It takes a special energy, over and above one’s creative potential, a special audacity or subversiveness, to strike out in a new direction once one is settled. It is a gamble as all creative projects must be, for the new direction may not turn out to be productive at all.

Creativity involves not only years of conscious preparation and training but unconscious preparation as well. This incubation period is essential…

This felt good to read. (Major thank you to Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings. Support and check them out here.) I’ve never heard of Oliver Sacks before reading this, but the first picture I saw showcased him as a large, bearded man with spectacles, smoking on an Amsterdam train station and jotting something down in his notebook while standing.

Maybe I’ve been in quarantine too long and haven’t gotten a professional haircut in months, but all I can think is, “This is the way.”

I mean, LOOK at him. (SOURCE)

I should remind myself more often that, to a certain extent, what I’m doing is brave. That leaving what I’ve known and loved, teaching, to venture out into the creative world, is a special kind of audacity. Who am I to say my writing is better than someone else’s? That you (vague reader joining me today) should spend money or time on me? That takes an audacious person’s soul.

It could take years, gestating, growing, to get to the special level of audacity that I want, but, let’s not stop the ego train now.

Thanks for reading,

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