Running for Your Life: Doubt as Starter

Am riding the N Train, going local, on a Sunday (Nov. 12) and making notes.

When I arrived at the station on the R Train, the more convenient D Train was on the express track, doors open. We R passengers made a bee line for the doors, which closed before anyone could get in. Then the D pulled out, which is why I’m on my second choice: the slow-moving N.

How hard is it to look and see, to accept, without judgment? For without that state of mind, doesn’t creativity founder?  

What is doubt in art but the starter, what you build from the ground up, you know, like in sourdough bread-making.

In art, your particular brand of doubt creates something fresh and new, removed from the unoriginal, the creative equivalent to the subway ad campaign for an entrepreneur service that in one ad chastises those who take a simple career path, noting disdainfully that it’s called a path because someone else has blazed it, meaning by that very nature the path is unoriginal and therefore not worthy of the best among us.

Precept: Original and new is good; unoriginal and old is bad.

A second ad by the entrepreneur gurus says: “Nobody ever said: ‘Just think about it.”

Except, of course, philosopher kings and queens … After all, thinking is the one thing that, at least theoretically, we humans do better than other animals. We apparently think; it is other animals that “do,” who, in fact, are the masters of doing.

Next: Running for Your Life: By Your Leaf