Showing up For Work

by Ariane Zurcher | Dec 9, 2021 | Art, creative process, Life | 8 comments

I’m not feeling great.  I should probably just end this post right here.  But, no, I’ll soldier on. Not because this post is important, it’s not, but because it represents all the things on my to do list and so much that is just life. No one needs to hear my laundry list of “woes”, we’ve all got them.  More to the point is that I’m struggling.  My mom’s death feels like an endless, bottomless pit of emotions.  I know I’ll get through it.  I know work-arounds that help me get through those days when things are really bad and “getting through the day” feels impossible.  That’s when the put-one-foot-in-front-of-the-other method of coping gets enacted.

Grieving is a luxury. Some days require putting all of that to the side so that other things can be dealt with in a timely fashion and because life moves along, it doesn’t wait for those of us who are grieving.  And I also know I can’t leap frog my way beyond the grief.  It will be there waiting for me on the other side.  It’s always there.  Some days I’m luckier than others, the grief stays on the edge, other days it moves front and center.  Those are the days when every step feels like I’m dragging a fifty pound weight.  Those are the days when showing up feels like a monumental task.  But I know from designing, from creating, from every day that I work on a piece, that even when I don’t “feel like it” showing up for the work is one of the most important things I can do.  And, counter-intuitively, it is what ends up making me feel better in the long run.

All of this reminds me of something Michael Crichton once said.  It was decades ago when I was the Director of the Aspen Writer’s Conference and had reached out to him to kick off the conference.  He was game and gave an amazing talk in the Paepcke Auditorium at the Aspen Institute.  I will have to paraphrase as there is no transcript of his presentation.  He was talking about writing. Imagine, he said, if you were a commercial airline pilot with a full schedule of flights and woke up one morning and said, You know, I don’t really feel like flying today.  I think I’ll go back to sleep for a few hours. Writing (any of the arts) is the only “profession” where people talk themselves out of getting up and putting in the hours.  Everyone in the audience was quiet.  But it doesn’t work that way, he continued.  If you’re a writer/artist then you get up and you put in your hours, whether it’s flying a commercial airline or writing a book, or in my case, working on a new piece, writing up a new workshop, filming a new Youtube video or any of the other things I’ve got on my list of things that I need to do because this is the life and profession I’ve chosen for myself.

How does grief fit into all of this?  It doesn’t.  It’s just there.  All the time.  And as a result, it is I that must make the necessary adjustments in my life to accommodate these new feelings and emotions, while continuing to show up for the work.