Reclaiming What's Lost: Reconciling Talent and Realism

Is talent ever lost or gained? Or, is it something we can manipulate with time, a part of our genetic wisdom?

A few weeks ago, I went to Barnes and Noble in hopes of finding something to motivate myself to overhaul my poor practice habits. As a musician, I'm stuck in the equivalent of a writer's block, where I haven't had the guts to lasso the creative energies jumbling around my head. I haven't trusted my Muse. But now, I'm suiting up for battle.

In the "The War of Art," Steven Pressfield describes these inner battles--the musician who won't play, the writer who won't write, the chemist who won't concoct, the runner who won't run--as a product of "Resistance": What stands between the "life we live" and the "unlived life within us."

Resistance is parasitic. It thrives off anyone who wants to make a difference in their world. It's every time you've ever said "I can't," every time you've exchanged dreams for what was disguised as reality, as "too little time," as deluded priorities. I stopped blogging for more than a year because of Resistance. This book is a must-read for anyone who wants a little kick of encouragement to get out of that nasty funk that Resistance leaves in its wake. It wants you to surrender, to give up, and deprive yourself and others of your individual contribution.

Between summer classes and working at the hospital, I've intermittently been reading the book "A Devil to Play" by Jasper Rees--an almost an ironic find given the nature of my soul searching. The book is the narrative of a middle-aged journalist who attempts to master his childhood instrument--the French horn. This particularly resonated with me since I started to wonder if, by straying from my teenaged dreams of returning to Carnegie Hall to play, once again, I was abandoning the part of myself that used to believe talent could be forged into anything with persistence.

However, as I've reclaimed my dream for medical school, I realized that perhaps compromise is not a bad thing. Instead of looking at life as the shedding of dreams for "being realistic," I'm looking at life through a healthier lens--as the loose interplay of passion, where each dream overlaps another. I will become a doctor, but I will not surrender the pieces of myself that say artist, musician, poet, writer.

Pressfield says that the most important part of ART is WORK: "Because when we sit down day after day and keep grinding, something mysterious starts to happen. A process is set into motion by which, inevitably and infallibly, heaven comes to our aid. Unforeseen forces enlist in our cause; serendipity reinforces our purpose." We can't just bank on talent alone.

Branching off of Pressfield's brilliant reflections on what holds us back from grasping that "unlived life" within us, musicians and writers have everything in common when it comes to the necessity of practice and deliberate, forced time slots to do so daily. Improvement is impossible to gauge without constant stimulation. It's unrealistic, almost superhuman, to acknowledge all my priorities horizontally--to say that studying for the MCAT today has as much precedent as playing my French horn or tackling some poetry by T.S. Eliot or training for that marathon I plan to run.

But It's not healthy to think that way. It's so easy to fall into another rut, to beat yourself up about your shortcomings, your failures. That's counterproductive. (I did that this morning when I slept through my alarm that said it was time to get up and run 5 miles.) Without compromising those future dreams, any soul-searching artist must have the end in sight at all times, and make sure one foot is always being thrust in front of the other. Forward motion is imperative. It may be a hard road to travel, but as long as you're moving in the direction you want to go, discouragement it easier to brush off and move past. Stagnancy is the enemy.

While I may not master the horn and my poems may never be published or spoken aloud, I know that the little progress I make in one area is building on the other. Just by picking up my horn this morning for a 20 minute warm-up, I've beaten out that feeling of utter defeat. I don't want to compromise, but I must accommodate.

So now, it's your turn. Where are you letting resistance beat you in your life, but more importantly, what are you going to do about it?



EDIT: For more on historian/writer Steven Pressfield, click here.