Blindly Follow the Path

As I sit down to write this blog post, I have no idea where it will lead.  None whatsoever.  I've come up with a couple of ideas, most of them feeble attempts to get out of writing the thing, but none of them have really spoken to me.  None of them have said, "Yes, Jason, I'm the idea you should run with today."

It's not a happy place for me as a blogger, yet it's one I find myself in all too often when I'm composing or writing fiction, and for some reason there, it doesn't faze me.  I can be standing in the dark without so much as a lamp, and if it's a piece of music or a novel, I have no problem blindly fumbling my way forward until I get to something that looks familiar or interesting, then it's off to the races.

For us Creatives, this is our lot in life.  We go to start a new project, and we're immediately faced with the prospect that there are infinite projects out there we could begin, and we have to fumble around until we decide which project to choose.

Even then, with our germ of an idea, there's the conundrum of how to proceed.  At this point, we may have a pinprick of light, but we can see none of the paths that branch off from where we are.  We have to start down one path to see where it leads, and if it's not the path for us, we backtrack to the beginning and choose another path.

The paths have pitfalls, ones we don't realize until we're on top of them or, as frequently happens, in them.  And how did we end up in these huge pits in the path?  We were blindly fumbling along, in the dark, trying to make our way. 

This is pretty much part and parcel of how every composition project I've ever written has gone.  This fear and fumbling isn't so bad when I'm just writing a piece to see if I can.  Fortunately, however, I'm starting to get to the place where people are asking for specific pieces from me -- a publisher wants a set of arrangements for twelve bells, or a church wants to commission a piece in memory of a ringer -- and I have to tell them, "Yes, sure, I can do that," long before I've ever started looking for the path.  In that case, I can't just blindly follow the path -- I have to blindly trust that when the time comes to find the start of the path, I'll be able to do so.

Yet isn't this really a metaphor for life?  We go through life day after day, hoping we're doing the right thing, heading in the right direction.  Some days we move farther down the path; other days we stray or even backtrack.  We learn from our mistakes and so make fewer of them in the future.  Some days the fog lifts and we may see how the path leads for miles; other days the fog closes in so closely we can't even see where our next step will land. 

And what do we do?  We keep moving, because standing still simply isn't an option.  We keep moving, keep walking, keep creating, keep living, and hope that, in the end, we've made something worth our time and effort.