Beginnings

Boy, beginnings can be tough. The cursor blinks, awaits. Forget what Gustave Flaubert says about using le mot juste, sometimes finding an ordinary word is difficult enough. There's an apocryphal tale in which Michelangelo explains his process of sculpting his masterwork: Just chip away all the marble that does not look like David. Lucky him, I suppose. I identify more with Ernest Hemingway when he describes the effort needed in his work: "Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges." The blank canvas ready for the initial brushstroke, an undulating beat anticipating the first verse, that cursor, oh that expectant cursor: The hard in the start can be humbling.

This year continues to offer many beginnings, unanticipated or otherwise. It can seem as if the assurances of certainty. fabricated by the trains that runs on time, the electricity that streams from outlets on demand, the internet that reliably connects you to Zoom, are really made of mere Papier-maché construction. At the first hint of water it falls apart and the flux held within is released. Up now feels like down, left looks like right, the way we used to work and live and travel and the comforts we may have been taking for granted feel like quaint souvenirs from a different era. Yet the poet Maya Angelou issued these lines many years ago: 

Another time I erected a

mansion, the windows shining

like mirrors

and the walls were hung

with rich tapestry, but

the earth shook with a

slight tremor, and the walls gave way, the floors opened

and my castle fell into pieces around my feet.

Her words could have be just as easily been written yesterday. It certainly feels like much is giving way. I shake my head and chuckle, a coping mechanism I suppose, when I think of the meme of Doc Brown telling Marty McFly, to never, under any circumstances, set the DeLorean to the year 2020. Not sure how I feel about the one that points out that the dystopian Mad Max movie was set in the year 2021. I too might have avoided 2020 if given the choice, like skipping past the 3rd season of Lost, but I sincerely hope we don’t see the Road Warriors zipping up and down the highways and byways and Thunderdomes speckled into REIT holdings next year.

Sometime mid-pandemic I happened upon an interview of Pharrell Williams at an oasis-like studio aptly named Shangri-La. Despite the spa-like backdrop and the always smooth Mr. Williams, I was transfixed by the big bearded interviewer dressed in cotton shorts and a white Hanes t-shirt. The man spoke with the soothing voice of a radio DJ and I learned he was the legendary producer Rick Rubin of Def Jam fame, a producer whose musical catalog I was more familiar than with than with producer himself. Mr. Rubin looks like the kind of dude John Lennon might have chilled with when he was making his pilgrimages to India and yet is O.G.-enough to have been able to throw-down with the likes of Eminem, Metallica, Jay Z, and the Beastie Boys. 

I then tumbled down the Rick Rubin rabbit-hole trying to learn as much as I could about him and found Malcolm Gladwell’s interview of Mr. Rubin. In the intro, Mr. Gladwell explains that the first interview was held at Shangri-La but that he and Mr. Rubin have had to reconvene at a rental house for the second session. As the follow up discussion transpires, the Woolsey wildfires are ravaging Ventura County and Mr. Rubin’s house is located in an area shaded purple on a map, signifying that it had burned down. It is unclear, however, whether Mr. Rubin's Shangri-La studio still stands as it rests at the margin of the purpling expanse. Ordered to evacuate, Mr. Rubin gathers a few things and leaves with his family. Yet he is sanguine when asked about the prospect of losing his properties to the fires:

In a way it feels like a potential for a clean start. When I moved from in-town, I lived in a big old Spanish house filled with antiques, and when I moved to Malibu I moved to this very empty Zen house and that felt good. This seems like a more radical version of that.

A more radical version of a clean start? That’s certainly one way, definitely radical, to look at the possibility of losing much of what you have and starting over.

Had I been worrying about the fate of my home and business, I doubt I would have had Mr. Rubin's equanimity, his preternaturally calm perspective. (I would have likely been looking through my insurance policy and wishing, perhaps, that I had Patrick Mahomes' insurance agent.) Maybe creative types like Mr. Rubin are just predisposed to clean starts. He, after all, is a producer that musicians turn to in order to help them find their next work, their best work. It's not enough to recycle the chords and beats from old albums and try to repeat past successes; tired formulas often lead to bad albums. It's better to start afresh, find where the artist is at that point in time as Mr. Rubin suggests:

A great piece of work is a chapter or a moment in your life. If you go past that and into the next moment of your life, the music is going to change.

It's about starting where you are and working with what you have at the moment. He's rather Heraclitean in belief that each work has a time and place. Moreover, Mr. Rubin doesn't push it. His process almost sounds mystical in nature:

I try to imagine what [the artist] at their best is, and then try to set up whatever situations we can allow that to happen. Because we never have any control over it happening. It’s a frustrating job in many respects because it’s like fishing—you can go out fishing, but you can’t say, ‘I’m going to catch three fish today.’ We have very little control over this process. It’s magic.

Magic notwithstanding, beginnings are often met with anxiety and dread. What if I can't do it again? How on earth am I am going to do it? What if I don't have what it takes? That inner critic can be loud and quite convincing and maybe there are some outer critics that are equally effective as well. As the writing instructor Stephen Koch advises:

Beginning again is hard, and it can be frightening. We never begin again at the old starting point and rarely reach the old answers. To experience this uncertainty at any stage of life is troubling....

Yet starting is what many of us have been asked to do this year, whether the starts are clean or messy. And with respect to these starts, Mr. Koch offers, perhaps, a more positive way of looking at the lack of certainty nestled in beginnings:

...but [uncertainty] is also a great and wonderful thing. We are speaking about the uncertainty of promise, the anxious tentative hope out of which everything of value must come.

There is something, perhaps, to be found in the “uncertainty of promise” and that “anxious tentative hope” in the starts. As Shunruyu Suzuki says, "In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few." An open mind ready to meet such possibilities and potentialities may be the condition precedent needed to create the conditions that can help find that magic to which Mr. Rubin refers, An aid to the process of remaking the unknown. As they might have said in the Southern one-stoplight town I went to school: “There’s a blessin’ in every lesson, and a lesson in every blessin’,” and being ready for and accepting of beginnings is one of the biggest lessons I've learned this year, even if it hasn't always felt like a blessing. Having said all of that, if anyone happens to have the syllabus for the upper-level course known as Year 2020, would you mind sharing it with me? I wouldn't mind a head's up as to the next test.

Please note that the opinions expressed herein are mine and mine alone and do not represent the opinions of and are definitely not endorsed by my employer Raymond James. Thanks!