A Summer Break

An Announcement

Italy, 2016

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If you want hearty and bountiful crops over many seasons, then you need a strategy. As with so much in life, this demands that you consider multiple time scales, because you don’t want a strong, plentiful harvest this year to constrain a strong, plentiful harvest next year. You might sell crops, you might have barrels of fresh goods to bring to the market, but, really, they’re just product, the final, almost misleading veneer, as your business fundamentally specializes in soil.

And this isn’t exactly an unusual circumstance. In so much of life, outputs are what’s visible, they’re what people observe, evaluate, and discuss, even though the energy and concentration and commitment results from inputs. Whether you’re a carpenter or potter or chef, the consequence of your labor surfaces in a momentary, almost forgettable finale, with the process of building the structure or shaping the clay or cooking the meal demanding most of your time. To walk around the world is to see the completed, polished products of all this labor—while almost always overlooking the time that’s required for even the smallest creation.

One simple but often forgotten lesson is that you must enjoy the process of creation, regardless of your discipline, rather than the outcome, because you do spend your life within processes and not outcomes. If you just want to enjoy finished canvases but don’t want to enjoy painting canvases, you’re going to be one frustrated painter. Life is lived amid means even though most conversations are misleadingly about ends. And this same truth applies regardless of your discipline, whether you’re in science, mathematics, engineering, or anything else that you can imagine, you’ll spend most of your time performing the daily, deliberate labor of that discipline rather than basking in the results.

Another simple but often forgotten lesson is that the inputs which produce the work must be fed—in a manner that is, perhaps, like rotating crops in the soil. This is particularly applicable when you attempt to create: if your business is invention, imagination, ingenuity, then what kindles that fire? How do you orient your life, or spend your time, to trigger a moment of creativity? Consuming a diet of processed foods or sugary drinks isn’t the ideal fuel to strengthen your body—and in the same way spending your time consumed by what’s banal and plastic and clichéd isn’t the ideal fuel for creating art.

There’s no formula, or source from which you can easily and consistently tap for a wellspring of creativity, but there are certainly some general rules, such as the fairly basic claim that good inputs are a prerequisite for good outputs. The notion that an artist can live with indifference—absorbing junky content, having junky conversations, inhabiting junky environments—and still end up creating good art is, perhaps, rather fanciful. I won’t define the word junky for anybody else, although I’m pretty sure every reader will know, instinctively, immediately, how they would define the word for themselves, and how they would describe the environments that, for them, hinder creativity.

This long and tedious preamble brings me to the point: Desk Notes is taking its first summer holiday. After 233 essays without any extended breaks, it is time for a short pause, to recharge, to regroup, to simply linger without watching the calendar. My backlog of partially-written essays is already unwieldy, so I will certainly return in a short time, presumably primed with new ideas that I can’t, in this moment, anticipate. I have paused all paid subscriptions, so there will be no billing during this period. If you’re one of those august, glorious subscribers who has upgraded, there’s nothing that you need to do, and you will not be charged during the break.

For now I am going to savor a few summer days, which I know will bring me back to the desk with a breathless, frenzied need to publish. I have some loose plans, early hints, and a few sketches for what’s to come. But the best writing, for me at least, emerges when I am just at the edge of my abilities, when I’m not quite sure whether the page will coalesce into anything worthwhile before I begin. In general, that’s where I try to linger, with the next sentence always feeling like it is just beyond my grasp. My perception is that a writer who struggles at this edge makes for the best reading—although that part of the equation isn’t something, of course, that I can assess about my own work. What I do know is that spending a little time away—some of it purposeful, some of it wistful—will increase the likelihood of encountering more moments that feel catalytic.

Thank you, as always, for reading. There will be new issues soon.