Driving home tonight from a last minute “close out the weekend” grocery store run I heard an interview of an author on NPR. Didn’t hear enough to catch her name but I did catch one of her sound bites where she talked about her “best work… ya know the really scary stuff, the most creative work I manage to do” — I don’t remember the exact wording but this unknown source said something to the effect of “I know I’m doing my best work when I lose control over it”. The way she spoke about this reminded me of “You can’t plan for screen magic”.
I often find that it is specifically my desire to control what I am creating that silences the work. I push the work inside. And I delay and I procrastinate because I convince myself that I will be able to control this thing I need to create… and since I can’t control it now, I’ll just wait until another time, when “I feel like it” or rather wait until another time when I might be able to control it.
I’m working a lot lately on blasting past that knee-jerk reaction to shut it down — and to just let my work be. Sometimes this is a matter of giving way to working with the contribution of others, and other times it’s a matter of getting out of my own way. Either way, it’s easier said than done. But it’s worth remembering, and it’s worth doing: do the work – stop worrying about control.