#45: conviction, not ambition

revisiting childhood joys in Lake Powell and not letting ambition stifle your desire to start something real (and a special announcement about Gia's art show on September 10th!)

Gia Rush, Vindicta (2022), Acrylic on Canvas, 18” by 36”

A younger version of you knew what you wanted to do, be, become. A younger version of you played with ferocity in certain settings and shied away in others. A younger version of you was quietly (or maybe violently) sidelined in sport and praised in math or vice versa. A younger version of you felt the expectations of others before you had reached an understanding of what letter corresponds to the sound “x” in expectations. And so that younger version of you developed many protective layers, edges, and personalities that you put on to fit the mold that you thought was being laid out for you. In the process, you slowly lost sight of what that younger version of you wanted. But that little you still comprises the pattern of your being. And there are certain environments in which those early memories, knowings, and wantings are more readily primed for reviewing.

One of my favorite questions to ask myself and others is…

You died. The ‘creator’ of Planet Earth tells you that you have 5 minutes to return to any place you feel called. Where do you go and why?

My answer is easily Lake Powell. For every summer of my childhood, my family drove 10-12 hours to the lake, my mom reading a book in the front seat as my dad pounded his one-per-year Red Bull and my siblings and I mouth-breathed in the back after connecting two adapters so we could fabricate 3 headphone jacks to all be able to watch She’s the Man, Stick It, and Raising Helen. We stopped in Las Vegas to buy fireworks (and the best mango popsicles in the world) for my dad and Kurt to blast off the rocks as we braced in fear and excitement, and as our moms begrudgingly laughed in the kitchen while stirring pots of Annie’s mac and cheese, pouring another glass of wine, and swapping disco outfits in the bathrooms before re-emerging in comedic timing.

For my siblings and I and the Brendlinger family, Lake Powell teems with childhood joy, nostalgia, and identity formation. On our biggest year, we had 22 people living on a houseboat for 7 days— mostly kids— who would play in the sun, surf behind the boat, fight to stand up on a solemn ski, consume copious amounts of fruit, cereal, and paninis, and pass out on the boat deck under the shooting stars year after year, coming back each summer having felt like an eternity had gone by since our last trip as happens when you go from 4 to 5 to 6 to 7 up to 13.

And then we stopped going for 11 years.

So much has changed in our lives since.

We’ve graduated high school, and college, moved cities, gone through job transitions, all experienced our parents’ separations, and one of us has even had a baby! So to be back on this boat with the same people yet with 11 years of SO much change was the most deeply nostalgic experience I’ve had maybe ever.

I went into this trip with thoughts about creativity and career at the forefront of my mind. And I looked forward to getting to experience this physical space and these people again to remind myself of the early childhood joys that we tend to forget as we get older and beaten down by polite society.

And I also went into this trip with a particular memory primed from college, another moment in which my desire for change, challenge, and adventure had peaked.

One fall day at Georgetown, after settling into the rigid wooden desks that you have to open like an airplane folding tray to squeeze yourself into, our professor pulled down the projector screen. We were watching something today; a novelty and an exciting break from the anxiety that percolated in my stomach after the fresh thrills of being a college student wore off and I started to think about how what I was learning in school related to anything meaningful in the “real world.” I think I was a sophomore at the time and I started to feel really wiggly, caught between my adoration of learning and my disenchantment with how I was going to transition from philosophy classes to a ~ReeeAaaLll~ job in the post-grad world.

The video was a PBS documentary about whaling. And I was enchanted. Something about the contrast between writing papers in circles around the myopic discussions that my classmates and I were having with watching these men lead lives that constantly flirted with their own mortality activated the adventure center of my brain.

It was a pattern-interrupting moment. A moment in which I felt bleak, small, isolated, disconnected, and directionless, but somehow still quietly hopeful. The constant, hospital-like buzz that looms in the background most of the time, representing our annoyance with the day-to-day bullshit that is so cosmically insignificant started going off with the amplitude of the NYC ambulance that passes by me every single time I try to call a family member, without fail. It became insufferable and I had no choice but to do something about it. In this state, anything that smelt even slightly like adventure captured all of my senses. Hence, me being a 19-year-old girl in a college classroom with my brain zipping around and storing each pixel of this whaling video in my memory like it represented some important primitive part of my calling.

