My First Week with The Artist’s Way
A Journey into the Creative Life
I have never gravitated towards “self-help” books. Similarly, I was trying to remember the last time I read a book strictly in the “inspirational” category, as I usually take my inspiration from the likes of Amy Dorrit and the many fictional heroes and heroines that make me want to live in a better spirit. For me, Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Georges Bernanos, or C.S. Lewis are “inspirational.” Perhaps the closest I’ve come lately to “inspirational” is a collection of writings of Henri Nouwen on caregiving. I’ll always choose (and recently have) a treatise on theology, for example, over a book with a title like The Power of Positive Thinking. I’ll take a book or a collection of essays related to a certain topic—e.g. on the psalms or on the subject of poverty in the spiritual life—over 12 Steps to Financial Freedom, worthy as the premise of all these kinds of books are, and much as I can glean wisdom from hearing about the essential argument.
I appreciate the delving into interesting or particularly difficult questions that takes an author’s whole framework of understanding, reading, and background to tackle. Many “self-help” books are probably just that; but so often there is a jingoism or a “formula” to it that makes it sound as though only one best or proven way to do...whatever it is. When I think of “self-help” books I think of the magazines that populate the checkout racks, catering to everything in us that wants a change, a “makeover” of one sort or another. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But frankly, though I always appreciate practical tips and will gladly take the highlights in bullet points, I’d rather read three hundred pages about the psychology of Robespierre than to read the same amount in trying to alter my own. My own, I obstinately think, is better altered by history and literature.
So, what I’ve started doing this past week, and will be doing for the next eleven weeks, is, for me, an anomaly.
