Live Your Life in Service of the Art

Has anyone — everyone? — read The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin? I’ve read it twice. For me, it’s the right book at the right time. I often pick it up and open to a random page.  I did that this morning. Things I read:

 “Live your life in service of the art.”

“It’s best to wait until a work is complete to discover what it is saying. Holding your work hostage to meaning is a limitation.”

 “The artist’s only responsibility is to the work itself.”

 The first and third quotes are enormously freeing for me. The first reminds me I have permission to ignore the errands and emails, and maybe even my family. The third - that our only responsibility is to the work itself - is also liberating. To me it means concerns about whether it’s good or bad, too big to get done, of no interest to anyone but me, can and must be dispensed with. Exactly what I need to hear when I’m creating.  

I’ve found the second statement to be true over and over again. It usually takes me more than a year following completion of a work to realize what it’s about.

Regretting Almost Everything is a two-person musical comedy about Marriage. It’s about Love, Sex, and Kids. Those are huge, broad categories of human experience, each of which has infinite aspects. What the show’s about will be different for every person. Danny and I were recently interviewed by Caleb Feigles. He told us that, for him, the show is about the difference between “desire” and “sex.” And so it is.