Pain is a very troublesome emotion to feel. It can kick you when you’re down and leave you begging to be let back up. But pain is also a feeling that a specific group of people in this world can appreciate when it becomes tangled up in their work. It marries itself to their craft, pushes their limits, and triggers their passion.
Yes, it’s true — In moments of distress, artists thrive. Shocked? Somehow I didn’t think you would be.
When going through the “tough” in life artists get up, dust off, savor the moment, and continue down their respective creative paths even more enthusiastically than the day before.
Analogy.
The clock is pushing 1am and you’re still an hour away from home after a nice, long, relaxing weekend. You’re getting tired but don’t want to pull the car over (which I agree is not the best approach but for the sake of this stay with me). The sleep begins to take you over; your eyes shut without warning and that scares the hell out of you. What happens next is not exactly pleasant, and you know it won’t be ahead of time, but you do it anyway — You smack yourself in the face a few times with a decent amount of force to get the blood flowing, and to ‘about-face’ your senses.
Once you pull into the driveway you’re grateful that the mobility of your hand was useful.
You did what you had to do.
Everyone has it in them to overcome a situation and fight the effects, but are you one who will do it? In the car scenario, would you pull over, or push on through? Artists push on through. It’s not always the best decision. We don’t always do it with grace. And it’s certainly not the easiest road. But it’s second nature.
We don’t take a time-out to heal.
We create to heal.
An artist overcoming pain can dish out some of the best paintings ever painted, the best photos ever taken, the best films ever filmed, the best songs ever written. Raw emotion combined with imagination produces pieces so far outside our conscious realm it’s overwhelming and powerful.
And it’s so important to capture that moment as it’s happening.
Tapping into such a deep place can’t be done manually — You have to clutch that moment it in your hand, and hang on until you feel cleansed and satisfied.
It’s tough, if not impossible, to recreate the way your body feels, the way your mind works, or the way your words sound when moving towards recovery after turmoil. And it’s in that recovery process that our creative spark plugs switch themselves out for a new set, and push us to new heights of creation.
Don’t take these times for granted as a creator.
These are the moments when pure emotion turns itself into art.