Creative resonance

Here is a short Zen story. A man finishes a retreat at a monastery and, before leaving, is allowed to make a question. He thinks for a while and asks: “How do you find peace?”. The monk replies: “I say yes. Whatever happens to me, I say yes.”.

Instead of denying the suffering the monk refuses to add a second layer of it by resisting what is already there.

Resistance in creation

Creativity has its own version of resistance. Results often looks nothing like what we have in our heads, or the creations of those who inspire us. And the initial instinct can be to reject the output: this is not good enough, this does not represent me, why bother? And so we stop. Or worse, we never start.

To me this is the creative equivalent of the monk refusing to say yes: adding a layer of suffering on top of what is simply the reality of where we are.

The struggle is the point

There is a counterituive phenomenon called stochastic resonance: when a signal is too weak to be detected, adding noise actually makes the signal visible. This is because the noise makes it cross the threshold of detection.

Our “bad” creations are like the noise to the true signal of our creative identities. Without the struggle, the thing that makes us unique is too faint to be seen. Specially at the beginning.

Say yes

We do not have to love all we do, but its a tragedy to inhibit creation in fear of not doing as well as we wished we could do. It is precisely action that allows our indentities to develop and strengthen.