Woke up early this Christmas morning with you on my mind. You, my fellow artists -- writers, actors, directors, songwriters. For most of us, a professional life in the performing arts calls on us to balance two equally important roles -- creative player vs. career steward. These two essential components can sometimes feel at odds with one another. And I'll admit that I often find myself running from one to take refuge in the other. And vice versa.
I often hear from students and friends a frustration with the extent to which our lives and careers feel unpredictable and beyond our immediate control or even fathoming. It's tough enough that there is no clearly marked roadmap to follow from here to there. To make matters even more daunting, the yardsticks we pick up by which we measure success are hardly ever the same from one year to the next. It's not easy generating both the ideas and the faith and will to see them through to completion. Hardly a week goes by without some level of anxiety, self-doubt, even panic borne of a fear that this or that choice could prove to be a dead-end.
The thing that we all know to be true, however, is that every dead-end, every unfinished or abandoned project, every artistic overreach, every risk that doesn't quite pan out -- they all help shape us as creative artists and we'd be incomplete without them.
The support of the people who most get what we're going through. Trusted fellow creatives.
There have been times when I felt my own work was so disappointing I almost wished I might lose the will to create.
Almost.
From that most scary place, waiting just around the bend will be something wonderful and unexpected and astonishing. Something powerful enough to inspire even the most cynical among us to do it all again.
That's what I wish for all of us for 2020.
How damned lucky we are to have the fire that fuels our ambition and the will to breathe life into our vision so that we might proudly share a piece of ourselves with the world.
It truly makes us whole.