The End of Hope (Part 5)

The End of Hope (part 5)

So in the end the end is joy. Joy encompasses everything: the pleasure of attaining a personal goal or dream, the experience of great community and culture, and the mystery of the zeitgeist, knowing is good right now.

Joy is capable of withholding immediate knowledge, a skill very important to the joyful. There will be many occasions where the rationale for certain things won’t be there. At this level, things are self-justified, or beyond justification. They just are.

And the authority for doing such things is self-evident. It comes from within, ultimately from God if you can swallow that. No man can bestow it upon another. It is completely independent. Joy in this sense is for the brave individual.

But courageous individuals in this experience can share it with others. That is the real beauty. Our joy must be found within us, but can be shared and amplified outside of us. There is a rich tapestry of share joy, which ultimately becomes hope.

**But it must start within us. And unfortunately evidence of the gift is usually found in restlessness and passion. It is the consistent feeling of being off balance, without the comfort of a home. It is a necessary restlessness.

This is the dying to oneself that must be first. This is the dedication to the process. This is the allegiance to the end. At the time it does not feel good. It does not have a sense of hope and ultimate purpose. It feels rather horrible and hopeless actually.

There is a grieving process. We must lose our “right” to getting something “out” of the process. We are simply committing our whole selves to it. We have no idea at the time what that means. There is no master plan or career path highlighted.

It is simply death to oneself and commitment to one’s gift, to the thing that was implanted in us without us. It is a surrender to the process of growing this fledgling seed into whatever it is to become, which we can at best vaguely intuit.

***That may sound like a deterministic sort of will power. “I will do this come what may.” It sounds like a fierce sort of discipline. But for the creative the journey through death into life is not a matter of mere will power. There is much else going on.

First of all there is the obvious call into the process. Where does “it” come from? “It” is not some idea we conjure up. Though some may try to take credit for “it.” The truth is we do not create the invitation. “It” comes from another.

And not everyone hears “it.” No matter how hard we try to explain to someone who has never heard this call we come up short. It is very similar to the attempt to explain a vivid dream. No matter how soon after we wake up, the brain can’t piece it all together.

Even if we can, it sounds ridiculous. The other person may politely listen but there is absolutely no way they can feel the intensity of the thing we just experienced. That’s how the call to create comes. It overwhelms us then sneaks away.

The End of Hope (Part 3)

The End of Hope (Part 3)

Is there a reward for hope? Is there a practical reason to continue hoping? Is success in some form or another a part of cultivating hope within us? In other words, do we believe that what we seek is better than where we are at?

Some will try to philosophically contend that hope somehow is an end in itself, that it is sort of a state of mind or attitude. While not all wrong, there does seem to necessarily be more for the conditions of what we call hope to blossom. In other words there is an object to our hope. And somewhere innate in that object is not just its creation (or bringing forth into reality), but also its blossoming (what may in our time be connected to “selling”). In other words, success.

Do we pursue some creative endeavor only in the prospects of its possible success? Or is there something innate to the calling that is deeply part of us regardless of success? Yes. But somehow our job is to get the thing inside us out. Some at this point will bring out exceptions of course. People who did what they were called to do but faced only failure. Some may mention Jeremiah the prophet - called to failure. Perhaps. But then how do we know his name today?

We think for a prophet success is people listening to the words spoken and changing. Not so. Success for the prophet is getting his word out. Period. Did Jeremiah do a good job in getting the word out from his heart to the public? Yes.

That’s what we don’t realize. How did Jeremiah get the attention of the royal courts? How did his word make such a big impact so as to be considered a threat to the royal way of life? He must have done something to get the popular vote. Or did he? Even they didn’t like what he was saying. In that sense, he was universally annoying. But he didn’t stop. And people didn’t stop hearing his words from God. He did exactly what he needed to do. Isn‘t that the kind of success we mean?

Success isn’t albums sold or price per painting, but it may include that. We really get to determine what success looks like for us. We get to tell our creative endeavors what the goals are. No one else can tell us what the goals are.

Obviously viability will likely be one. We are not free to determine what viability means (in other words, it comes down to a certain number of sales, etc.). But we are free to determine the values and vision of our particular company.

We have the creative freedom to dream it up, to fight it out, to discover what it looks like for us. That is the beauty of it all. Too often we get hamstrung on the initial viability needs, to the point where that becomes the only goal.

The goal is the what. We define the “what’ whereby we judge ourselves successful or not. What are your goals? You decide them. You must figure out what those really are. What is it you want to do? Only you can decide that question.