I’m at the bus station, waiting to board a bus that will depart in an hour. This was the first bus available since I didn’t buy a ticket beforehand.
I’m travelling to Mexico City in order to legalize some document in order to obtain a work visa for Spain. I won’t bore the reader with the bureaucratic details involved, instead I will write about something that has been on my mind.
Some days ago I was listening to Rick Rubin’s interview to Steven Pressfield on Rick’s excellent podcast, Tetragrammaton. Steve mentioned that he writes every day in the direction to a particular project. I wondered if I could do this, to have a writing project to which I could contribute every day, instead of keeping this sort of journal. Which project would this be?
Another topic they touched upon is that sometimes we feel as if we had a book inside of us which needs to be expressed. Putting these two together, I came to think: if I were to write every day in the direction of a project, what would this be?
For many years I’ve been trying to build bridges between spirituality and design, which has been more tricky than one would expect. Spirituality is a loaded term which I often hesitate to define, knowledge of it comes from experience rather than an intellectual transfer of knowledge.
The conversation between Rick and Steven was spiritual in nature, even though the word spiritual wasn’t even mentioned. Rick speaks about Source while Steven speaks about the Muse, as the driving force behind the creative impulse. Us designers work very differently from artists in this regard: we research, integrate, prototype, research again, and then iterate until we reach a particular aim. Artists don’t completely do away with this methodology, but it happens in the background, and the aim is more of a theme rather than a target.
The main challenge in writing about a spiritual way of designing — as opposed to an intellectual way of designing, is to convince the reader that they possess spirit. Again, the challenge is to induce an experience of spirit rather than making an intellectual case out of it. Perhaps an abbreviated secular model of St. Ignatius Spiritual Exercises would work. But this is asking too much.
First let’s put aside the term spirit, let us imagine that we are trying to define something within us, which is not conscious, which directs our actions towards a purpose which is outside ourselves. Since it is unconscious and within us, we cannot look directly at it, we can only see its effects.
The time to board the bus is approaching and I have gotten nowhere with this stream of thought. I will take this question on the ride: “How do I demonstrate that you possess a spirit?”.