Turn The Lights On
EPISODE 046: TURN THE LIGHTS ON
It's never been easier to get feedback on the work we create, and it's never been harder to avoid it. But is that feedback helping us make work that's authentic and meaningful or can it be a trap that pushes us further away from that same kind of work? Let’s talk about it.
Prefer to Listen Elsewhere?
Listen on iTunes | Spotify | Google Play | Stitcher
Do me a favour? Would you take a moment and give this show a rating and review in iTunes.
Want More? A Beautiful Anarchy is published 3 out of 4 weeks. On those fourth weeks you can still get your fix through On The Make, my monthly missive about the creative life. Subscribe now and I’ll make sure you don’t miss a thing, and every month I’ll draw the name of one subscribed listener and send them a signed copy of my book, A Beautiful Anarchy.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Over 20 years ago, I was on a hike with friends on a dark and moonless night in northern Saskatchewan. Completely unable to see beyond the beams of our headlamps, we’d only been hiking a few minutes before it became clear to all of us that we were being followed by a bear. Looking back I’m not sure why any of us, all seasoned outdoorsmen, thought this midnight hike was a good idea, but the longer we walked, the more certain we were that the bear was getting closer, his grunting noises deeper and louder. And as the noises of the bear got louder so did ours. We had started with whistling but it’s hard to whistle when you’re terrified, so we moved on to campfire songs and what I suspect was the world’s most jumbled version of Don McLean’s America Pie, all of us aware of the dark irony as we sang that line in the chorus “singing this’ll be the day that I die.” At this point we were no longer walking slowly, and still it sounded like the bear was getting closer. I remember thinking about my best friend walking in front of me and wondering if the bag of beef jerky in his pockets would work in my favour when the bear finally caught up with us. He was meant to be my best-man in the morning, but at this point I’m ashamed to say he seemed expendable.
That I was getting married the next day probably only heightened my anxiety. How we got to sleep at all that night, still hearing the bear circling our camp, I have no idea, but somehow we got into our sleeping bags and slept under the stars, awoken the next morning by sounds that in daylight sounded less like a bear and more like the not too distant pulp mill, belching out whatever emissions pulp mills belch, a deep and constant grunting.
There was no bear that night. With all the terrified singing we were doing it’s also likely there wasn’t a bear within a hundred kilometres for many nights to come. But it sure sounded like it. Darkness has this way of amplifying our fears and compounding them and right now in the last quarter of a year that has already brought us a global pandemic, unprecedented wildfires, mounting political and racial tensions, and financial uncertainties, not to mention the arrival of murder hornets on the west coast of North America, right now might be a good time to acknowledge the role fear might be playing in our lives, creative or otherwise. I’m David duChemin and this is episode 046 of A Beautiful Anarchy, let’s talk about it.
Music / Intro
Everyone I know is scared of the dark. It might not be the dark of night, some people are much more chill about these things than I am. But I don’t know anyone that’s not freaked out by the unknown, and the ways in which our imaginations try to make sense of the uncertain by trying to fill in the blanks with what we think we know. I didn’t know anything about pulp mills, had no reason in the world to connect the sounds that night to anything but what to me was most likely. Out there in those dark woods, with no other evidence to the contrary and an utter inability to see into the shadows, a bear was the best fit. Had that hike happened in the light of day under a blue sky it’s possible the noises that had me so worked up wouldn’t even have registered for me.
Right now, many months into the Covid pandemic, we are very much in the dark. We can’t really make plans to travel because we don’t know when it’ll be possible to do so. Some of us can’t make plans because we don’t know how long the kids will be back at school, or alternately, still doing school via Zoom calls at the kitchen table. Some of us don’t know when, or even if, we’ll be back to work. And there are bigger fears still when you consider the uncertainty of contracting this virus. You’re not the only one finding it hard to make plans, to make art, to focus, or to walk down that dark path in front of you without doing whatever you need to do to keep the bears away.
I’m not sure where we got it but almost everyone I know has a story about childhood fears of monsters under the bed. They weren’t there in the daytime, but the moment night fell, in the quiet and the darkness, we not only worried there was something drooling under the bed, we were certain of it, and though the circumstances have changed as we’ve grown, that fear of the unknown and the unseen remains largely intact.
What most of us want is for someone to come in and turn the lights on, because if there are monsters under this bed I’ll be damned if I’m going to be the one to touch my feet to the floor, much less walk to the light switch on the far side of the room. That would take courage I’m not sure I have.
