Creation over Consumption
Knowledge without art is of little worth
For a long time, I was terribly and passionately involved in digesting as much material as possible, in accumulating as much knowledge as I could manage, and for a while, I derived a certain sense of well-being from the practice. Soon enough, something was becoming increasingly apparent to me. It was never enough, and it was never going to be enough in the future, either. The idea that the accumulation of knowledge – through books or otherwise – will ultimately lead me down an end was a falsehood, and one which I fortunately grasped early on. It is very easy to fall into the trap of unending consumption, to the point where you start to feel accomplished not so much from using what you’ve learned to produce something meaningful, but from mere learning, which is useless if it isn’t applied with some singularity.
Consumption is a trick of the mind, it misleads you into thinking you’re making progress, because the acquisition of a new idea generates a pleasant feeling, which immediately lifts your spirit – you can easily see why people craving knowledge are seized by learning, in that their enthusiasm and willingness to produce is often curtailed by their fixation with accumulating more and more knowledge, until they reach a state of vain superabundance. Unless you’re applying what you’ve learned into something productive, you’re not actually learning. To actually learn, you must absorb and embody the knowledge by taking the time out to use it. If you don’t use it, you didn’t learn.
Before anything, learning should teach you that the practice is only as useful as your ability to carry it away from the study room – that is how you gather experience, which is synthesized knowledge accumulated over a series of trials and errors. Unending consumption deflects wisdom itself, and thus renders the aim of learning purposeless. Let us then turn our priorities on their head, and focus our precious attention on what truly matters: production. Production is where implementation occurs. Production is where you selectively pick out the knowledge you gathered, filter it through a sieve, and cleverly execute your task. Some mistakes will be made no doubt, but one thing is for certain. You will discover what works for you personally, and what could be dispensed with immediately. This is a crucial stepping stone for a man who has his priorities straightened out.
You don’t want to waste your time doing things that make you unproductive, and at the same time, you want to spend your time building something meaningful that makes you fulfilled – to find out what stirs your soul you must give birth to new art, and do not so much concern yourself with the risk of creating inadequate work. Diligence pays, attention pays, but frequent failure is inevitable in the beginning, and will periodically happen once you start striving uphill. We spend so much time ruminating over what could be and what is, but so little time carrying out what should be carried! Creation and art is where it’s at, that is the true call to purpose. If you’re not creating, you’re crumbling, and those who crumble are soon crushed.
You have to occasionally call to mind this distant fact – which we often like to forget: our time here is extremely finite, and tends to hasten its pace as we grow older. You don’t want to waste a great portion of your life in negligence, thinking you’re somehow unsusceptible to death, then failing to carry out what you worked so diligently to acquire. Let us prioritize, above all, the importance of creation over consumption, for that is where we hone our craft. You don’t want to end up with a swollen stomach due to a lack of digestion. And the only way to digest what you consume is by being of service to yourself and creating, violently, passionately, endlessly.
If your aim is to make living itself an art, you must create and experience and inculcate beauty in your everyday living, not sit by the bureau 10 hours a day reading novels. It is useful to allocate yourself time to read and write and relish your own solitude, but you absolutely must grant yourself the privilege to create more than you consume, for that is where the richness of life becomes immanent. We must breed new life into being, and we do that by producing and honing and mastering. Let us never deviate from what’s most advantageous and invaluable by nature.
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