Poet, author, and one of my favorite thinkers, David Whyte talks about this in describing his experience of living in the Galapagos in his 20s as a biologist.

Young as I was in the Galapagos, I began to touch an exposed nerve in human experience: the sense that there is something larger in the world than mere human priorities. What ever work I was doing, something larger, more frightening, with a different order of priorities was moving in parallel. Something that encompassed a grander and more difficult universe than my career goals. (Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea, 34)

I know you know the feeling I am describing. It feels like waking up, like homecoming. All of a sudden, a veil lifts. You reach a point of getting so fed up with the tedious bullshit that’s been gently prodding at your side, you have to make a shift. An unsilencable craving for adventure. In these moments of change, we tend to feel both empowered and vulnerable. Empowered because an adult part of ourselves comes alive and starts to take ownership over how we want to live. The vulnerability comes in because this command finally allows a childlike version of ourselves to come to the forefront and remember. To remember what it is that lit us up when we were little. And then an outpouring of early memories or visuals ensues once you’ve allowed your adult self to relax enough to genuinely inquire.

Whyte describes this moment and the memories that it brings him back to. “I remember the absolute sense of excitement at nine years old, when I picked up my first book of poetry and read it as if I had discovered a secret code to my future life— which, as it turned out, I had,” (Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea, 64).

This early encoding exists in all of us and it reveals itself in comical ways. The whaling video did not remind me of what I want to do with my life from a content perspective, though that is a pretty funny visual. It just reminded me of my mortality. Of the shortness of life. And how much more we have to give than the menial tasks we go through on a daily basis, sometimes adding things to our to-do-lists retrospectively in a desperate attempt to trigger a dopaminergic response after we’ve blown the rest of our neurotransmitter load by scrolling Instagram and swiping through pictures of potential romantic prospects on our sweet little screens.

This moment made me change my mind rapidly about where I wanted to study abroad. Instead of Madrid, I switched to New Zealand. And while there, I had much better access to the early version of myself that had a lot of conviction in my interests. I remembered my entrepreneurial spirit that would cut the legs off my jeans after school with my friend Olivia so we could sew them into small purses, adhering ribbons, badges, and other custom items that our “clients” requested. I had a moment while watching Julie and Julia and just knowing deeply that there’s something about writing and food that I have to pay attention to. And community is a big piece of mine too, hence why the men working together to kill whales, reminded me of a core part of who I am (the working together piece, not the whale killing). I know you have these too. They tend to be funny because they are so small and seemingly insignificant but for whatever reason, the clarity and space that they occupy in your mindseye when you bring them to memory is indicative of the fact that they hold information about the patterning that would become the fabric of your adult sense of belonging.

Sometimes a drastic life change or loss is required to reactivate these memories. Or sometimes they are stirred up by feelings of awe.

There was something awestriking about being back in Lake Powell. After so much time had gone by and we had all changed so drastically, the primitive integral parts of us remained the same.

Take Chloe, for instance. We are the same age and spent our childhood summers being dimwits on this lake. But then spent most of our teens and twenties apart. For all intents and purposes (and also in the biological, your-cells-regenerate-every-7-years sense), we are fundamentally different people than we were back then and had to almost reintroduce ourselves as the women that we are now. But when she is shredding behind the boat, or muscles her way out of the water on a ski, or face plants into the water and comes back up laughing, I still know her facial expressions like the back of my hand. They are the exact same.

We spent a lot of time talking about our relationships with work and creativity and the visions that we hold for our lives. And there was something really special about getting to do this against the backdrop of our childhoods in Lake Powell.

It made me think about long pauses.

“Most people who exhibit a mastery in a work or a subject have often left it completely for a long period in their lives only to return for another look. Constant busyness has no absence in it, no openness to the arrival of any new season, no birdsong at the start of its day.” (Whyte, Crossing the Unkown Sea, 176)

There’s something about pausing a project, a dream, a revisitation to a place, a relationship, or anything else that makes the coming back feel even more special. Even taking a two-week break from writing this newsletter has added musicality to it.

