The WordPress dashboard tells me that this is post #3400 – always a fun thing to watch the zeros roll up, right?

It’s been incredibly hot and more than reasonably humid and out of everybody’s mind done with being rainy. Without an exception when people talk about weather, and at this point everyone is talking about the weather, we’re done with the weather. We’re pretty certain it’s not even weather anymore that we’re talking about but the effect of climate change.

Last night I found the coolest place I could and sat watching a video of James Victore giving a talk at Tellerrand. I enjoyed the brush up on why the best work relationships are based on trust and other commandments from Take This Job and Love It. A bit of facebook conversation has the notion of the difference between practiced and authentic rolling around in my head. How does it fit with the notion of “fake it til you make it” which is quite legit. I always like to start with a real definition.

Authentic:

adjective
• of undisputed origin; genuine: the letter is now accepted as an authentic document | authentic 14th-century furniture.
• made or done in the traditional or original way, or in a way that faithfully resembles an original: the restaurant serves authentic Italian meals | every detail of the movie was totally authentic.
• based on facts; accurate or reliable: an authentic depiction of the situation.
• (in existentialist philosophy) relating to or denoting an emotionally appropriate, significant, purposive, and responsible mode of human life.

Practiced:

adjective
expert, typically as the result of much experience: admiring the dress with a practiced eye | the waiter was practiced at disrupting moments of intimacy.

The latter definition surprised me in brevity, although there was much more on ‘practice’ of course. Practiced seems outside the idea of practice. Not exactly the ten thousand hours of practice bringing you towards mastery and yet “much experience” is still about a lot of repetition, right?

Can you be both practiced and authentic? Of course. Can you be one or the other? Pretty sure. Wouldn’t both be best? Yes. I think there’s the implication, with the notion of authentic meaning ‘coming from one’s true self’ that you could continue being practiced and at some point become repetitive and less original and thereby less authentic. Practiced might become too pat.

I suppose this is part of the cycle for many artists that you work and work and work and suddenly have a success with all the interest surrounding it. Then you have a period of repetition, pretty natural to some extent since there was a lot of work getting you to that point in life and this is bolstered by external interest in the work. At some point it all becomes more of the same and less authentic in terms of doing your own work. Something triggers something new which is rejuvenating and energizing to the artist and surprising or disappointing to the viewer. Rinse and repeat. Part of The Work is keeping it new to one’s self, being open to the what-if, and continuing to explore.

A message from the quote box and Ray Bradbury:

Love what you do and do what you love. Don’t listen to anyone else who tells you not to do it. You do what you want, what you love. Imagination should be the center of your life. – Ray Bradbury

You’ve made it to the end of yet another long, rambling post/rant, this one number three thousand four hundred, with more to come. James V. gave me a kick in the brain yet again to make me wonder about stuff.

Finally, sometimes you have to take validation where it is found and not read too much into it (or past the opening lines of it). Keep cool everyone!