Indefatigable Artist Podcast Episode 35 - Robe Reading
Making reading and writing cool in 2023.
Yes we can! Yes you can read something, anything. What is it you want to do in this life? Certainly there must be something you want from this life, go out and find someone who has done it and read about them. Not only will you learn something applicable to your life, but the simple act of reading can reduce stress, calm your mind, ease the tension in your muscles, get your heart rate down.
Just as you can read anything you want, you can write anything you want!
If I can energize just one person to write even just one word down, I will deem this podcast a success. And I have already done this, but today is a new day, this is a new episode of the indefatigable artist podcast, so we have another person we need to energize to write something down!
Stop getting in your own way. That reflexive voice in your head that just came up with an excuse to deflect from this task, giving you a lousy excuse as to why you can’t read or write something. I have to do this, I have to do that, I don’t have time. No one HAS time, time passes us all by.
We all have the same 24 hours in a day.
Decide what to do with that time. Write out your schedule and stick to it! Hold yourself accountable to that schedule. In the short term there may be stressful to hold yourself accountable, but in the long run, it allows you to hit these free flow moments, where you can really let your mind dive deep into whatever it is you’re doing. You can be fully present. You can give all of your mental focus to the task at hand, or the person you are talking to, you won’t be thinking I have to do this or that, because this or that is in your schedule and you have made time for that, right now in this moment, is not the time for that! Right now is the time for you. It’s ok to take time for you, it’s in your schedule, this is me time and everything else in this universe, in this planet can fuck off, this is me time! I am taking me time because it betters my mental health and therefore I can put out better energy later on. The next time. I have stressful situation I can deal with it more positively, more progressively. I won’t snap, I won’t let my emotions get the better of me and allow me to act out and make the situation worse.
Getting a flat tire, and then breaking my hand punching the car – what good does that do? Does that solve the problem? No it makes it worse cause now I have to go to the hospital.
You choose to get upset and to stay mad. An incident is perspective. The incident just – is. how you perceive it will determine your conscious emotional reaction. What is your default to a stressful situation?
I have had to ask myself this and continue to ask myself this every time I encounter a stressful situation. My default was to just get pissed off, get pissed off at the incident, get pissed off at anyone around me. What good did that do? I felt like it relieved stress but it just added stress.
In these moments now, I have to pause. I have to close my eyes if I can, take a deep breathe, realize that I am in control of my thoughts, I am in control of my emotions.
I believe that we are doing something special with these Robe Reading streams. I feel it in my very being. I believe that we are going to make reading cool for millions of human beings who have forgotten entirely about reading in this digital age.
There is so much noise.
The second that we wake up, we welcome in the noise with eyes barely open, mind barely awake from its overnight subconscious adventures, and now is being thrown into the algorithmic abyss.
Down the algorithmic abyss the mind goes, feverishly swiping down the infinite timeline, image after image, video after video, text after text, what’s next? More, more, more. You aren’t doing enough, that other person has more than you, is doing more that you, are you even active right now, what are you doing if you aren’t spending time posting how much you are doing! If you’re actively doing something, you should be posting about it! What the fuck are you even doing if you’re not posting about it!
And I am saying this as a content creator, so these are things I think about often, what effect is the content that I am creating having? What effect am I having on those who encounter Bleace? Any effect at all? And that is where I come back to the belief that we are doing something special, each and every day that I wake up, I wake up with a purpose.
Now the difficulty I have had with my content is that it’s too varied, it’s too all over the place, as I have been honestly since writing my books. Really in general as an artist, I have this willingness to try any and everything, for better or worse. I just want to fucking create, that is all I want to do each and every day, is create. But now, I have reached a point both in content creation and overall life fulfillment.
For content creation, I feel I have to cater to the algorithm so that it will push my stuff out to viewers who will appreciate it. Kind of a game you have to play in learning how your creations can fit into these various platforms. A science all on it’s own, so you’re trying to learn these platforms, which are varied, then within them, they are updating all the time. At the time I feel that I have it figured out, the platform makes an update, now what was working before, isn’t working now, have to update what I am doing just slightly, but enough to notice the difference.
At the same time I am doing this, I am also learning who I am as an artist. I have become an artist not with any gifted talents, not any that I feel I have, it’s hard work that has carried me this far. Growing up I didn’t take art seriously, at least not consciously, looking back I really did love writing privately, I didn’t tell anyone and wrote in my little black and white journal, some pretty disturbing things but what do you expect from a trouble teenage boy!
But having tried these different art forms, these different mediums, from writing, to painting, drawing, 3D animation and virtual reality building, to graphic design, video editing.
I am now simplifying. I feel like this is the time where a book has been written and I am now going back and editing, what is working and what isn’t. I am evaluating myself in this, why haven’t I lived up to my own expectations? Why do I feel like I have failed? And yes, I have felt that as I am very hard on myself, which then causes me to stress and have panic attacks, which is not good for creativity, stress is the silent killer. It’s also the killer of ideas and creation.
