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Audio Journal: Don't Despise the Chisel · The Daily Writer

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: As human beings, there are really only two things that motivate us: seeking pleasure and avoiding pain.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Basically, everything that we do, every action that we take, everything on our schedule is motivated by one of those two things.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes it's a combination of the two things.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, we love to seek pleasure in different ways, but we also want to avoid pain.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: We tend to avoid anything that doesn't feel good or that causes us pain or loss or fear or anxiety of some kind.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: But one thing that I find interesting is that if you look at many of the great works of art, and really more I'm talking about music here more than anything else, most of the time, the great songs that have been written, the great albums that have been created, they come out of a place of pain.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: And if you look at in any list of top 40 songs from pretty much any decade of the past several decades of any week, you're gonna find that most of those songs are talking about pain of some kind.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, the most common theme that we see addressed in in music is love and relationships that are broken.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: And that's something we see in, I mean, my goodness, it doesn't even matter what genre rock, pop, country, hip-hop, jazz, whatever it is, that theme of of sadness, that scene that theme of being broken, of loss, comes through so often because it's a universal human experience that we have.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: And that was definitely true of Fleetwood Mac, which was well, of course they're still around, but it was one of the biggest bands of the 1970s.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: Two of their biggest songs, Dreams and Go Your Own Way, both of those songs actually, if you know your Fleetwood Mac history, they dealt with the exact same event, which was the impending breakup of Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham, the guitarist for Fleetwood Mac.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: And it's so fascinating because those songs take very different approaches to that same event and they are two different perspectives.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: But yet they both come out of this experience of pain and loss.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, out of that experience of pain and loss came two of the greatest pop songs ever written, in my opinion.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: Certainly two of their most popular songs and two super popular songs from the 1970s.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: So in our lives, we have these experiences of loss.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: Probably right now you're going through something that's frustrating.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: You're going through something that's causing you grief or anxiety or fear or uh pain of some kind.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to challenge you to think about how you can channel that negative emotion of pain and loss.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: How can you channel that into something creative?
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: How can you channel that into music or channel it into writing or poetry or uh maybe even painting or drawing of something?
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: We all go through pain, but so many, so many times we let that pain escape us and we don't do anything with it.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: So is there something you can do with that experience that you're going through that could be a great creative expression and maybe that could bless other people or help them through their season of pain and loss?
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: If you've read any of my stuff or listened to this podcast for any length of time, you know that I love art.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: And what if my favorite artist of all time is Michelangelo?
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, he's famous for all kinds of things, but one of his most famous pieces of artwork is the David statue.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: What I find interesting is that when Michelangelo was sculpting, he didn't necessarily see it as I'm going to sculpt, I'm going to bring to life this statue out of the marble.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: He saw it more a process of I'm removing everything that doesn't belong there.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't see his job as a sculptor as creating something from scratch.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: He saw it more as a process of just taking away everything that didn't belong, and whatever remained was what needed to be there.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's a good perspective.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes we look at our life and we we despise the pain that we're going through.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: We're so frustrated at our experiences or our situation, whatever that might be.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: And we're that block of marble and we look at the sculptor and we get very frustrated because they're bringing that chisel down upon us.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's painful.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, my goodness, a chisel is a tool that causes pain.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: It takes things away.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: But I wonder what would happen if we decide not to despise the chisel, but instead we find a way to embrace it.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: We find a way to value those experiences that we're going through because they make us into who we are and they give us they give us fodder, they give us material that we can use for our creative work as well.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: This is not an easy topic to talk about, and I certainly don't want to minimize anybody's pain or suffering that that they're going through.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: All of us are suffering, you know, constantly in some way, that's just the nature of our human experience, I think.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: But is there a way that you can take what you're going through and use it for good, use it for creative expression, and allow it to shape you into who you need to be?
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: I'll see you in the next episode.