Learn To Love the Questions Themselves
4 Steps to Overcome Doubt and Actually Do It.
“Learn to be patient with all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke
I returned to my studio at the start of the year and hit a wall.
Why the hell am I feeling like this?
It took me a couple of days to figure out what was going on, and not before I’d tormented myself with a cacophony of awful internal self-speak.
A week later, I’ve worked through this miniature saga — more than that — I’ve transformed my state of mind.
Today, I want to talk about how I pulled myself together.
These three ideas will help any of you struggling with old or new projects at the start of this year.
If you’d like to read why I felt like that, you can read about it in this post in my Creative Journal.
1) What Is The Nameless Fear?
So many of us carry something we want to do in our chest — yet too few of us pursue it.
While not doing it, we arm ourselves with a society of excuses.
These are usually based on time, money, and resources.
Yet here’s the brutal reality:
We all have one life.
We do it, or we don’t do it.
Ask yourself:
What is your nameless fear?
You think of it immediately.
Or you may feel a fog over it — but sense it out there, somewhere in the darkness.
That is no matter — but you need a strategy to get to it.
That is why I write.
Writing helps me break down the wall between my subconscious feelings and my activated mind.
At any one time, there is always something holding us back.
To attack it, you have to see the enemy.
Most of us have to pull that enemy out of the void.
Only then can you face him.
Yes, you may feel like David before Goliath.
But then you grip your sling, and you pick up your pebble.
That pebble represents your courage.
And it is all you need before what you are most afraid of.
2) Learn To Love the Questions Themselves
The trouble many of us have is that we are willing to tolerate the fog between what we dream of doing and what it takes to actually do it.
That’s why we distract ourselves.
Because it prevents us from having to hear our own thought.
We know we can take steps to attack our own distraction. But we’d rather give ourselves over to it than take control.
Why?
Because we fool ourselves into thinking that it’s easier to scroll, browse, and surf than actually risking hearing ourselves.
And we can never do something if we recede before our fears.
When I entered the studio, I was confronted with exactly what I wasn’t expecting.
I ended last year on a high.
I had written and recorded my 12 songs.
I had overcome my writer’s block, the fear of the silent room, and the sacrifice of pursuing real-world things to see if I had music left in me.
Yet answering those questions was only the first stage of this journey.
I’d just got through Level 1.
Level 2 comes with an entirely new set of questions:
Am I actually trying to become a professional musician again?
What was the purpose of writing the songs?
How do I get the songs out into the world?
Should I start contacting the industry or trust my gut and do it solo?
Dam, how the hell do I actually play these songs?
Has the marketplace not already determined my place in its lower tier?
Can I actually sing?
For two days, I wrestled with these questions — they were some of my own nameless fears.
In my room at Mahalla, I am brutally honest with myself.
I do not yet have any answers to the above questions. But I have, in Rilke’s words, learned to love the questions themselves.
The reasons we are afraid may vary from person to person.
It may involve posting one’s work on social media, the burden of potential failure, or the weight of what friends or family will say if one changes course.
Here’s the thing:
Once you uncover your fear, it no longer dominates you.
Rather, it becomes your instructor.
3) Inside Doubt Lies Revelation
In hearing my own doubts, I realised one incredibly important thing:
I am not yet where I want to be.
Why should we fear this?!
The doubt was serving me with a series of revelations.
If I am not where I would like to be, then what do I need to do to be wherever this mythical place is?
Then I realised:
I had arrived in my studio, wanting my progress to be easy.
I was experiencing resistance.
Resistance to what?
To the fact I need to do a whole lot of work.
First, to bring my musicality to a level where I can potentially play publicly again.
Second, to figure out how I can release these songs in a way that I am proud of (and which gives them a fighting chance to be heard)
Recognising all of this brought me great peace.
OK.
My fear was not so scary after all.
The bogeyman doesn’t come to destroy us. He comes to bring us to ourselves.
The doubts contain revelations.
Each one is precious.
But you can only hear their instructions if you are willing to surrender yourself to them.
That does not mean giving up.
It means giving up.
If I want to play one of the songs in a key I don’t know, then I just have to learn the dam key.
I can resist that it will take me hours and hours of work.
Or I can make that one of my miniature challenges, do the work and grow through it.
Do it or don’t do it.
Distraction helps us dilute how brutally simple life is — and how honestly it speaks to us.
You learn to play the song or don’t.
4) Do The Work
You’ve clarified the questions.
Now, it is time to start looking for answers.
How do you do this?
During my wobbly few days, it became painstakingly clear that I was avoiding certain work because I hadn’t yet head to learn new things.
Working out how to distribute my own music on streaming platforms
Deciding if I will do the artwork myself and then how.
Figuring out a promotional system that I can apply weekly
Creating the assets for the release (music videos, reels, social media, etc)
Playlist pitching
Media outreach?
Licensing opportunities?
Budget planning?
As you can see, lists can quickly overwhelm.
Moreover, we find ourselves crushed by the weight of requirements to do any project professionally.
That’s why we get so utterly overwhelmed — the dream gets crushed through the steps required to concretise it.
Here’s how I’m dealing with it:
Resolve to do the work
Don’t do it all at once
Prioritise one thing you don’t feel like doing every morning
Accept that learning new things takes time
Set a clear goal for each miniature step
Settle in for the long-term
An example:
My loose plan is to release a song per month this year.
To do that, I have to take control of my uploading.
I researched, spoke to contacts and settled on using Distrokid.
I’ve figured out the platform and the assets I need.
Next, it’s time to get the songs uploaded and set up.
A few days ago, during my wobble, I wanted someone else to do it for me.
It’s a typical response when we feel overwhelmed or don’t feel we have the knowledge yet to do something.
We want to displace responsibility from ourselves and onto a guardian figure.
In my room, I realised this:
No one is coming to help you.
It landed like a meteor.
But its shockwave woke me up.
My new music is asking two things of me:
a) Improve as a musician
b) Become my manager
Roger that!
5) This Is Your Quest
I feel tingly in my stomach.
I feel small before my path.
I am too committed to turn back.
This set of songs started as a personal mission. I felt something calling out to me, but I had no idea if or how to get to it.
Now that I have the songs, I know the journey is nowhere near complete.
I know that I have to put them out — that I want to put them out.
But to put them out means taking a risk on life again.
I am not jumping too far forward at this stage.
I am entirely unattached to outcomes — the fulfilment is in the doing itself for me — that is where life happens.
And I feel, somehow, within its heart, alive in my days.
There is a mystery which incubates inside us.
Trying to get to these songs was my effort to give them form.
And now that I’ve touched that little part of the mystery, I have been energised by it.
That is transformative power latent in the mystery — and why we are ever attracted to it.
Yet, in touching it, you realise something else.
That the journey is not only one inward.
It must be fulfilled outwards, too.
I resisted at the start of the year because I hadn’t anticipated this stage.
Yes, loosely, I imagined I’d get the songs out somehow.
But I never realised that the songs would ask me to renew my relationship with the world.
The mystery is not passive but expansive, energy-filled, bursting with life.
Like the cosmic nothing at the start of things — it has its own nature and wants to express itself.
Damn.
Out doubts come not to cajole us.
They come as a provocation.
Who might you be if you dared to listen to it?
That is not just a question:
It is your quest.
New YouTube Video:
Learn To Love the Questions Themselves
DO THE WORK
GET LEARNING
START FIGURING STUFF OUT
You need to process where you were to get to where you are
Each stage is its own challenge
There will always be resistance
Every Day Is A New Opportunity
Workshop
Fear
Doubt As Revelation
HUMBLE YOURSELF