Forget about Good

This past week, I took on the second recommendation from the "Incomplete Manifesto for Growth" by Bruce Mau:

"Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you'll never have real growth."

This was very difficult to do. The week was an emotional roller coaster. I was amazed by how many things and how easily I judged or prejudge something to be good or bad. Which brought me to my first realization. To forget about good, I also have to forget about bad. What does that leave? For me, the only thing left was "it is" or "doing." I spent a lot of time (and I suppose I have in the past as well) critiquing, judging, contemplating, or editorializing. This is good. This is bad. All that time I was "evaluating" "goodness" or "badness" was time I could have been doing. I wonder if I used it as a passive aggressive way to procrastinate.

So, nothing is good or bad. Okay, I can work with that I told myself. I began to work. I found it difficult to proceed. I had deeply ingrained inside me that my work especially had to fall into one of the two categories. When I "couldn't" place my work into a good bucket or bad bucket, that left me with just do it, finish it and notice what I like and what I dislike. Like and dislike are different from good or bad. These are emotions. Forgetting about good freed me in a way to see how I felt or how my paintings were impacting me. This is where the roller coaster came in. I had emotions. I wasn't a factory with a strict quality control program. It didn't matter if a piece didn't live up to standards because the standard had changed. The new standard was based on trying, doing and completing. Given I had spend many years of my professional life in quality control type jobs, I found this extremely difficult and began to question everything.

What is the impact if I expand "forget about good" to everything else in my life? Is there really such a thing as a bad decision? If I don't beat myself up for doing something wrong or congratulate myself for doing it right, what does that mean? It means it opens me up for growth, new opportunities or exploration. I can recognize what I like and what I don't like without something being good or bad. I can notice my feelings about a situation or object, and based on who I am and what I want out of life, determine my next move. It freed me to action (or complete inaction but that didn't last very long.)

One of the biggest things about good and bad is that I realized that most of the criteria I used for judging was external. It was other people's standards, other people's good and bad that I have learn, heard and collected over the years. This was the second hill of the roller coaster. I began to question those standards. Do I like it (or dislike it) or is this a voice from my past telling me what to think/do/act? Nine times out of ten, it was some one's voice in my head. What a pisser! All these years I considered myself an independent thinker and I felt I had been brainwashed. I ended the week with a mini-exorcism attempting to rid myself of these foreign ideas searching for my own. It didn't work. Other's ideas and standards are still there but I think I'm just a little bit better at recognizing when they start yelling at me "this painting is not your best work" or "this one is a masterpiece." My paintings are neither, according to me. They are tools for me to grow and explore and create. I'll let others judge them.

By the end of the week when things began to settle down, I experienced something incredible. I received four images for paintings. I quickly sketched them in my book and this morning began working on two of them. What a blessing! The painters block I had been experiencing broke open, I think partly because I was willing to take a chance without worrying about it's inherent "goodness."

I highly recommend trying "forget the good." But beware of the box that you may be opening. Trust me, stuff with come out, demons and angels alike. It will impact you. I would say for the better but I'm forgetting the good. So let's just say, it will impact you.

This week, I am tackling the third recommendation from the Manifesto:

"Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we've already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there."

I had no idea what I was getting into when I decided to start this experiment of living the "Incomplete Manifesto." This is bigger than I ever imagined and only Heaven knows where the path will lead. So far, it has been a great experience. I'm glad I decided to do this.