A few years back, I was on the hinges of an unsuccessful run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. I had quit my job as a substitute preschool teacher to take my one man show to the festival of a lifetime, the mack daddy of unjuried play, the experience I had been scheming about for the better part of a decade.
After losing my footing over the course of a month, I also became conspicuously injured, as a lingering knee sprain had been exacerbated by the oodles of flights of stairs I had traversed while walking the Royal Mile to my venue at the end of it. I lugged a gigantic full-size 88-key weighted keyboard daily on my back, sometimes with an accompanying street performing amp, many times to a non-existent audience. I would arrive at my venue not knowing if the show was canceled or not, preparing myself for a much-deflated, ego, spirit, and bruised heart.
I quit the show, revised it, then took it to the Vancouver Fringe, where an excited and deliberate jury awarded me the “Artistic Risk” Award for my willingness to push the boundaries of storytelling, as well as the heaviness of the content I was willing to bear open-heartedly. It was a welcome triumph after a heavy heart had been laid bear, yet when I came back to LA, I had no job, an apartment which was continuously flooding, and an inability to conceive of how I would move forward financially, artistically, and creatively.
And so I began to re-work my rule of life with the help of God, where the systems I had been working on needed to fall away. I started remembering one of the central theses of my new show, that pain patiently endured with the help of people could lead to purpose, perspective, and ultimately a story worth living.
Retroactively, this process had proved true as a way to weather the suffering of life and continue on creatively, but I had never employed it consciously. I decided to drop all of my systems and to do lists and focus on the pain, weathering it patiently, and building back up the community in my life. Maybe the purpose would come, but I knew it had to wait.
I re-engaged with the book, “The Artist’s Way,” writing morning pages daily, going on artist dates, and beginning to seek the ways in which my life had been lost, so that I may recover. On one of these artist dates I ended up at The Last Bookstore, one of my favorite local haunts, where I found the book, “Lost Connections”, by Johann Hari. He conjectured 7 lost connections that lead to depression. I began to take notes assiduously, as I usually do with regards to reading, finding the ways in which I had become disconnected.
If you’re feeling depressed, I have a handy dandy copyable template you can use to map out how you can reconnect, here:
Life Conditions/ Reconnections
One of the last connections I needed to re-establish was to nature, and I also needed to get out and move, otherwise known as exercise. I had been going to physical therapy for my knee for the past few months and my therapist recommended two things: cardio, and adding weights. I had remembered how a friend on the basketball team, after a year of being benched, spent the whole summer working out and focusing on basketball. When he came back, he was dunking, dominating in practice, and quickly was a starter on varsity. I asked him what he did, and he told me he ran up the Baldwin Hills steps every day.
So I decided to kill many birds with one stone and begin doing the steps every morning, writing my morning pages at the top. My goal became:
To jog up the hill without stopping.
I ended up finding out that most of me was dead weight.
It took me six months to get up the hill without stopping, in continuous motion over 5 minutes.
Listen to the latest episode to find out all the lessons I’ve learned.
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