Learning to Surf
“You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.”
—Jon Kabat-Zinn
This article is not about surfing. Sorry.
I’m a creature of routine. I’m a creature of ritual, schedules, habit. I like to start each month/week/day with a clear list of priorities and deadlines. I like to know well in advance when any disruptions may come — in part so that I can work myself up into an anxious tizzy and in part so I can plan for said disruption accordingly.
I do not like disruption. I’m not crazy about spontaneity. I don’t like drop-in guests or last-minute requests to get together. I guess you could say I like spontaneity I’ve planned for — spontaneity within a framework, like free writing from a prompt or keeping things fresh in a performance.
However, in the two years since I lost my job, started Outer Voice, built a viable freelance career and then found a new job, the universe has reminded me for the umpteen-zillionth time that life is, if nothing else, unpredictable.
Uncertainty, unpredictability, ambiguity. In the past two long years, we’ve all been reminded just how fragile these lives of ours are.
Everything is always changing. Nothing remains static. The universe scoffs at my schedule.
This statement popularized by mindfulness proponent Jon Kabat-Zinn, has become my mantra. “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.” The changes won’t stop happening. The hits won’t stop coming. But you can learn to roll with them. You can embrace them, or at least make room for them. You can ride them.
Artists already work in ambiguity. No matter how solid your craft and training, how much you reject ideas of working intuitively or instinctually, ambiguity remains as much a material of your work as paint, clay, film, or words. It’s a natural part of bringing a new thing into being.
From the summer of 2020, and the height of COVID fear, racial reckoning, civil unrest, and good old-fashioned American rancor, through the election, January 6, 2021, and surge after surge, we’ve had a hell of a slog. A necessary slog in many ways, but a slog nonetheless.
We find ourselves shaken and in a closer, if more complicated, relationship with ambiguity and uncertainty. We’ve lost loved ones, we’ve raged, we’ve had all the feelings. We made things in response, some in direct response, some glancing along the surface, tugging things free and examining them.
For me, these two years coincided with a personal scrambling for purchase financially and emotionally.
Ultimately, I turned back to the quote about learning to surf.
Once I chose to get comfortable with ambiguity, to hold my ideas about goals and the future with a looser grip, to love the freedom that came with riding the swells, the troughs, and the calms without placing arbitrary expectations upon them, the more my work evolved and the happier I became.
Here’s some of what I learned from getting comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty.
It defangs the ego
This clinging to expectations of the way work “should” go, to rigid schedules or ideas of how my work should look or sound — clinging unproductively, that is, at the expense of happiness, quality, or progress — is ultimately an artifact of my ego.
If I find that I cannot create the thing that I have already envisioned because the circumstances aren’t perfect or the world refuses to cooperate with my artistic priorities, then my ego has taken the reins.
Similarly, if I let myself be driven by insecurity, by frustration that my work isn’t the flavor of the month, or by fear that it will be seen as frivolous or middlebrow, shallow or incomprehensible, that is also my ego.
Buddhist nun and author Pema Chödrön writes,
“Ego struggles against reality, against the open-endedness and natural movement of life. It is very uncomfortable with vulnerability and ambiguity, with not being quite sure how to pin things down …
The ego wants resolution, wants to control impermanence, wants something secure and certain to hold on to. It freezes what is actually fluid, it grasps at what is in motion, it tries to escape the beautiful truth of the fully alive nature of everything. As a result, we feel dissatisfied, haunted, threatened. We spend much of our time in a cage created by our own fear of discomfort.”
The past years have eloquently reminded us that nothing is certain and that everything is impermanent. By embracing ambiguity, we embrace the immediacy of life and all the exuberance and pain that comes along with it.
This doesn’t mean we throw away workflows and schedules and deadlines. But it does mean that we loosen our grip upon them, lest we get rope burn.
It does mean that we open ourselves to ambiguity, uncertainty, and all the emotions that this entails. It’s an opportunity to listen to the deeper self. What am I afraid of? How does this threaten me? How does it liberate me? How does it connect me to others?
