Walking

With every step you take, it’s possible you might fall.

That’s not pessimism, it’s the reality of being a perambulatory human being.

Mathematical models have demonstrated that walking is just falling over and over again, but—and this is essential—it also means controlling the fall in such a way that it propels us forward, moving us a smidgeon closer to where we want to be instead of landing us flat on the ground.

These falls are irregular and require a flurry of tiny corrections with each new stride to ensure they land as intended, rather than wobbling us off-course or tossing us into a painful faceplant.

Making things for a living is a bit like walking in that it sometimes seems like the most natural thing in the world, requiring little thought and serving as the obvious, logical means of getting from where we are to where we’d like to be, while at other times feeling borderline hazardous: each step a possible stumble, each new foothold progressively less certain, secure, and familiar than our point of origin.

I’ve been making things since I could hold a crayon, and I’ve been making things for a living for about two decades.

For the past twelve years I’ve made things for strangers, many of whom have become familiar faces and names and usernames during that period. These strangers have become an audience of people with whom I truly enjoy sharing and engaging, and a collection of relationships that afford me abundant creative freedom—two things I treasure as much or more than anything else I possess.

That said, with more freedom of movement comes more opportunity to fall.

Vast, open spaces allow you to perform at your most ambitious, peak capacity, but also to flop spectacularly: floundering in public, bruising your knees and your ego and possibly your reputation, with nothing to hide behind and no one to blame but yourself when it happens.

The reality is that this can happen no matter how open your space, how liberated your time, how expansive and cherished your audience.

Putting yourself out there in any capacity is terrifying, and I’ll tell you from experience that the fear of missteps doesn’t go away even after you prance and meander around for years, by all outward indications knowing full-well what you’re doing and confident every step will land precisely as intended.

What does change with time is that you eventually become more comfortable with an imperfect, personalized sort of walk. Something that’s less like the self-assured stride of a runway model and more like the snaking stroll of a curious vagabond or the chaotic wandering of a traipsing child exploring an unfamiliar neighborhood, comfortable with all the unfamiliarity because life has shown itself to be ceaselessly novel and provocative—the greatest joys often bundled with the strange and mysterious.

You come to realize that by sometimes shuffling, sometimes trudging, sometimes tip-toeing while gazing skyward, or full-out running toward a muddled horizon, or holding stock-still staring at your own feet, you’ll get to where you need to be: however distant the coordinates, however late or early you might arrive, however many times you may fall and pick yourself back up along the way, and whomever you might be when you finally get there.

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