Hello! 👋🏽
Welcome to another exciting issue of Long Way Home🏡, where I explore topics of creativity, emotional intelligence, and happiness. In today’s topic, I write about one of my biggest creative hurdles. I routinely talk myself out of approaching ambitious subject matter. Read on to see why.
Since I was away most of this week helping my brother move, I have just one video for you.
Penn and Teller are geniuses. If you’re anything like me, you’ll be watching the video with your eyes covered, sneaking peeks through the gaps between your fingers.
Now, let’s get into this week’s topic.
The Most Urgent One Percent
I never used to write about the most important things.
I used to be too daunted by the task of cramming the vastness of my experience into any single piece of writing. I didn't think I had the narrative skill to accurately capture all the nuance, emotion, and background in a digestible way, so I would abandon more complex subject matter long before breaking any significant ground.
My relationship with my parents. Influences of early romantic relationships. The role of my Indian culture in my life. The transformative effect of early childhood experiences. Even attempting to write about these issues felt like trying to stuff a galaxy into a ketchup bottle—utterly futile.
Everything I knew and felt about a particular topic needed to be neatly ordered and cleanly presented all at one time. Without telling the full story, I struggled to imagine how anybody else could find the subject interesting and insightful. To me, telling half the story equated to writing a piece that was half as interesting. I needed to recount The Odyssey, all in one breath.
Further, I never wanted anybody to read any individual piece and think that was the entirety of my opinion. It's easy to believe that creators insert into all their creations the full scope of what they believe. We make them a caricature based on the messaging in their creations. To avoid being misconstrued, I would feel pressured to tell the story perfectly and completely.
The worry of doing the subject matter injustice in this one attempt built a moat around it, the threat of my inadequacy swimming freely in the water. I didn't trust myself to break topics up into pieces and tell fractions of the mesmerizing whole while preserving the bits that enamoured me in the first place.
The Roman poet Ovid published Metamorphoses, his magnus opus, in 8 AD. It's considered to be one of the most important pieces of literature in the Western world. It's 11,995 lines, 15 books, and 250 myths told in one continuous poem. In 1622, one of my favourite sculptors, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, was inspired by a myth told in Metamorphoses to sculpt one of his most famous works, Apollo and Daphne.
Bernini didn't sculpt the entire Metamorphoses, he never sculpted the entire myth of Apollo and Daphne, he only sculpted the one split-second moment where Apollo touches Daphne while she's being turned into a tree by her father. And it's a masterpiece. Bernini takes the most climactic and urgent 1% of the myth and makes it his mission to capture the full extent of that single, magical moment in his sculpture. In that same way, we can choose the one minuscule piece of the narrative we want to explore and tell all the truth inside the tiny galaxy of that moment.
In reality, there is no pressure to tell the full story in one go. In tackling ambitious subject matter, we must choose the 1% of the story we wish to tell and do our best to accurately describe it. Nothing more. We are in the dark, holding a flashlight to the amorphous, complex matter in the middle of the room. With each thing we create, we point another flashlight at it, illuminating the issue from another angle. Over time, the truth becomes revealed, not in any single piece of work, but in the aggregate of all our work combined.
Kendrick Lamar never tries encapsulating the entirety of the Black experience within any single 4-minute song. He chooses one slivered perspective and presents that narrative to us in a digestible way. In one song, he might depict the trauma of poverty, and in another, the triumph over hardship, and in yet another, a profound love for his family, his city, and his people. Over time, we are left with an extensive catalogue of Lamar holding flashlights in a dark room, revealing the deeply complex issue of the Black experience.
We must learn how to take the most urgent 1% and make it our mission to do that 1% justice, over and over again. As we explain some aspects, the remaining portion feels less and less daunting. At some point, the balance tips; we feel like we have explained more than we have left to explain. Creating only gets easier.
The first step is to define the most urgent 1%. Personally, I never know what that is until I start. After etching away at the topic, the most urgent 1% quickly reveals itself. The challenge is to not feel discouraged or daunted by the vastness of what there is left to explain, but to begin and slowly uncover it.
One percent at a time.
Holding a flashlight,
Vandan🏡
@vandan_jhaveri