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The ebb and flow of energy and success.

michauxfochaux:

There’s a fine line between the drive to succeed and the murder of the present. You can spend many, many years climbing the stairs only to find out that there is no landing; the stairs were actually your narrative all along and goddamn if you didn’t charge on up them, so eager to see what was at the top.

Guess what, fucker. At the top of the stairs are more stairs.

Close your eyes. Wait, you can’t read with your eyes closed. Fine. Picture this with your eyes open, then. Picture that you’re in your mid twenties. You’ve blazed through a childhood that you, like most, found alternately joyous and persecutory. You lived in an average house and got average grades; you had average friends and drove an average car. You never, by and large, excelled or failed at anything. And then one day, you find something you might be good at. You don’t so much seek it out as stumble into it. But for some reason, a desire to WIN at it shouts at you from a place you didn’t even know existed.

Let’s say, for sake of argument, you want to be a screenwriter. Just cause. Just cause you think you’re pretty good at it, and those doors happened to be the ones that opened to you, and you happened to be smart enough to walk through them.

Let’s say, for sake of argument, that after four years of film school and five years of cleaning up someone else’s shit as a Hollywood assistant, you finally get your day in court. You write a great fucking script, and not only that, you do it at the right time, and for the right people. And like some insane atomic reaction, like the goddamn big bang itself, the stars align for one half of one second and you manage to slide through the right door.

So you’re in your mid 20s, and off the first script you write in your life, you get signed by the biggest, most powerful, most elite talent agency ON GOD’S GREEN EARTH. And not just signed; signed and pushed. Sent on all the meetings. Sent on meet and greets four to five days a week for months. Provided a conference room with you and a bowl of popcorn at one end, and 12 (12!) agents in suits at the other end, all asking you what you want to write, and telling you the sky’s the limit, and scribing your professional aspirations in their notebooks. Would you like another Diet Coke?

And it goes to your head, a little bit… but not quite in the way you’d think. You don’t begin acting like an asshole or feeling full of yourself. What happens is, you begin to think you’ve succeeded. Past tense. That you’ve arrived, that you’ve climbed the stairs and you’re at the top of the landing.

And then eventually you book your first gig. Someone offers you money to write. Not just money; they offer you one hundred thousand dollars. They offer you more money than your parents have ever made in their lives, and all you have to do is fill 120 pages, and courier is a really big font. And you accept their offer, and with nervousness and pleasure you quit your day job.

You no longer have a day job.

You’re on the landing at the top of the stairs.

And you work when you want, and you take some meetings, and you write this script, and you enjoy the feeling of having arrived. And you turn the script in.

And they ask you to revise it.

So you revise it, and you turn it in again.

And they ask you to revise it again.

So you revise it again, and you turn it in again. And they thank you, but this time they don’t ask you to revise it again.

This time they tell your agent that they’re going to hire someone else to revise it.

That hurts a little. More for pride than for passion. But it doesn’t hurt that much; you still have the meetings, and you still get the conference room (even if there’s only six agents in it this time), and, best of all - you book another gig.

In fact, you book two gigs at once.

Whew, you think to yourself. I thought maybe I hadn’t arrived for a second there. But you look at the numbers on the contracts and realize you’re about to make twice what you did on the last gig, and in fact you’re so busy with these that you can’t even accept submissions for other jobs, and there’s no question - simply no question at all - you’re at the top of the stairs.

At least, until you turn in the first of these two scripts. Because you turn it in knowing its a disaster. You bit off more than you could chew. And it’s not just self-doubt; their actions tell you what they think of it. They flat out kill the project.

They put it in turnaround.

(That’s script jail, if you didn’t know.)

Well - there’s still the other project. You turn that in. Well, that’s strange. You don’t hear anything back from the producers. Not for a long time. Then you hear they didn’t like it. Then you hear they did like it. Then you hear one of the guys who runs the company got killed by the fucking Russian mafia in a mansion in Latvia, and your script is in fact about the Russian mafia, and long story short it gets a bullet put into it too.

And then a year goes by. During some of that year you’re on strike, and you wear your unemployment like a badge on your chest. And then the strike ends, and people go back to work.

You don’t, though.

A bunch of your potential projects disappeared. Some people that liked you have moved on. The landscape of the business is changing. The economy is crashing. And you don’t book another job.

That whole year, in fact, and for another six months after it, you don’t book a single job. The money you made is running out. You’re going after every job you can; jobs you would have passed on without a second thought the day of that big meeting in that big conference room. Now you’re itching for one of those jobs. But you can’t get one. You can’t get a job writing a horrible movie that you yourself would never go see. Now the conference room only has one lone guy in it. And he still cares about you, and still believes in you, and still works for you, but that doesn’t stop him from calling and asking “What’s going on? I’m starting to worry about you.”

Well fuck me. Turns out I’m still climbing the fucking stairs.

_______________________________________________________

The journey is the destination. The sooner you give in, and the sooner you relax and let life pass through you instead of smashing your head against it… the sooner you will find that happiness is in your friends, it’s in your family, it’s in your pets, it’s in your art, your interests, your loves, your lusts, your fears, your psychology, your freedom, your politics, and your ability to help others.

Your time on Earth is finite.

In Rome, at the Santa Maria della Concezione, the bones of Capuchin monks rest in peace. Four thousand of them, in fact. And inscribed on the floor in front of a particular pile of bones is a simple saying:

What you are, they once were

What they are, you will be

Over that, my friends, you have no fucking control. Not one iota.

Orient yourself to the present. Push yourself to the very limit of your human capability, and do it often, but know that it’s the push that that life is made of, not the result. You will never stand on the landing and look back at the stairs below you, and know that you have finally - finally! - made it. It won’t happen. You must learn to love the view from the stairs instead.

There is only now.

There is only now.

There is only now.