It's time for me to get ready for the incubation phase of the Dwelve creative process next (looooong) weekend. (By the way, isn't it quite auspicious that it's purportedly Buddha's birthday and a total solar ecplise occurs on April 8th - the first evening of the incubation "advance" ?)
It seems absurd to be taking all this time off. We're told to hurry up and be creative. Heck, if that works for you more power to you. A friend pointed out this passage in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that gets to the heart of incubating ideas as a practice towards attainment of stark clarity and illumination. And gumption.
I like the word “gumption” because it’s so homely and so forlorn and so out of style it looks like it needs a friend and isn’t likely to reject anyone who comes along. It’s an old Scottish world, once used a lot by pioneers, but which like “kin,” seems to have all but dropped out of use. I like it also because it describes exactly what happens to someone who connects with Quality. He gets filled with gumption.
The Greeks called it enthousiasmos, the root of “enthusiasm,” which means literally “filled with theos,” or God, or Quality. See how that fits?
A person filled with gumption doesn’t sit around dissipating and stewing about things. He’s at the front of the train of his own awareness, watching to see what’s up the track and meeting it when it comes. That’s gumption…The gumption-filling process occurs when one is quiet long enough to see and hear and feel the real universe, not just one’s own stale opinions about it. But it’s nothing exotic. That’s why I like the word.
You see it often in people who return from long, quiet fishing trips. Often they’re a little defensive about having put so much time to “no account” because there’s no intellectual justification for what they’ve been doing. But the returned fisherman usually has a peculiar abundance of gumption, usually for the very same things he was sick to death of a few weeks before. He hasn’t been wasting time. It’s only our limited cultural viewpoint that makes it seem so. – Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Chapter 26)
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