Pema Chödrön also writes, “When we’re able to hold the rawness of vulnerability in our hearts, we can use that energy to create poetry, writing, dance, music, song. We can make of it something that touches and communicates with other people. Artists have done this from the beginning of time.”
It invites collaboration
I started a new job in September at a company in the midst of making a lot of changes to their procedures and processes. And, it’s completely remote. Although I found myself in a “senior” position (at least in title), I was the new guy who knew none of the company’s ways of doing things — old, new, or in the middle of change.
One of the first questions my soon-to-be VP asked me in my first interview was, “how comfortable are you with ambiguity?” Thinking of it as a writer and an artist, I answered with a confident “very!”
My first project was an entirely new kind of product, and my boss and I were tasked with creating it. This not unusual territory for me, but it was at a new company with unknown best practices and expectations, and a client that I didn’t yet know at all. There were no benchmarks for success, no known shape or form to the project. I had just raw information, intuition, and experience.
I’ve always said that you don’t have to be smart to ask questions (probably why I’ve spent so much of my career interviewing other people), and so I dropped that ego baggage and started asking questions … and for help.
When we free ourselves from the preposterous idea that we are islands, that we and we alone can produce these things we conceive, then we’re one step closer to freedom, to fulfilling work, and to the true core of life, which is that nothing comes into being without the influence of some other thing.
To allow yourself to ride the waves of ambiguity and uncertainty, to allow yourself freedom from the iron fist of the ego, is to take the first step out of the too-popular mindset of the isolated artist and to move toward openness and community — two things our world needs more than ever.
If you’ve read Outer Voice for even a short time, you’ve heard me banging the drum of multidisciplinary collaboration. I firmly believe the future of all artistic disciplines lies in their ability to weave together and create new, stronger forms that strengthen all the independent parts and create more opportunity for more artists and audiences.
It makes your work better, if you let it
Choreographer Twyla Tharp writes in her (occasionally problematic) book The Creative Habit,
“Your creative endeavors can never be thoroughly mapped out ahead of time. You have to allow for the suddenly altered landscape, the change in plan, the accidental spark — and you have to see it as a stroke of luck rather than a disturbance of your perfect scheme. Habitually creative people are, in E.B. White’s phrase, ‘prepared to be lucky.’”
In early 2021, I was at an artistic crisis point. I’d been shopping a novel for years, only to be met with close calls that never fully developed. My music had come to a standstill. I had no more words. The year of Covid and America was only one element in a mental block that had roots in the 2018 passing of my mother and the long period of denial, grief, and guilt that followed it. I’d turned increasingly inward, and looked more and more to mindless escape.
But something was reaching critical mass, and it didn’t take shape until I let go of all my expectations. I shelved the novel, put down the guitar, immersed myself in loose, improvisatory, exploratory work that inspired and challenged me. And I let a fallow period come along in hope of a fertile season.
When it came, it came because I embraced uncertainty and unknowing. I opened a new document and just started typing. It began as a stream-of-consciousness letter to myself, then to my mother, then to the earth, my family, my unknown ancestors, everyone I’d loved. To rocks and wolves and old gods. It became a sprawling block of text that I then proceeded to whittle away at, to carve and shape into a slim collection of poems that were closer to incantations and mourning songs and attempts to strip away all but the most essential.
This became a collection of poems and music that will grow to cross-disciplinary collaboration, visual art, and who knows what.
This came from accepting unknowing, accepting that I could not stop the waves, accepting that I could drown or surf. It came from shaking off the grip of the ego and instead embracing the ultimate uncertainty — that I no longer had any idea what I was doing, but that the only way out was through.
Accepting ambiguity means accepting the possibility of pain and disappointment, yes. But accepting ambiguity also means accepting serendipity. It means leaning into the delicious surprise, the happy accident, the brilliant new partnership. The new idea.
