Pursuit

I often conflate the results I’m getting with my effort, and I forget that each action you take shapes you slowly—how a river carves a canyon with water lapping against the hard rock—your brain is shaped the same, each groove carved by you and each action you take.

Pursuit without results feels like insanity.

When you act and feel the friction between what you’re trying to get your body to do and what it wants to do - that’s the biggest battle of them all - the artist with his chisel pushed against the marble, face sheening with sweat from effort. Pounding, pushing, to create the smallest crevice. Hammering away, away and away again to achieve little, to achieve almost nothing. To the naked eye, it looks like a man pounding rock with nothing to show for it; just a measly sliver of a crack.

It looks so incredibly worthless that many, myself included at times, scoff at him for even trying. It’s like watching a man trying to draw water from a rock. So we do what we do with all people we deem insane: we watch, we judge, perhaps we silently mock.

But that is what pursuit is.

Pursuit is pounding, clawing, chiseling every day despite it appearing it’s leading to nothing. Sore hands, meaningless indentations, some strange looks from onlookers and many feelings of doubt: for years and with zero promise of a potential result.

That is pursuit.

Because to sculpt David you have to see it first.

Unfinished, even Michelangelo’s works seem… strange. It’s just not quite right.

Because they need work. They require pursuit.

So you get up, and you pursue anyway. To create your own David.

Picking up your chisel, your hammer, sitting in a room full of crystallized quarry dust, knowing deep down that this perfectly smooth block of concrete will be metamorphosed into your creation. By your will. Each day. Over and over again.

It took 3 years for Michelangelo to sculpt David — including many years of building his skill prior where he sculpted The Pieta, the Bacchus and more.

You are your own David. What you make will be your creation. It will feel meaningless, it will feel long, it will feel messy, it will feel disinteresting, it will feel hard.

But that is pursuit.

Pursuit offers the promise of difficult work with no promise of a guaranteed result.

And that’s what makes pursuing anything meaningful. That’s what makes perseverance so great.

So pursue. Please, pursue.

You are sculpting your David with each repeated raising and lowering of the hammer. The load: cognitive and physical both, is part of the process.

- Arry Pandher