Be Good to Your Spark

When it comes to cultivating passion, only *you* can choose your best path forward.

Microcosm and Macrocosm (1937) by Helen Lundeberg

My house is filled with tiny ashtrays. There are four ashtrays on the mantel and fifteen on the top of my bookshelf and three on my dresser, purple and dark blue and speckled white and brown. No one here smokes. So I put necklaces in them, or hair ties, or guitar picks. I need to give them a job so they don’t feel like pointless clutter.

I took my first pottery class in March. I felt like an expert potter by the end of the class and it all went downhill from there: vases turned into ashtrays, bowls became ashtrays, even plates transformed into ashtrays. But my instructor was relaxed about my repeated failures. Sometimes he’d come and stand by my wheel and ask, “What do you want to make?” Maybe he saw another ashtray forming and wanted to let me know that I had other options. But mostly he stood by silently. Occasionally he would compliment my work: This ashtray had a nice glaze on it. That ashtray was very symmetrical.  

One day halfway through my third class, we had a substitute. She loomed over my wheel. “I’m just messing around,” I told her, afraid that she’d start telling me I was doing it wrong. I just wanted to relax and make more ashtrays. I didn’t need vases or bowls. I just wanted to enjoy myself.

“It’s fine to mess around once you know the basics,” she said in a sharp tone. “But you have to learn the basics first.”

As she took over my wheel and turned my ashtray into a bowl, using a series of swift motions I didn’t understand, couldn’t follow, couldn’t mimic, I thought, “No, you’re wrong. You don’t have to learn the basics first. You don’t have to do anything. You can mess around and make ugly little ashtrays for the rest of your life.”

Finally she stepped back from the bowl she’d made and I asked, “Can I make any changes to this?”

“No, it’s finished. I wouldn’t change it. It’ll just collapse.”

So I put her bowl on a board and then put more clay on the wheel and made another ashtray.

***

You could say that I’m a very stubborn baby who resists instruction, who can’t handle authority, who doesn’t know how to follow or collaborate, and you wouldn’t be wrong about that. But my angry thoughts while I watched her make the bowl are still accurate:

You don’t have to do anything.

No matter what anyone tells you is the one right way to do a thing, you don’t have to fucking do it that way. You can decide for yourself how to proceed. And sometimes, it feels better to waste your time, to fail, to reject all feedback, to live inside your own pure bubble where ashtrays are works of art and everything else is a failure. Maybe this makes you a brat. Maybe it means you can’t play nicely with others, or you refuse to humble yourself.

But there are times in your life when you want to humble yourself your way. You want to feel your way in the dark. You want to keep your dumb projects pure and untouched by others.

There are times when you recognize exactly how fragile your newbie interest is. And you know that if you start trying very hard things and failing at them spectacularly, you will walk away and never look back.

There are times when you can’t be taught. You don’t really want to learn yet. You’d rather flounder. You’d rather be seen as a complete idiot by your classmates than make the same fat toad mugs that they’re making. You just want to make things that look right to you.

There are times when you need to take things very slowly. When you expect too much, the results are awful and the way you feel —annoyed, angry at yourself, anxious — is even worse. So you need to be patient.

But more than anything else, there are times when you just want to do things your way. What feels good is deciding, stubbornly, that you’re going to proceed in a way that feels right to you. And even though everyone around you might think you’re hopelessly rigid, you know what you’re doing. You know that you have this little spark of interest and love for what you’re doing and you don’t want to kill it.

Sometimes that stubborn feeling of I WILL DO IT MY WAY, DAMN IT includes looking around at the elaborately decorated vases in your pottery class and saying to yourself, These look ugly to me. Sometimes it includes watching performances you find wanting and reading books you find flat and uninspired and feeling smug about how bad they are. Sometimes doing it your way and nurturing your tiny spark turns you into a superior, hyper-critical asshole, in other words — if only privately, if only inside the darkness of your stubborn head.

But that’s okay. You get to be an imperious jerk privately. You get to decide what it takes to keep your spark of interest alive. You get to experiment your way into the life you want. You get to take your own strange, meandering path to passion.

Because that’s how you find passion: inside the darkness of your stubborn head, inside the echoing fears of your stubborn heart, inside your rigidity, your defense mechanisms, your sadness, your most vulnerable dreams. You find passion inside the unique corridors of your body. You listen for the faintest whisper of passion. And you whisper back, “It’s safe, trust me.”

***

I’m taking my fourth pottery class now, with an instructor who insists that we all follow the same very precise steps. I chose this class because I knew this instructor was extremely directive and specific in a way that I might not have loved a few months ago. I watched her instruction videos and saw how insistent she was about how to position your hands. I also saw that she made jokes at her own expense and admitted that everyone does the same things in different ways, but these are the methods that work for her.

Based on her videos, I liked her a lot. I knew that was important for me, a baby. I knew I needed to spend three hours failing in the company of someone it was easy for me, personally, to trust and respect.

My spark is a campfire now. But only because I trusted and respected myself. I was kind to my stubborn baby. I told her it was okay to make ugly little ashtrays forever. I was kind to my imperious asshole. I told her it was fine to hate all of those prissy vases with the ugly flowers drawn on the sides. I was kind to my messy slacker. I told her it was acceptable to make a big mess on my wheel and cover my pants and boots with splatters of red clay. And I was kind to my loner. I told her it was okay not to make small talk while I worked.

From the first class, my primary goal was to enjoy myself and to avoid quitting just because I sucked. Learning how to suck at things without quitting is so important! Maybe it’s the most important thing. And for some of us, it takes a LOT to tolerate it. We need to be very very very very very kind to ourselves. We need to be giant strange superior babies inside the darkness of our stubborn heads.

But in my experience, the more you respect that bratty baby, the more you end up (eventually!) respecting your instructors, listening to their feedback, knowing which ones are right for you, understanding how to navigate criticism, and recognizing how to balance a whole world of experts against the precious, passionate weirdo inside of you.

So if you have some project or activity or creative pursuit you’ve always wanted to start, but you’re worried about failing and snuffing out that spark forever? Figure out what it will take for you to keep the spark alive. Ask yourself what would feel good. Imagine welcoming failure instead of fearing it. Picture taking your time and doing it your way. Allow yourself time and space for experimentation. Commit to trusting yourself completely, and giving yourself anything you need to keep going.

And if someone tells you You have to learn the basics first, remember: You don’t have to do anything. You can do whatever you want. It’s your spark, and only you know how to turn it into a wildfire.

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