David Lynch says as much in his Master Class. That artists should take time out of their day to day dream, think of ideas swirling around in our heads. And he says that you can’t do this if you are overly stressed, stress squeezes the hose of creative flow.
So I took a deep breathe and have been pondering about how to solve this problem, how to overcome this obstacle. Which I know I shouldn’t admitting, I should be a content creator, streamer, who has it all figured out and is giving advice, but I am not there – yet.
Back to the top! I believe that we are doing something special with these Robe Readings! These robe readings and the indefatigable artist podcast writings.
I do have ambitions to keep creating in a variety of outlets, but I want to focus on accomplishing one goal at a time. I want to envision it so powerfully, where I can see it every time I close my eyes, and when I am awake I am working feverishly and with such conviction that what I seek will find me. Now I am not where I want to be or where I thought I would be with my craft, why? Why am I not there yet?
In answering that question, I have found myself, found what it is I want and now I am going to set in motion a plan and execute that each and every day.
I like being transparent with anyone taking the time to listen to these streams. I feel that being vulnerable as I am right now, will help others along their creative journey.
It’s ok to be vulnerable, it’s ok to not have it all figured out, cause guess what? We are just one planet around one star, which is one of a billion stars, in something we call the universe which has black holes that we have merely just discovered let alone traveled through! So what are we doing? No one has it understood and it hurts to much to think about so it’s better to just watch Big Brother and think about who is dating whom.
Everything we think about is a choice. The question then, is it a choice made conscious by you or someone else? Why are you choosing to think about that? Did you see it on the timeline? Did you see it on the news? Who initially said those words to you? Where did that phrase come from? Why are you getting upset at something you saw on the timeline or on the television screen? Why are you letting it arouse anger?
If too many people realize that they can control their thoughts, this may not be good for those who are trying to manipulate human behavior to compulsively buy inanimate objects until they go bankrupt.
The poor kid had high ACT and SAT scores, but a low emotional intelligence score and ended up killing himself after being turned down by a girl he had a crush on for years, or he was bullied to the point that he snapped and shot kids at school.
Putting all of these highly distracted, emotionally deprived kids all in one building? Making them sit in desks, all of that energy, all of those hormones raging, supervised by overworked and under appreciate teachers. Test score after test score, onto the next! Test, test, test.
When meditation class? When an hour pause to teach kids they can control their thoughts, that they can choose what they focus their mental energy on. That failure is not ultimate. That another person’s words are projections and deflections from their own ego. Behind every bully is a fragile ego afraid to be exposed, deathly afraid of being made to feel vulnerable, vulnerability is death! When it’s actually a strength!
This is what drives me in this podcast, this is what drives me to want to create a more emotionally intelligent world. I am not a psychologist by any means, but I am a creative and I know the effects that creating has on the mind. I understand that we need to be having this conversation at the dinner table more than we are right now, in 2023. We are the product of millions of years of evolution, we need to start fucking acting like it.
How is it that I can read a quote from Einstein in 1945 and have it perfectly apply to our current political situation here in the US?
We have made technological advancements, yes, but how many emotional advancements have we made? Surely more emotionally advanced than we were 100 years ago, certainly is the case, but far from where we could be. We learn all of this external information, US history, Chemistry, what about human psychology? I know there are schools that teach it, and always exceptions, I am talking more on a broad scale and having this become more normalized in schools. Teach the youth early how to deal with their emotions, how to deal with stressful situations so they can better handle them in the short term but also as adults.
All of what I do is provide a perspective that I wish I had when I was young. I am talking to my younger self. Is what I am saying that there will be some Utopia or that there will one day be a state of perfection? Absolutely fucking not, that does not exist, the universe doesn’t work like that. It takes protons, neutrons and electrons to create an atom, positive negative and neutral energies to combine together. A heart beat goes up and down, that is life, we have to just accept what that is, what this universe is, and not accept the self-imposed ways of life, the artificial structures that separate humans through imaginary monetary means, imaginary in the sense that paper dollars hold no meaning outside that which humans give it, what is a dollar bill worth in the next galaxy over?
What is a credit card on Neptune? What is a credit score to the alleged Alien found in Mexico? Yes, there is other life in the universe, this is only shocking to small minds – have we found them on Earth, is there evidence of that life? That remains to be seen, not saying that was a real alien but I do appreciate the fact that they made their findings public, if that is real, again, time will tell. But the limited knowledge we do have of the universe, would suggest that there is most certainly life out there, as the universe is far too vast and too diverse for their not to be.
To get to these next steps, to Go Further, we have to become more emotionally intelligent, and I encourage all who hear this, to creatively express themselves more! Say what you have to say, while you have the ability to say it! There will always be more ideas than time, just as there will always be more thoughts than spoken words! The only time is Right Now! Face that hard truth, open yourself up to that vulnerability, grow from it! You woke up today with that simple act, you are already more resilient than the day before, if you choose to see it!
The only time you have is right now, choose to use it wisely! Go Further!
And if this my last episode ever, and one of these times that will be true, so I want to say it now, because if not now, when? But I just want to say before I go, one last thing and if it’s the last thing I ever say I want it to be this -
