Getting Personal
Veronica on August 16th, 2011
“And don’t tell me it’s not personal, it’s business. What’s so wrong with being personal anyway? Whatever else anything is, it should start by being personal!”
This exasperated exclamation by rom-com heroine Meg Ryan in You’ve Got Mail always resonated with me — and left me concerned that it might mean that I also shared with Meg’s character a most entertaining yet un-sexy penchant for preciousness. So it was with relief that I read the indomitable Francis Ford Coppola state that his best advice to his children has been: “Always make your work personal.” Can’t argue with the man who made “The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now.” No pastel sweater sets there.
I believe in personal. In the beautiful insight from designer Ji Lee that “When you give something, just for the joy of creating, it always comes back on a much larger scale.”
It can be hard to justify doing something that spends considerable time, money or energy simply because you love it. Because it brings you joy. But the truth of the matter is that this is exactly the type of creation – and the type of living – that breathes “beauty and truth” into our work (another insight from Coppola, which I think he ripped off from Keats, who in turn ripped it off from the Greeks, but I digress). While doing something because you like it may seem a childish motivation, or even selfish, it can be anything but.
“I take care to seem happy, and especially to be so,” St. Therese famously said. The way the youthful nun wisely split “seeming” and “being” makes me think of the ways in which we cultivate creative behaviours. Within our current creativity-as-a-trend (hipster) culture I often feel that it’s deceptively easy to take care to seem creative, rather than to be so. Craftsmanship can be connected to image, but just as often it’s completely unrelated – an obsession that adherents follow for the sheer love of it, out of a personal need that has very little to do with what others think. In fact, many great creative talents – recognized or unrecognized – have persevered despite what others thought of their passion or how they go about pursuing it.
This short film of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings pouring over the process of letter-pressing (and coffee-staining!) their album covers makes me think of that type of obsession. Sure, letter-pressing is très cool at the moment, and Welch isn’t hurting for affirmation – but the point isn’t whether or not what they’re doing is popular. (To counterbalance a little, popularity isn’t a crime, folks.) It’s that when I watch them get lost in the process over a part of the album that’s usually mass-produced, I get the feeling they’d do it anyway, even if every kid wheeling a fixie didn’t profess a love for hand-printing. “She was going to do it anyway,” Welch sings in one of my favourite songs. “Even if it doesn’t pay.”
Power to that, I say.
This is awesome. As an employee, I sometimes perceive myself as “doing the work of others” instead of doing personal acts of creation, which sometimes makes me feel resentful. It seems that if I can transcend employment to become personally invested in the work itself, it would be a helluva lot more enjoyable than the sensation of Working for the Man. You’ve written this well. Thanks Veronica!
This is my understanding of Jesus’ saying,”if someone asks you to carry a burden one mile, go two” — because you wanted to do the second, not because you were forced to. You’ve made it personal, and transcended the work, obliterating the intended effects of oppression.
August 17, 2011 @ 9:48 am
Thanks Kevan! As someone who uses my creative side at work, I really identify with the angle you articulate. It’s hard to feel a sense of pride and ownership sometimes, easy to feel like you’re selling out. But recently, alongside this (above) chain of thought, I’ve also been thinking a bit about embracing my work well enough to fall into the “flow” and get lost in time. Some psychologists define one of the crucial aspects of “play” as “losing track of time.” Imagine that, if we could make our work our play (something you’ve always seemed remarkably adept at — which I admire). When it comes to employed work — as you point out — it does take that first step of dropping the resentment and the defensiveness to find that openness. Tougher on some Mondays than others! Thanks for the added angle to think through this. Love it.
August 17, 2011 @ 6:46 pm