We need pauses. We need time and space to think, to change, to allow the dust to settle. Whyte talks about this in relation to the amount of wakings that we go through in our lifetimes. He uses his young daughter as an example.

I remember being woken one morning by the cries of my three-year-old daughter, distraught by a dream, and thinking, as I comforted her, that this was just the beginning of her long apprenticeship to waking. I took her in my arms and cradled her as she fell back to a better sleep, and imagined a lifetime of wakings ahead of her: sometimes to losses that will not go away no matter how many times she falls asleep again; sometimes to the world in happy anticipation; many times to a gray sameness through which she must fight to regain her life. We should apprentice ourselves to coming awake, and treat it as a form of mastery the threshold of waking, the entry to the day, is the musician’s foot lifted to begin the beat. Miss that beat and you will have to stop and start again. The dash and flare of the day comes from that foot hitting the floor after the correct restful application. Sometimes a prayerful, painful approach to a difficult day may mean stopping and starting a hundred times, until we learn like a virtuoso, the thorough, attentive, rhythmic presence of the true musician. (Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea, 188)

This is true of anything in life. I needed the aforementioned hospital-like buzz to reach NYC ambulance level in order for me to really hear the silence in Lake Powell. To be present in conversation with my siblings and our family friends. To take in the changes that we’ve all undergone since our last trip and use it as fodder to remember who we were when we were kids.

Gia Rush, Mental Ergonomics (2023), Acrylic, mixed media collage, 9” x 12”

This whole summer has felt like a long pause. Like a revamping of my relationship to time. A return to old memories. And a reinvigoration of my excitement for the projects I have brewing right now.

And a past version of myself would likely sit on my sister’s couch, opposite her, laptop burning my thighs after getting back from the airport and dampen these feelings of joyous childlike freedom by mixing in doubt, fear, and “but the reality is…” narratives. We tend to go from remembering early desires to overactivating our prefrontal cortex and thinking that we have to rely on willpower, determination, and ambition to reconnect with whatever calling we’ve just been acquainted with. But this type of ambition is so limiting.

We put so much value on ambition. I am even guilty of using it as a descriptor of my favorite types of people but we get so much wrong when we do that. Ambition can be stifling. Ambition requires the efforting part of you that led you astray in the first place. We tend to close down when we lead with ambition. Whyte says this well.

You could direct the beam of ambition to help you see the immediate territory ahead but it would ultimately only illuminate things that were already known to you, and its glare would just as likely rob you of your peripheral night vision. Ambition kills our sense of the miraculous; ambition, ironically, could hide the stars. (Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea, 79-80)

Ambition feels good because it illuminates a path for you. But that path is one that you already know. In order to change direction, ambition must be left aside. Which is not to say that you should stop trying and surrender your existence to meaningless floundering. Instead, this means that you are entering unknown territory. And within that unknown territory, you have an opportunity to make your life into something different, something more artfully challenging.

So Whyte poses an alternative. He advises you to announce yourself to the world. Not too soon, but not too late either.

Whyte knew that he was a poet. He knew for a long time. But the modern world does not take well to a grown man, father, and primary breadwinner of the family announcing himself as a full-time poet. And still, that’s what he was. A poet. So Whyte set out to announce himself as such to the world. And he gave himself grace in doing so. Instead of efforting his way through and either selling out or starving his family, he committed to taking one small step towards his life as a poet every single day for 365 days. Whether that was writing poetry, memorizing lines that he’d read and loved, or reaching out to organizations where he could share his work, he took one small action towards being a poet every single day and the buzz built upon itself. He also started telling everyone he knew that he was moving towards being a full-time poet.

