In her essay, “Of Power and Time,” collected in the book Upstream, poet Mary Oliver beautifully sums up the role of the creative person and how ought to should treat us.
Too often, we’re asked to conform in myriad ways, to endure a thousand little violations, to bend to society’s will. But, she asserts, that’s not our role.
The essay is too long to reproduce here, so I’ll share a few excerpts. I encourage you to read the entire piece.
Mary Oliver was a treasure to us all.
Say you have bought a ticket on an airplane and you intend to fly from New York to San Francisco. What do you ask of the pilot when you climb aboard and take your seat next to the little window, which you cannot open but through which you see the dizzying heights to which you are lifted from the secure and friendly earth?
Most assuredly you want the pilot to be his regular and ordinary self. You want him to approach and undertake his work with no more than a calm pleasure. You want nothing fancy, nothing new. You ask him to do, routinely, what he knows how to do—fly an airplane. You hope he will not daydream. You hope he will not drift into some interesting meander of thought. You want this flight to be ordinary, not extraordinary. So, too, with the surgeon, and the ambulance driver, and the captain of the ship. Let all of them work, as ordinarily they do, in confident familiarity with whatever the work requires, and no more. Their ordinariness is the surety of the world. Their ordinariness makes the world go round.
In creative work — creative work of all kinds — those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward. Which is something altogether different from the ordinary. Such work does not refute the ordinary. It is, simply, something else. Its labor requires a different outlook — a different set of priorities.
Of this there can be no question — creative work requires a loyalty as complete as the loyalty of water to the force of gravity. A person trudging through the wilderness of creation who does not know this — who does not swallow this — is lost. He who does not crave that roofless place eternity should stay at home. Such a person is perfectly worthy, and useful, and even beautiful, but is not an artist. Such a person had better live with timely ambitions and finished work formed for the sparkle of the moment only. Such a person had better go off and fly an airplane.
The ghost 👻 that follows me from room to room, itching the underside of my skin, always asking myself what is the strange itching. At times it's like, can I get out of this suite made of flesh. Insights for myself show the withholding I do, to control my surroundings but keep myself in the world turning actions,my frustration adds up and shows that its me not my job, my wife, my friend's. The light is bright for me today and it's up to me to move the needle forward, it's not my surroundings that need changing just a straight forward moving action to stop playing it safe with this "one wild and precious life" Mary Oliver
It seems to me that the people who do their jobs really well have a love for what they do, or a knack for the skills it takes to do their job. A creative person has a need to be creative. They don't have much choice. Something pulls them towards their creative path. Even if your day job is a pilot, if you're a creative person you'll spend your spare time writing jokes or books or drawing comics. And you'll probably crack jokes as a pilot, too. "Roger, Roger."