Trust the Process

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.