Archive: Escape Velocity

From Living Deliberately, Living Well 1.0; June 15, 2020

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v = √[(2GM/r)]
v = the square root of [(two times Newton’s Gravitational constant multiplied by the mass of the planet you’re on) divided by the radius of the planet you’re on].

“In the real world, the escape velocity depends on where you are at on the surface.”

I started Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way in late September 2019. It’s intended as a twelve-week program, but it took me nine months to get through the whole thing. I’m grateful it took me that long because JC offered a key set of tools for helping me navigate a year of incredible turbulence in my professional life, while also managing to sift this turbulence to identify my deep commitments and begin acting with those commitments front-of-mind.

Perhaps the most significant of these tools is the idea of escape velocity. In the context of The Artist’s Way, escape velocity is the trajectory a creative person needs to accomplish to bypass all the stuff that would keep them tethered to the ground, questioning their efforts and undermining the process of creation they want to tap into. We achieve escape velocity by asking ourselves a very straightforward question: What’s the payoff?

This question, which shows up in an earlier week of the program and then again in the final week, asks us to identify the things that we are allowing to block our progress and to inquire as to what the benefit is to staying blocked, to staying stuck. Following week twelve I feel like I was able to decisively sever some of the strongest tethers, and in breaking these links I uncovered intensity, an urgency to get to work, and to say what I need to say.

This intensity is, for me, escape velocity. I love it. I feel at home in it. I feel the clearest sense of my own self when I tap into it. Intensity makes sense and possibility of a list that reads article, article, book chapter, fieldwork, research, book, book, book. Intensity is the thing that gets me to the desk every day and the thing that also tells me that I’ve done enough for the day, time to stand up and turn out the light. Intensity invited me to this life, it is the thing I see being lived so beautifully and unapologetically by AV when he was 25 and still now, twenty years later. Intensity is agency and free and full expression, the possibility for joyful and curious encounter of the world.

As artists and professionals it is our obligation to enact our own internal revolution, a private insurrection inside our own skulls. In this uprising we free ourselves from the tyranny of consumer culture … We unplug ourselves from the grid by recognizing that we will never cure our restlessness by contributing our disposable income to the bottom line of Bullshit, Inc., but only by doing our work.

Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

Substitute income in the above for time, attention, emotion, anything that is serving our versions of Bullshit, Inc. I don’t know what escape velocity looks for other folks, and I wouldn’t prescribe intensity as an across-the-board mode of accomplishing it. I can say, though, that it is worth finding out, worth inquiring what precisely it is that will allow you to do what you want to do with joy and in fulfillment, and then going and doing as much of it as you can.

John Baldessari reintroduced text to his work in the mid-1990s. In the Goya series, he paired aggressively banal images with captions that Francisco de Goya (1746–1828) gave to his prints in The Disasters of War (1810–20), his eyewitness response to Napoleon's campaign in Spain. What drew the artist to Goya's laconic titles was their puzzling ambiguity and open-ended meaning. The Spaniard's original There Isn't Time depicts a scene of wanton slaughter, whereas Baldessari's floral still life grew out of his Vanitas series (1981) about the fleeting nature of life. "It can also be read," he said, "as when someone sends flowers it is usually about trying to repair something and often being too late."

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