11 11 / 2012
What I Mean When I Say Fuck the Fear
When I was a kid, I used to read a lot of music magazines: Cream, Rolling Stone, gossip rags, really.
But there was one interview with Eric Clapton–a sentence actually–that utterly confounded me. The guitarist said that every day he woke up and wondered what he would get the blues about.
Why would someone as famous as Eric Clapton actively try to find something to depress him? I couldn’t figure it out. My confusion, so clear now, was a result of my own adolescence, my inexperience.
The blues are not not something you set out to get. They come to you.
Fear works the same way. You don’t have to worry about its visits. Fear is as timely as a train schedule. You may not see it yet, but somewhere down the tracks, it’s barreling toward your station.
My brain is the Grand Central of fear.
I’m afraid of starting. I’m afraid I won’t finish. I’m afraid at just about every stage in the process. That’s not to say there’s no joy along the way. Of course there is. But creative work is the culmination of thousands of small decisions, each branching off into hundreds and hundreds of possibilities. It would be unusual not to be overwhelmed.
So for me fuck the fear is not a declaration of liberation. It’s a affirmation, an acknowledgment that this fear will transform into that one followed by the next and on and on, and the best I can do is say, fuck it, I’m going to try and get some stuff done anyway.
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03 11 / 2012
"A warrior accepts that we can never know what will happen to us next. We can try to control the uncontrollable by looking for security and predictability, always hoping to be comfortable and safe. But the truth is that we can never avoid uncertainty. This not-knowing is part of the adventure. It’s also what makes us afraid."
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01 8 / 2012
"I like pressure. Pressure doesn’t make me crack. It’s enabling. I eat pressure, and there might be times when I get a bad feeling in my gut that this might be too much, but you feel pressure when you’re not doing something, you know? When you’re getting ready for something, you feel pressure—when you’re anticipating. But when you’re constantly in activity, there’s no time for pressure to just sit there and make you crack."
27 7 / 2012
When confused or uncertain or on the edge of panic, keep moving, keep working, keep that fear at bay.
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