“I had an intuition that when you really annunciate what you want in the world you will always be greeted, in the first place, with some species of silence. It may be that the silence is there so that you can hear exactly what you have asked for, and hear it more clearly so that you can get it right. If the goal is real and intensely personal, as it should be, others naturally should not be able to understand it the first time it finds its own voice. It means in a way, in a very difficult way, that you are onto something. Though daunting, at the beginning, silence is good, and silence is a testing fire.” (Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea, 136)

To be guided by conviction instead of ambition. To believe instead of defend. To commit to something for your own sanity. To not get swept back into the confining grasp of ambition that pushes us into old habits of grinding knuckle to bone to effort things into the world for the wrong reasons. To do one small thing a day in pursuit of whatever it is that a child version of you always knew you wanted to be. That is what I am up for. Not setting an arbitrary goal to make sure my discipline is still intact. But instead, to be faced with a new, self-inflicted challenge that activates the whaling part of my brain and reacquaints me on a frequent basis with the feeling of brevity, of mortality, of mission.

I’ll leave you with this. One of my favorite newsletters is a column called

Ask Polly

.

A 28-year-old who signs off as, “Trying Not to Become a Crazy Cat Parent” writes in with her vulnerable fears of losing her edge. She’s found herself back as a barista in need of a career transition and knows how much more she has to give but is at a loss for how to engage it. Ask Polly responds,

You're a person who isn't going to settle for just any career or just any life. You aren't easily satisfied. That's important to recognize about yourself. You crave deep connections and big, exuberant challenges. You would rather do something very small or very very big than do something average sized. Try to support this part of your nature. For example, don't just exercise every day. Train for a marathon or take up CrossFit or something impossibly hard. That's who you are. I'm not saying you're a marathon runner, either. I'm saying you're a person who needs a big, exuberant goal in order to do anything at all. To engage with something difficult, you need to engage with the biggest, brightest, most absurd, most deliriously deluxe version of that thing.

Maybe this sounds contradictory to my argument against ambition. But the difference is that when you feel the call to do something more important with your time, it comes from an endless spring of energy. Sure, without careful discernment, that may be mistaken for ambition or efforting. But when it comes from the right place, from the place of a childhood commitment to doing something that you love, it doesn’t require the horse blinds of ambition to get you up and keep you going. David Whyte’s 365 days of announcing himself as a poet is a perfect example of this.

It is in our nature to want to do something “big.” I put that in quotes because the grandiosity matters far less than the conviction that we feel for the thing. For David Whyte’s nephew, “big” might just mean fixing washing machines with the sense of passion and fervor he felt sitting in the back of his uncle’s truck and having the region of his brain come online as a kid. But the important thing here is not to mistake ambition for the invigoration that emerges when you have a well-selected challenge set out for you.

This summer has been intoxicatingly fun and full of distractions. As it nears its end, I feel myself craving the order of the fall. But I also feel a calling towards a new big challenge, a new sense of adventure. I am watching metaphorical whaling videos again. I am at a moment of wanting something different, something daunting, a challenge that excites me and scares me simultaneously. Maybe you feel the same. And if so, this serves as a reminder to not stifle a ripe opportunity for self-exploration with an overcorrection towards ambition, rigidity, and discipline which is the very thing that took us so far from our memories of childhood joy in the first place.

I’ll leave you with a few questions.

1. Where is your “Lake Powell?”

2. What weird stuff did you love doing as a kid that was special to you? (The more specific and embarrassing you allow yourself to be around this, the better.)

3. If you were to commit to doing a small act every single day in pursuit of a genuine joy of yours, what would it be?

4. If you were to announce yourself to the world as something (in the same way that Whyte announced himself to the world as a poet), what would it be?

And finally, here are a few lines from one of my favorite poems, What to Remember When Waking by David Whyte.

you are not
a troubled guest
on this earth,
you are not
an accident
amidst other accidents
you were invited
from another greater
night
than the one
from which
you have just emerged.

That’s all for today. Thank you so much for Getting Caught Up in Char’s Web with me this week!

Thank you so much, Gia, for the beautiful artwork for today’s newsletter. PSA, LA people!!! Gia’s having a show on Sept 10th. Do not miss this opportunity to witness the beauty of her and her art in this special setting!! See the flyer below for details.

With so much love,

Charlotte

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All past issues of Char’s Web are available for reading here. A few samples below…

#1: A first of many.

#12: Attraction of inspiration versus deprivation.

#42: Read your way to mastery.

#43: The slobs I peeled off the streets.

Some housekeeping…

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