Are you an observer or a doer?

Every day I question the pursuit of my path.  Every day I wonder why do I have this hunger to create.  Every day I wonder if I will be able to produce in time...before it's too late.  Every day I wonder if it is worth it to create when there is no guarantee that it will be received well or sold.  And every day I realize I have no choice but to create.  

 The story below is taken from Steven Pressfield's About section:  (He's a professional writer/screenwriter that is a major advocate of fighting one's own personal creative Resistance in order to "turn pro" or rather to become the great artists/writers/creators/actors/fill-in-the-blank that we are capable of becoming)

     My father was in the Navy, and I was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, in 1943. I graduated from Duke University in 1965. Since then, I've worked as an advertising copywriter, schoolteacher, tractor-trailer driver, bartender, oilfield roustabout and attendant in a mental hospital. I've picked fruit in Washington state, written screenplays in Tinseltown, and was homeless, living out of the back of my car with my typewriter. My struggles to earn a living as a writer (it took seventeen years to get the first paycheck) are detailed in The War of Art.

     With the publication of The Legend of Bagger Vance in 1995, I became a writer of books once and for all. From there followed the historical novels Gates of Fire, Tides of War, Virtues of War, The Afghan Campaign and Killing Rommel.
     My writing philosophy is a kind of warrior code—internal rather than external—in which the enemy is identified as those forms of self-sabotage that I call "Resistance" with a capital R (in The War of Art). The technique for combating these foes can be described as "turning pro."
     I believe in previous lives and the Muse—and that books and music exist before they are written and that they are propelled into material being by their own imperative to be born, via the offices of those willing servants of discipline, imagination and inspiration, whom we call artists. My conception of the artist's role is a combination of reverence for the unknowable nature of "where it all comes from" and a no-nonsense, blue-collar demystification of the process by which this mystery is approached. In other words, a paradox.

     There's a recurring character in my books, named Telamon, a mercenary of ancient days. Telamon doesn't say much. He rarely gets hurt or wounded. And he never seems to age. His view of the profession of arms is a lot like my conception of art and the artist: "It is one thing to study war, and another to live the warrior's life."

I love the fact that he's done a catrillion things in his life, I've often felt weird that I've worked a million jobs in search of my highest calling, only to find that it doesn't exist, I have to create it.  Sometimes I think it's the search, the pursuit that drives me, the longing to become MORE in this lifetime.


Here's a guy that's shining the light on those who are willing and courageous enough to heed the warrior's call.  I believe we all receive this call in life at one point or another to follow what's in our heart but we all don't  follow.   I love his last line, "It is one thing to study war, and another to live the warrior's life."  

Shak
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