You’re also not the only one right now who might be feeling like you don’t have enough courage to face the things keeping you up at night. I get that. But what if courage, like love, isn’t a commodity that can be measured or weighed? Sure, the feeling of courage, or the feeling of love, can be experienced in terms of abundance or scarcity. But at their best aren’t courage and love really something more active; not something you have or do not have but something that is either done or not done? Aren’t they a response, in the same way faith or trust is a response to doubt? Courage isn’t the absence of fear but a response to fear that we get to choose. Courage gives us agency and allows us to face monsters under the bed, and when necessary, to fight them off.
To be an adult in this world means to realize that not only is no one else coming to turn on the lights for us, but despite what Dad said, there might actually be monsters hiding in the shadows into which we most fear to look. The monsters of adulthood are different from those we feared as kids, but they are monsters all the same and all the positive self-talk in the world isn’t going to make them go away. After all, sometimes the tumour isn’t benign. Sometimes the phone call at 2am isn’t a wrong number, the job offer doesn’t come, and our loved one doesn’t come home from the hospital. And what then? Most of us are old enough now to know that sometimes the darkness contains some fearful things.
It’s time to turn the lights on. Not because doing so makes the monsters flee, though in some cases it makes them smaller–or, rather, it reveals them to be smaller than our fears made us think they were. Turning the lights on rather than ducking our heads under the covers allows us to face the thing we fear and take the measure of it. To find its weak spots. And when it’s clear that the thing we fear isn’t going away without a fight, turning the lights on is the first step in that fight.
This is important because it seems to me we can either fight the fears themselves, or we can fight from those fears. Fighting the fear means turning on the light, not just for ourselves but for others. It means overcoming the fear and getting to the other side of it. Fighting from the fears turns fear into a weapon and only makes more monsters. Remember, courage is not the only response to fear. So is anger. Hate and intolerance too, are responses to fear, and you only have to watch the news briefly to see how easily some people give in to them. Anger seems to be a natural response, an instinct, but courage and love have to be chosen.
I feel a little bit like I’ve bitten off more than I can chew with this episode. Or maybe I’m just recognizing the paucity of my metaphors sooner than I usually do. So I’m going to skip ahead to what I think was my point all along: not only is no one coming to turn the lights on, leaving that task to us, but I believe the way we do that is by making the light, maybe even becoming the light, for each other.
This is what art-making has long given us the tools to do. Art-making is a chance to focus on other things, things beyond our current fears, to gather our courage and to help others do the same. Art-making is a chance to tell stories that not only acknowledge the shadows but help us feel less alone in fighting them. To sing songs and write poems that give us clues about where to find hope. To make tangible things that solve real problems. To create beauty that reminds us the ugly times are never the whole story. To live artfully is the opposite of living fearfully. To live artfully is not frivolous, and it can’t be something we do only once things go back to normal.
In the same way that we need to stop waiting for courage, and stop waiting for someone else to turn the lights on, it might be time to stop waiting for normal to return. The normal we knew is not coming back. It’s not a migrating bird, returning basically unchanged after wintering for a few months in warmer climes. Normal is not just on pause, like a Netflix show, while we sort out the mess we’re in, only to pick up where we left off once Covid goes away and we’ve all had a chance to pee and refill our drinks and grab some popcorn.
This is our new normal, right now. It’s not a shitty commercial break in life. It IS life. Time hasn’t stopped. We will never get these days and months back later. We don’t get to repeat this year on account of Covid. There are no do-overs. To believe otherwise is to duck our heads under the covers and hope it all just goes away.
Things are so upside down right now and there’s so much we don’t know, so much we can’t know. That makes many things harder, and many more things impossible. But it will always be possible to make a difference, to choose to respond creatively and art-fully to our fears, to choose to be courageous and to confront both the shadows and the monsters they might very well contain, to resist them with light and love, hope and creativity. When what lurks in the shadows isn’t something from which we can hide or run, it’s time to pick a fight. One of the ways humankind has done that, for thousands of years is with our art. I’m expressing this poorly, but I worry if we stop our art-making now, if we put it on hold while we wait for things to change, wait for courage, wait for conditions to be perfect, it’ll be like waiting until things aren’t so dark before we turn the lights on.
The time for light is when the darkness is at its most impenetrable. The time for courage is when we are most afraid. The time for love and hope is when those two responses seem the hardest to conjure. Now, more than ever, it’s time to go make something beautiful.
Thanks so much for joining me and being part of this, for giving me an audience and a chance to speak not only my mind but my heart. If this or any episode of A Beautiful Anarchy has made a difference to you, or if you’re a regular listener who never misses an episode, I’d be so grateful if you'd consider sharing it with others in your world that could benefit from a little encouragement in their everyday creative lives. Just point them to aBeautifulAnarchy.com and they’ll find their way from there. And if you’d like to get in touch with me, you find me anytime at talkback@abeautifulanarchy.com. Thanks again for joining me, we’ll talk soon.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0