Everyday Creative

Chapter TwoThe Obstacle Is The Way

Make your work a work of art

Imagine you’re driving a Mustang convertible on a five-lane freeway at no more than 20 kilometres per hour. You’re surrounded by thousands of other cars, filled with people who look just like you. Everyone is jostling for position, switching in and out of lanes, never really progressing.

Your boss is sitting next to you, shouting loudly and at length about the party you’re heading to. They keep describing how important it is you get there on time and how incredible it will be when you arrive.

The car’s GPS, which has the party’s coordinates locked in, keeps beeping at you to get off the freeway and head to the outer suburbs. But whenever you attempt to exit, the boss tells you to stay in your lane. ‘Just keep going a little while longer’, they say, ‘We’ll get the next one’.

With every extra kilometre that you’re trapped on that freeway, the soul-crushing repetition, frustrating mixed messages and suffocating lack of agency begin to take their toll. You switch on the cruise control. You switch off your passion for the promise of the party. You tune out of your boss’s one-way conversation and tune in to what you have planned for the weekend.

Despite the increasing number of street signs you pass that say ‘wrong way’, ‘freeway end ahead’, ‘continue at your own risk’, you just keep on driving. Maintaining compliance. Accepting your fate. Resigned to the road ahead.

Sound familiar? This is how a friend of mine described ...