scruffian

Ten years ago today I began writing a haiku every day. My first is still one of my favorites, today’s is number 3564.

The first few haiku were the hardest ones to write – having ideas is hard. There’s also a fear of failure – a sense that whatever you make won’t live up to your own expectation. In my experience this is always true – I have never made something that turned out as I wanted it to be.

Yet the experience of creating something and sharing it helps you become accustomed to failure and changes your expectations around the things you make. It forces you to confront the reality that your ability to create is always lagging behind your critical faculties.

This chasm between your ability and your taste makes it hard to keep going. There have been many occasions when the last thing I wanted to do was to write a haiku. Feelings of inadequacy, apathety and despondancy diminish the creative spirit. Ironically, the thing that keeps me going at these times is also a fear of failure – if I miss a day then I have also failed!

The gap between the intention of the work and the work itself is an important aspect of creative work. What we make is never what we intended to make, but that doesn’t mean it has no value – its just different to what we expected. The skill is in recognising the value of the work itself rather than focussing on how it falls short of the intention.

This project has given me the assurance to keep pressing on with the work – not because of those few who read it or because I am working towards some higher goal (like having a book published), but for what I gain from doing it.

All this begs the question “why bother?”. For me, when I create something it enables me to express something of myself in a way that even I wasn’t fully aware of before . Poetry is a mirror for the soul. It is a means to see myself as I am, not as a I wish to be.

I’ve recently started writing a song every day…

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Incidently today is another anniversary for me – I’ve been working for Automattic for 12 years.