No one ever told me that getting older feels like slipping. Mid-motion, falling. A second lasts for minutes in suspense before the crash. I listen to the clock’s metronome to hear time slipping away. And me, slipping with it.
When you’re slipping, falling, tumbling, toppling, the natural tendency is to look for a way to break your fall. To save what’s left of you. You grasp for a stray branch, for a person’s shoulder, for sinking beer bottles, for expired friendships, for the familiarity of physical places, for the physiological sensations of pleasure, for anything that maintains the delusion of an unfading youth. The mirror mumbles contradictions. Grey hairs, receding hairlines and corporal deterioration. Gravity, pulls.
In the midst of all this falling, more specifically, crashing, we look for ways to respond. Never once do we consider that the crash is through drywall instead of concrete. That there’s something on the other side of wherever we’re being hurled towards. But no. We heave and yank and squirm towards anything that’ll stop this. We fight the movement of our life. We try, too hard.
‘Don’t try,’ reads the inscription on the gravestone of Charles Bukowski. Below it, a boxer stands poised for attack. A fighter’s life. Those words, of any that could've been left on that gravestone, have always perplexed me. The author who dripped his feelings out through dark green bottles of beer onto his Olympia typewriter. He knew a thing or two about trying.
As an ex-athlete, trying, trying hard, is imprinted on my inner fabric. I love trying. So for the longest time, the phrase on the grave of one of the greats seemed to me like the remnants of a bad joke. Those words—don’t try—have clung to my psyche despite everything. They remained in the syntax of my mind, growing faint yet never fading, equally alluring and perplexing.
In a letter to William Packard, Bukowski writes:
“When everything works best it's not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It's when you're mad with it, it's when it's stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It's when there's no hope but that. […] We work too hard. We try too hard. Don't try. Don't work. It's there. It's been looking right at us, aching to kick out of the closed womb.”
The best things in life are never forced. They occur nonchalantly. The way the sun slides out from behind the clouds. Effortless. The part that stumps me, the part that makes me pace in circles around my mind—is that it takes effort to make something look effortless. The alluring nature of those words lies in the fact that it lands directly into the heart of practice. ‘Don’t try,’ is a stripping bare of our inner-why. Beneath every ambition, every dream, every wish, lies the engine of our why propelling us towards it.
Do you do it for fame, or fortune, or something deeper? Would you practice your craft if there was a guarantee that nothing would ever come from it? Would you do it, simply because it must emerge? The way a wave must crest and it must fall—it is, because it is, regardless if anyone sees it.
My housemate says I live in a state of opposition. I make films about daydreaming whilst avoiding idle time. When he puts it that way, I sound mad. Except that time doesn’t move linearly. Moments aren’t measured the way seconds are. Some moments hold more weight to them. When emotion and truth coincide, air is bundled in magic. Sparks fly from the whisks of such recollections. The way the eyes of a loved one gleam naked truths. The way the sun hugs the lids of your eyes like a mother does a crying child. The austere wisdom of low-hanging mist in frosted graveyards.
‘Once in Atlanta, starving in a tar paper shack, freezing. There were only newspapers for a floor. And I found a pencil stub and I wrote on the white margins of the edges of those newspapers with the pencil stub, knowing that nobody would ever see it. It was a cancer madness. And it was never work or planned or part of a school. It was. That's all.’
In the essence of the craft there is an understanding that the work is something alive. Something restless, something desperate to emerge. It’s so easy to miss. For the money, for the status, for the pleasures—oh so short-lasting—the understanding that the thing is alive, is so easily omitted from our conviction.
If it’s inside of you, if you would do it despite anything—it will grow out of you without any effort. Naturally. The way teeth and nails grow out of you. It’ll occur from the background, and it’ll come to the foreground. It’s patience. It’s a letting go to the many mechanics that work their way through us. It’s surrender.
During heights I dreamt would last forever, the slipping sway spun a solemn desire: certainty. I wanted to become stationary. At the top. At happiness.
I envied the immovableness of trees. Yet I am slipping, moving, ageing, living, dying. And I shall remember. If it is in me, it will stir. It will make itself known. It needs not a single ounce of effort. Don’t try.
I don't know what it all means, but I enjoyed your perspective. ♥️
Wonderful thoughts here— love this so much!🫶