do anything productive, here we are back again, brain dumping the mess of thoughts inside my head, for well, no one to read really, other than maybe some random lost stranger, stumbling upon this nook of the internet guided by the all-powerful recommendation algorithms.
Over the past few years, maybe because of the pandemic-induced lockdown or just cause I have so many changes going on in my life, it's easy for me to feel lost and for life to feel out of control. But I am also starting to realise that it’s okay to give up control and just trust the process. But okay, why all this heavy talk? Let’s talk about something else, like maybe sketching!
Now I was a very, very veerrrrrryyyyy nerdy kid in school, and the only two things going on in my life were my marks ( not even my subjects, I don’t think I actually cared about learning ) and computer games. I didn’t really have any hobby of sorts ( something which I am regretting a lot now and ever so slowly trying to fix ), but I did have one little hobby which used to sometimes pop out to remind me of its existence. I loved to draw!
Wait wait, before you get any ideas, I am not a good painter, and there’s no Tare Zameen par going on here ( I am not even dyslexic, I may be ADHD or bipolar though, lol, IDK). Sometimes I feel my skills points for imagination and creativity got traded for my analytical and logical skills. If you ask me to imagine something or create something, I can’t, and the only thing I see when I close my eyes is pitch-black darkness. So I can’t really draw anything new, but wait, even if I can’t create something new, I can at least copy someone. So that’s what I do, I can’t imagine my own shit, but I like to copy other people’s work.
I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
- E.B. White.
We had this thing in our school where we were encouraged to draw something related to the pictures in our English/Hindi books in our notebooks, and I just used to love copying those paintings in my notebook. We also used to have a display board in the class for drawings, and there used to be a bunch of my drawings there as well. Again I was not very skilled, but I had this process where I used to draw rectangular grids around the original picture, and I used to draw scaled-out versions of the grid in my notebook and then just draw the part in each rectangle one by one, and just trusting that it will all fit in together, in the end and look something coherent and good, and it usually did. This also allowed me to convert like these very small drawings from my books to huge 2-page drawings in my notebook :P
I stopped sketching for a long time since my JEE prep started, and I did one or two odd sketches during my 4 years of college, but recently I have been starting to pick this up again actively and find myself lost in sketching stuff after work.
But wait, why all this talk about sketching? Isn’t the blog about trusting the process? Well…I feel through sketching I am actually realising the importance of just trusting in the process and not thinking too much about how things will end,, and just being optimistic about things. When I sketch something, in the beginning, it all looks pretty funny, just a bunch of odd circles and lines, and it doesn’t really feel like it will add up to anything much, or even when I am beginning to shade, it always feels like I’ll mess it up, and it will look flat and boring. But that’s where the magic of the process lies, I feel. You just have to trust that it will turn out well, or at least trust that the artist you are copying knows their shit and will somehow make things right at the end of the tutorial lol.
Creativity cannot flourish and reach its deepest potential without the participation of its demons as well as its angels.
― Shaun McNiff
And I think this is true for soooooooo many things in my life; there are so many things where you just have to trust the process, making small efforts every day, investing a little bit of yourself into the process, and just hoping that it will all be worth it in the end. The intermediate state of things can sometimes look messy, and alright scary and hopeless, but as Jobs said, you can’t connect the dots while going forward, they’ll only make sense when you look backwards; you need to connect the dots backwards, and then everything will make sense, or maybe it won’t, maybe it will all just be like abstract art in the end, which won’t make any sense at all in itself, but will depend on how you interpret it.
Even while writing this blog, I have to just trust the process and keep on writing, even though I don’t have anything much planned out, just hoping that the words will come to me and somehow I’ll be able to write something enough for an article, or well at least a long rant. ANYWAY, that’s a lot of brain-dump for an article; whenever I write one of these, I feel like I should do this more since it’s so relaxing; maybe I’ll, who knows.
Until the next one — So long!
