Meditation On The Value Of Doing

I’ve been taking acting classes in LA. I’ve learned a lot about myself through the process. Not all of it has been flattering, but I believe it’s never a bad thing to know yourself and that acting can be a great path to seeing sides of yourself you didn’t know existed.

One thing that’s come up for me over these past weeks is that I like to control things. I’ve got this little voice in my head which has an idea of the way everything should be. As I write this post I find myself constantly deleting text and trying to choose my words very carefully. Mistakes get corrected instantly, and while this is a good thing on some level, it also keeps interrupting my flow of thoughts. A part of me wants to throw this whole post out since I feel like it won’t be insightful enough – or won’t really say what I want to say.

So I have to let whatever I’m working on be bad, let it be whatever it will be or it will never leave my editor or my head.

When I think about past projects I’ve tried to work on, I think that I can see this control rearing it’s ugly head. I always want to work on GREAT projects and that means that often I work on no project or work on a project that I get frustrated with when it turns out that it’s not as great as I had envisioned it would be.

I think that seeing other people’s work is actually a problem for me since I see how polished, finished and good that work is and a part of me wants to compare my incomplete play to their finished work.

So on doing – I’ve been finding that for me I need to do more – write, code, draw, act… and NOT read. I know that may sound like heresy in this day and age of information, but I need to respect and get to know MY ideas and that means giving them the space they need to grow, and I find I can’t do that very well when I’m surrounded by the noise other people’s opinions.

Not to say that I will ever STOP reading all together, but for now reading opinion pieces leads to me editing my thoughts and actions and I need my own thoughts and opinions even if those thoughts and opinions aren’t “right”. I’d rather have one original thought that I believe 100% than a palace full of other people’s thoughts that I turn to before thinking myself.

Circling back around, I guess that doing the “right” project is impossible. There is no such thing as the “right” project and searching for the “right” project leads me to completing no project. Rather, ANY project can be the right project if it’s something I enjoy doing and want to do. So anything that comes from the heart is a good project despite the fact that it may not win awards or rain down money. In the end those projects that we do just for the sake of doing them lead us to places where projects do gain us money and happiness, it’s just that we have to give up control. Do what you love and let the details take care of themselves.

So some projects I want to work on:

Standup comedy script

Stories of what the future will look like

Plans for fun things to do with my lady B

Plans for art projects that I think would be fun to do

Create some fictional characters and a story from their lives…

Maybe I’ll do some of these. Who knows. I guess I’ll just play a little bit each day. They key for me is just being sure that I’m playing and not working.

There, I completed this post!