Observed

Even the most creative force in modern architecture admits to having little if any idea how he creates. Gehry seems to understand, however, that it helps to bring his fears out of Shadow and put them on the tip of his pen.

At the beginning of Sketches of Frank Gehry, the director, Sydney Pollock, asks the great architect a great question.

“Is starting hard?”

Gehry replies.

You know it is.  I don’t know what you do when you start, but I clean my desk.  I make a lot of stupid appointments that I make sound important.

Avoidance.  Delay.  Denial.

I’m always scared that I’m not going to know what to do.  It’s a terrifying moment.

And then, when I start, I’m always amazed.  ‘Oh, that wasn’t so bad.’

How true.

Part of the reason I like Sue Grafton so much is her honesty.  Plus, she’s so attached to her hometown, Louisville.  My hometown.

Her honesty may come naturally.  Or, it may be a result of the work she’s done on herself.  Years of therapy, she says.

At least some of that therapy and other work has brought together Grafton, a fabulously successful and hard-working fiction author, and Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology.  Their relationship was apparent in a 1999 interview on which I recently stumbled.

Here’s the excerpt which addresses writer’s block…and its roots in the Shadow nature Dr. Jung described…and which each of us has.  The interviewer asks, “You mentioned a little bit about writer’s block. How do you get around it?” (more…)

Carl Jung (1875-1961): "Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is."

I don’t often find myself disagreeing with Seth Godin.  He and I parted ways, however, when he wrote the other day about the amygdala, that pre-rational part of our brains sometimes referred to as the lizard (or reptile) brain.  Seth said, “The amygdala isn’t going away. Your lizard brain is here to stay, and your job is to figure out how to quiet it and ignore it.”

Quiet it, maybe.  Ignore it?  Not a chance.

In fact, I happen to agree with Dr. Jung.  I agree that the parts of me that I hide, repress and deny — the Shadow parts — will have more power over me the more they stay in Shadow.

So, my work is to do my best to stay awake to my amygdala and accept its job description.  The better I do this, the less it runs my life.  The less I act out, fighting or fleeing instead of just being.

Or, as Seth might put it, the more willing I am to ship.