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Sometimes you drive 10 hours in a day

I’m currently sitting in the back of a jeep driving from Cleveland, Ohio to Louisville. Yes that is a 5 hour drive.

It’s 11.30 pm.

Crazy? Probably. Why? Well my tour manager Andrew wanted to see a production of Parade up in Cleveland and we had a day off so I thought why not.

It’s going to be a long night zooming through the anonymous darkness of Amercian highways.

Longer still because we have a school matinee tomorrow morning at 10am (yes, a little bit irresponsible).

If I’d have stayed back in Louisville, I probably would have cooked some food, did a bit of work and exercise and then watched a movie. Sure- that’s a great day. But one that I’d easily forget.

I’ll never forget that one time we drove a 10 hour round trip to catch a show.

Sometimes you should be sensible and stay at your accom and forget the day you had…

And sometimes you drive 10 hours in a day and live your adventure.

A Haiku to fuel you

Your passion inside
It’s genius’ genesis
Find it and use it

The problems we want

I’ve been making a small film every day and this morning as I put together today’s work, here’s what my hour was focused on:

-How to pick the right eye line

-Pitching the tone the right way so the jokes landed

-What other line reads I could do to give myself options in the edit

-Where to dip the music track to make the punchline land

-What sections of text audio to boost so the set up was adequately heard

-How tight to make the edit between lines and where to give space for reaction shots

I realised this was the realm I spent my time. These were the problems I was solving while I was doing my work. It dawned on me how wonderful it was that every one of these were things I want to spend my time on. These are things I’ve learned through drama school and as I’ve built my craft since.

These problems were perfectly in line with who I want to be and what I want to be doing.

Yes they were difficult and they stretched me and they required me to make choices I was unsure about.

But that’s the point. I think the quality of your life is the quality of your problems. These are high quality problems to have and the very act of confronting these problems is me living into the exact identity I want as an actor and film maker.

What problems are you facing each day and do they align with the person you want to be?

Excited to get back

One of my favourite things is when there is something that I’m so excited about that any time I’m away from it, it’s all that’s on my mind.

When I was a kid and in LOVE with magic, I remember having this new prop I’d bought at an online magic shop and waited MONTHS for to arrive. I loved playing with it and practicing so much that I have a clear memory of being in a class and actually drawing a picture of it. I just couldn’t wait to be back home to practice again.

I’ve had similar feelings about PC games when I was a kid (Sea dogs and The Sims if you must know..!).

I’ve also gone through phases with tv shows- I remember working through Breaking Bad and I was so inside the world, I’d be thinking about the characters in my normal life, longing to see them all again to see what happens next.

This feeling of excited longing for somethign that is waiting for you back home is divine.

I think we should all always have something like this. A project or a passion.

The theatre we’re performing at gave me a guitar to have in my apartment while I’m here for the run of the show. When I’m doing the show, I catch myself excited to be back in my room playing this gorgeous guitar.

What are you excited to get back to?

You already know.

I remember watching a documentary when I was a kid about fire fighters. I can’t recall all of the details, but the bit that sticks out to me was this story of a fireman that predicted the future.

He was in the street and began frantically telling people to clear away from a building. Nothing seemed wrong; it was an ordinary building on an ordinary street on an ordinary day. But something told the fireman to get these people as far away as possible.

A split second later, the building exploded into flames.

How did he know? That’s the question. In an interview later, he said that he didn’t know why, but his intuition told him he needed to move these people. The documentary suggested that it was his years and years of experience that helped him to intuit that moment.

That he didn’t consciously put two and tow together, but his subconscious mind, with the thousands of hours in and around similar explosions, was working away behind the scenes. It was gathering data, noticing tiny details perhaps imperceptible to the naked senses.

The smell right before an explosion. The density of the air. The change in temperature to his skin.

None of these things were being consciously processed and calculated by the fireman.

His experience was working on him. Moving him to action. Moving through him.

