I remember the time while watching a gymnastics event in my childhood the commentator asked himself : “I wonder what is going through her mind as she does that triple back flip with one hand behind her back.” My father remarked “that’s why she is a gymnast .. so that she can escape from thinking at least for those moments it takes to perform.”
While I was being photographed by a young film graduate the other day I came across a situation where I was performing for the camera. I started by going through the motions of looking busy, moving across the painting with seeming deliberate intention and purpose. I was aware of the camera watching me and became a model of creative activity, taking a meta position, while maintaining some control of where marks were being made but without concern that the end result of the completed piece was going to be judged by the camera’s eye. It was an interesting state that today I find I can repeat to achieve a positive altered state.
I think the practise of being able to decide what mental position you are occupying, being aware, is how one can gain enjoyment from looking at writers, painters, and creatives in the spaces they do their stuff in. The mystique of it.. their habits and their lifestyle are all cloaks that we could imagine trying on ourselves. In being another looking in at the creative trappings of a different world one can imagine being as they are in their version of first position. Watching the resolved determination or effect of just being in creative flow (Mihail Csikszentmihalyi) makes heroes of those we hanker after ‘being like’.