Frustration

Our growth is a continuous creative act.

Frustration is a necessary stage in all creativity, but in life as in art, it can be like squeezing a stone, expecting blood. Nothing comes. There is no sign our effort has any effect.

Yet this pain’s necessary, to force us into exasperated experiment with living.

We become intimate with that stony resistance, play with it, and change our aim. Freed from the myopia of frustration, we can look at all the hard stones we have collected by living and see them afresh.

Seeing frustration in a new way gives us a chance to transform. The stone might open not with a squeeze but a sharp focussed tap, to reveal its gem.

Or we may need to drop the stone altogether, knowing that we were never to squeeze blood from it, but simply to know it. Drop it, lift our eyes and see how we can move again.