That’s where genius comes from. The thousands of hours, millions of distinctions and billions of grey matter connections. Learning when we don’t even know.

There is an unstoppable magic that arrives at our work when we allow this genius to move through us.

You are infinitely intelligent. Infinitely skilled. You are a genius.

Love and gardening

All the people in our lives are flowers dotted around our living room.

Smiling beautifully at us. If we leave the living room, they’re still there, beaming for us.

Though we may not see them, they are there.

Sometimes flowers need sun. Sometimes they need water. Sometimes they’re happy there on their own (probably enjoying their own beauty)

The art of keeping any flower alive is giving it what it needs when it needs it. Sure, leave the room to make yourself some lunch, but don’t forget to water the plant.

Gardeners also say that they are fed by feeding their plants. Love in is love out. And so the universe goes.

Water the flowers. Nourish the love and have a beautiful living room.

Temple of generosity

I’ve seen seven broadway shows so far during my visit to New York. One thing that has really struck me on this visit is the fact that these actors do this every single night.

Every. Single. Night.

In the audience, it feels like a once in a lifetime experience- and for many of us it will be. I’ll probably never see Audra do Gypsy again. That’s my orientation going into the show, like it’s only happening once.

The reality of course is that Audra will do it again tonight and tomorrow and the next day until she closes the show. The magic is the actors ability to reengage every night.

In the great actors I’ve seen, I’m seeing characters fighting for their lives, I don’t see a craftsperson. Of course I know they’re there, and the craft is impeccable, that’s a given here- but that vanishes before our eyes.

These great actors are not seeking to reanimate what they rehearsed or what happened in the matinee. Instead they’re reengaging with the reality for the character-

What are they fighting for? What do they stand to lose and win?

And all the while, they’re not missing a note or a step.

These great actors have the uncanny ability to bring pristine presence and searing life to a structure they’ve repeated multiple times. That is magic.

And it’s generous.

To reengage as if it were the first time is generous. It’s generous to us in the audience because it is our first and last time (in that sense, the work is life or death isn’t it?)

And it’s also generous to the character. To reengage every night is to honour the character. The imagined embodiment of the human plight. That’s generous.

Putting in enough hours to be an actor with the craft and spirit to bring this every night is generous.

The audience sit and gaze up, open hearted in the dark. Tell us a story. We’re like children, shown a magic trick that comforts us and tells us we’re not alone.

Every night in temples around New York city, the lights go down and an imaginary human is brought to life. They bare their wounds for us and in turn we listen and open our hearts.

Floating in the air above our heads in the black empty space between actor an audience?

Magic. Vulnerability. Connection. Loneliness. Love. Generosity.

In praise of being mild

I really love the sentiment of this quote:

Success doesn’t happen over night. Neither does failure

It takes the legs out from under a couple of limiting ideas in our culture. The first idea is that successful people get lucky; that some single action or bolt of lighting comes to them and then they have some massive success (what ever that means).

The truth is, as Tony Robbins says, we’re rewarded in public for what we practice in private. When we see an apparent overnight success we’re failing to see the hours and years of work in private; the thousands of shots taken and missed, the tiny distinctions made by learning from many micro ‘failures’ over and over (and over) again.

Failure also comes over time. It’s a repeated failure to show up in the little ways. It’s taking comfort over growth each time. It’s putting it off till tomorrow. It’s waiting for the big one.

When we believe success can come over night, we buy into the idea that it can be conjured up by a monumental effort or a big ‘break’. It’s fun to believe this because monumental efforts are heroic and big breaks are sexy. What isn’t sexy is doing a little bit every day (though I do believe it is heroic).

Never mind the giant spicy explosion- I’ll take mild please. Just earnestly do the work today, and a little more the next day. And the next. And forever because it’s your vocation. You’ll have what looks to others like an overnight, giant spicy explosion of success at some point- and you can enjoy it as such…

But you’ll know the truth:

The massive success that comes your way will make perfect sense to you. It will have been the inevitable result of your daily, mild, mundane work.