Which way you gonna jump?

One night, over dinner, my friend Randy (a psychological counselor) and I were chatting.  I threw him a hypothetical question.

“If a guy comes to your office and says he feels like, say…a chicken sitting on a window sill, what sort of therapy do you offer for this guy?” I asked. Randy sat staring at the moonlight skittering across the surface of glass of sparkling water. After a moment of swirling, he looked up, grinning, “I’d ask him: ‘Well, chicken, which way you gonna jump?’”  

And I instantly saw his point: No matter the situation, there are choices in reaction. And often, we have more choices than we think.

Even the guy convinced that he’s a chicken on a windowsill; he has choices. Our first inclination might be to say that chicken is about out of options. Yet, he actually has at least three options: Stay put, jump in or jump out. Three options, three radically different outcomes.

I think many of us find ourselves on a windowsill now and again. We’re just sitting there, feeling like we need to do something, to make progress in some way. But which way? And there is the nucleus that drives the heat.

I was on my own windowsill some thirty years ago. I was 20, had dropped out of college, and went to work on an oil rig. It was a truly hare-brained idea hatched with the aid of malt liquor. I flew into the idea with gusto and a naiveté usually associated with putting change under the pillow for the tooth fairy.

Yet, my oil rig experience was one of the most wondrous and formative of my young life. I lived on this remote land rig for a long stretch, drew pictures, shot basketball and otherwise washed dished and swept floors in the rig’s galley. At one point, a “roughneck” saw me do a drawing of the rig and wanted to buy it.

“Sure I said: for $100,” I said. Then, another guy wanted one and then another. I left the rig in my VW Beetle loaded with cash. By the time I returned to college, I found that I’d acquired a certain mystique because of the trip, as if I were a guy with an eye patch and a silver wolf-head cane. Then and there, on that rig, the idea took root that anything was possible. Even the most outlandish and far-fetched ideas, if we choose them as options.

So, the point of all this rambling is this: You, as an artist (or would-be artist, musician, chef, stone mason, writer or tap dancing great) may be held back by something mental, physical or spiritual that prevents you from fulfilling your dream, consider the choices you have.

If your dream, like mine, is to be an artist, maybe you are now sitting on your own kind of window sill.

Well, friend, which way you gonna jump?