Selfish / Selfless

A conversation with a friend about justification in the creative life and a recurrent newsletter theme of talking to others about The Work has me thinking about balance – as I’m wont to do anyhow, but this at least gave me (more) words: taking/making the time for the solitude required for any self-directed creative undertaking is the ultimate manifestation of an essential selfishness – you are, as William Gibson (I think) once said (somewhere), creating something for the sole purpose of your conviction that it must exist; other responsibilities, life, family, dogs, cats, kids, friends, jobs, etc etc are the selfless flip side to the currency of The Work. The challenge is to strike a balance between the selfish and the selfless in which both can thrive in the midst of a constant war waged on the battleground of your mind, a war of attention in which the most potent weapon wielded by both combatants is guilt: detente in this theatre, then, requires a constant vigilance against imbalance to tune into a personal balance extant with the rhythm of the day, the rhythm of the work, of life (which is, as John Lennon tells us, what happens while you’re busy making other plans). Just a passing thought. As you were.