This is a note to self, a journal of sorts. You might find it relevant too…
Years ago, as an inexperienced learner driver with no more than a few hours of practice under my belt, I booked an evening driving lesson with my instructor. It was the first time I would be driving without the safety of daylight. The driving instructor picked me up from home in the early evening. Things got real when he drove us to a rather busy, yet narrow road, replete with steady rush hour traffic. I remember being terrified, wracked with nerves, and lacking confidence as he removed the keys from the ignition and handed them to me in the passenger seat, suggesting that we trade places. It was my turn to take the wheel. There I was, on my first nighttime drive, and I didn’t have the comfort or the safety that an abandoned industrial road might have provided. Rather, to my left, I had a steady stream of cars coming my way, and to my right, there was a rather imposing stone wall of a countryside farm.
This was where my positional discipline on the road was really tested. In the sessions leading up to that day’s lesson, I and my instructor both acknowledged that one of the areas I needed to work on was learning to stay in the centre of the road (keep in mind this was in the very early days of my driving journey). During my first few lessons, when we were on wide enough roads, I sought comfort in the fact that I had some wiggle room. I could afford to veer an inch or so from the centre of the road and not jeopardise anyone’s life, or my own. But that evening, on that narrow country road with busy oncoming traffic, failing to maintain my central position could have made the difference between brushing against the stone wall on my right, or colliding with oncoming traffic on my left. I just had to stay bang on in the centre.
There was hardly a glimmer of moonlight in the early evening winter sky, and seeing as we were on the scenic country roads on the outskirts of Dundee, Scotland, there were no traces of the usual streetlights that lit up the inner city. Needless to say, it was pitch black by this point, and so to maintain a central position in my lane, I devised a strategy in my mind. I put the keys in the ignition, edged out of the layby when it was safe, and started driving on the road. I drove for about a minute until my instructor reached for the steering wheel from the passenger seat and nudged it in the other direction. I took a deep breath and kept on going, and it happened again. It happened a third time. And then the fourth time, it was less of a gentle nudge and more of a yanking motion, because that time, I had come dangerously close to driving our car over the middle of the road into the other lane.
By this point, having driven for no more than 3 minutes as I recall, my instructor insisted that I pull off by the side of the road for a chat. He asked what was wrong, what was going through my mind. Then I explained my strategy. I figured I would look at the headlights of the oncoming cars. My rationale was that I could use the other cars’ lights to assess their positions and thus course-correct my position in comparison. The logic made sense in my mind, that if I could see the other cars, then all I had to do was not drive into their lane. I told him I was looking at the oncoming cars in the other lane to make sure I didn’t hit them. That’s what I was supposed to do, right?
With some grace, I suspect all the grace he could muster, he smiled when perhaps what he really wanted to do was smack me on the back of the head. Then, with his thick Dundonian accent, he said something to the tune of the following…
‘Nah mate, that’s the worst thing you can do, because you will drive towards where you look. What you want to do is look at the centre of the road in front of you, focus on that single point right above your steering wheel. Do that, and you’ll drive straight! Okay wee man?’
In hindsight, it makes so much sense now, but at the time, it was just about the most unintuitive thing he could have said to me, And yet, when we got back on the road and I fixed my gaze on the centre of my lane, right in front of me as he suggested, I found myself driving straight with confidence for the first time ever, even in the dark, even with oncoming rush hour traffic, even on narrow, bendy roads with cobbles and stones and fences.
Those words, Stewart’s words, might as well have been magic, words that would go on to serve me well from then on. But this isn’t a driving blog. If you’re a regular reader, by now you know the drill. This is a creative blog, so this is the part of the piece where I ask and attempt to answer the following question: What does this little anecdote have to do with art?
You see, there’s a little thing called target fixation. This is a phenomenon where the act of focusing on an obstacle or hazard you’re trying to avoid, increases the likelihood of inadvertently gravitating towards, and eventually hitting that obstacle. In other words, say there’s something in your path you would like to steer clear of, the more you look at that thing (as opposed to the path itself), the more likely you are to hit it. One of my favourite artists, Austin Kleon, puts it brilliantly: where you look is where you go. I read a piece from him this week and it took me back to the anecdote I shared at the start of this post.
Driving is a lot like creating art, where you look is where you go. There’s a tendency to live life in a constant mode of obstacle avoidance. Just as I thought the right thing to do was to focus on the oncoming cars so as not to hit them, so too I find that I’m tempted to focus on the obstacles on my creative journey so I don’t collide with them. There’s a temptation to act in certain ways because we’re scared of failure, and we do things to avoid failure at all costs. We fixate on problems and worry about things that haven’t even happened yet. But this practice is inimical to our goals in the long run. Rather than fixating on obstacles, it behoves us to focus on the sorts of outcomes we wish to achieve. It pays to focus on our plans, and our systems for actualising those plans, rather than expending energy on all the obstacles in the path, and all the things that could go wrong.
This is easier said than done, admittedly. As with many things, it requires a lot of mental practice, and it involves doing the work and putting the reps in. An idea might be to imbibe this practice in our day-to-day lives for the small things, so that we may develop some sort of muscle memory that we can leverage when the big situations come around.
Lately, I’ve been trying to do this with my live performances. For instance, rather than worrying about forgetting the lyrics to the new song I’m trying out at a gig, it pays me to focus on the feeling I want to create and the vibe I want to leave the audience with. Now, this doesn’t mean I won’t end up forgetting the lyrics, but it does make it less likely. And even when I do forget the lyrics, I can still go on to create the vibe and the feeling, because, at the end of the day, that’s what people really remember. Forgetting a line here or there pales in comparison to the whole feeling of a song. This is reminiscent of that saying often attributed to Maya Angelou, that…
‘People may forget what you said, they may forget what you did, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel.’
I recognise that the above is quite a broad statement that was undoubtedly uttered in a different context, but if I may repurpose it for a moment, I’ll say that the audience may forget that line you stuttered, they may forget that bum note you hit, but they’ll hardly forget how your song made them feel. You can repurpose this for other kinds of performance arts and creative processes, be it dancing, acting, writing, or painting. It all boils down to one thing. It pays to focus on what we want to achieve, rather than fixating on what we want to avoid. On reflection, this idea that you go where you look is so intuitive, it’s no wonder public discourse is replete with expressions that espouse it…
‘Keep your eyes on the ball’
‘Keep your eyes on the road’
‘Keep your eyes on the prize’
If I may contribute one small variant to the plethora of expressions in the public domain, it’ll be this: keep your eyes on the art.
PS: Just a reminder that my latest record, All Behind is out now, everywhere. You can listen to it on several platforms. Please share it with a friend, share it with your social networks, and consider subscribing to the newsletter (below), my YouTube channel, or wherever else you listen to music.