Trust the Process

I want to get back to a creative practice, and thought I would kick it off by reading some of the highly regarded books around creativity. Some of the key themes resonated with me, and will shape how I approach establishing a regular practice. The advice I took to heart was to set aside stereo types about what a creative person is and look for ways to find individual self expression across a diverse set of mediums, to forgo conceptual ideas and instead embrace working in the medium as an exploration of emergent ideas or styles, that repetition is okay - good, and vital to exploring, and to not self identify too strongly with any by products of creative exploration. The book offered lots of ideas and exercises along the way, embedded among more of the philosophical advice, of which I did only a few. Overall, I would recommend ‘Trust the Process' as a worthy read for anyone looking to explore creativity with a wider lens.

Reading this book was a bit like meeting a really cool new friend for the first time at their going away party. I enjoyed it well enough, but there was a certain amount of disengagement from it that I felt because the timing just isn't right. I can think of many dark nights of the soul where McNiff's gentle but unshakable belief in our human capacity to create would have been the right thing, and I'm certain there will be more of those in the future.

And let me take a moment to admire how good this book is in the context of what it doesn't try to be. It doesn't try to be a method. It doesn't try to be a step by step guide. It doesn't pretend to be anything other than what McNiff has learned from his years of practice. It has structure, but it's not interested in any strong sense of direction or endpoint. Any chapter could be read in any order, and it is highly quotable and remixable, down to the paragraph.

What it is is a quiet reminder that creativity is exploration, respect, and deep engagement, and we have almost infinite directions we can go at any point. LaMonte Young's Variations 1960 instructed the performer to “draw a straight line and follow it.” Sister Corita Kent advised her art students to “find a place you trust and try trusting it for a while.” Well, sometimes you follow that line and you get very far away indeed, and sometimes you trust places and then you don't trust them anymore, or at least you get that itchy feeling that maybe its time to gather your bindle and move down the road. Trust The Process reminds us that an infinite number of straight lines runs through any point, and if you're stuck in place, the best thing to do is to take a step.