Passion Makes You Mechanical
I was rendering new images for a long time last night. Passion about a project, which comes from a completely human and emotional place, can make people mechanical.
This morning I read Seth’s post about being a “pilot”- someone meticulously checks off a to-do list and looks after details while remaining unseen. This way of relating to your work precludes innovation, but slipping into the “pilot” role and loosing yourself in a stack of tasks that need to be carried out to support an idea you’ve fallen in love with can be wonderful. Time passes differently, you start to pay less and less attention to your surroundings and yourself, and when you “snap out of it”, a lot of work has been turned around.
I know what Seth is saying, but activities like jogging, painting, and even writing could be coded as “pilot” behavior. It’s no way to live life entirely, but carving out contained spaces for meditative, automatic task-completion can be a wonderful escape, and nourishing a project by yourself requires it.
1 Comment
March 2nd, 2008 at 5:00 pm
I think when someone is truly passionate about something they do, there is not necessarily even a checklist..or if there has to be, it’s a mental/subconscious checklist in some way because, yes time passes differently and you pay little or no attention to yourself or surroundings, and when you snap out of it, it’s wonderful results. I feel like passion for me at least allows me to say, to hell with checklists, and to just do each thing that I need to/want to be doing to do the project. The “project of my passion” hahah..