The Art of Graceful Waiting
The epidemic of despair in the university points to the basic human need for something more than the merely physical—something just out of sight and beyond our reach.
By Colm O’Shea
“The object isn’t to make art,
it’s to be in that wonderful state
which makes art inevitable.”
–Robert Henri
So begins music producer Rick Rubin’s recent book The Creative Act: A Way of Being. His book carries a simple message—one I had long been waiting for, although I didn’t know it.
Allow me to give some personal context. I teach college essay writing, and no one in my line of work has failed to witness the abrupt downward trend in student mental health in recent years. Some of this is easy to explain, and one can fairly point to a few novel and extraordinary challenges to human flourishing, such as the Covid lockdowns, or the carnival hall-of-mirrors that is an adolescent life spent overwhelmingly online. But I’ve taught at my university for nearly fourteen years, and from my perspective the recent uptick in depression and anxiety in the student body (and, I’d add, much of the faculty) is merely an acceleration of a problem that was already quite advanced. Just before I began my first semester of teaching, the university library was installing plexiglass barriers to prevent the spate of students killing themselves by leaping to the foyer from upper floors. That plexiglass shield was replaced later by an inspired architectural guardrail which looks to me like a golden waterfall of binary digits: ones and zeros, presences and absences. It’s a photogenic but poignant reminder of how bleak so many young people’s outlooks can be. Those suicides were talented and intelligent students, but their present was so unbearable that they couldn’t wait long enough for a better future.
Teaching in small seminar-style workshops, I have intimate access to my students’ thought processes. I help guide them through their evolving essay drafts by asking fundamental questions: Where do their real fascinations lie? What are their deepest hopes and fears? Some seem never to have been asked such things, and it’s gratifying to see them blinking into wonderment at how little they understand themselves. However, I’ve become increasingly dismayed by the university environment, and I’m starting to perceive that the root of what’s wrong is a near complete absence of spiritual engagement, both in the faculty and the student body. It sometimes seems as if no one there believes in making art—no one believes that there’s any real point. At best, they do so out of a vague activist impulse to “make an impact”; at worst, to become famous. Between the threat of AI taking over the world of creativity and the tyranny of an algorithm-driven attention economy, a real anxiety gnaws at the hearts of my students. They’re unmoored spiritually—and I feel at times like a hypocrite, because I myself am a lapsed Catholic, and have no faith to call on either.
One thing that’s missing from nearly everything I read (not only from the students but also the greater academic community) is any sense of grace.
As newcomers to the workshop, students often initially regurgitate truisms on the page—one blunt certitude after the next—rather than exhibiting genuine curiosity, or perplexity, or the patience to wait and see what might emerge if they stop morally posturing before an imagined audience. Many see the essay as purely a place to pass judgment, or confess an ambient anxiety about the state of the world. And the essay can be such a place. But one thing that’s missing from nearly everything I read (not only from the students but also the greater academic community) is any sense of grace. By that charged word, I mean an awareness that there is a more profound pattern of energy beyond our narrow egotistic notions of our talents and shortcomings—an oceanic creativity that far outstrips our sophisticated anxieties about what we can and cannot manipulate to our own ends.
This absence of the concept of grace is particularly striking, given that I work with young artists in training—students who, in eras past, would have been expected to enjoy an elevated relationship with truth, beauty, and maybe even the sublime. But I don’t believe this generalized pessimism is limited to pre-professional art students. In an era when we’re all “content providers,” belief in the value of creative expression seems to be at a new low.
It’s in this bleak and anxious context that Rubin’s book has arrived in my hands. Co-written with Neil Strauss, it comprises a series of short, accessible reflections on cultivating a sustainable attitude to creative practice. Skimmed hastily, these could be dismissed as clichés—hippy bromides about being “open to messages from the universe.” I consider this the problem of cliché-wisdom identity. How does one tell the truism from the vital spiritual truth, given that each one often appears in the guise of the other? It may be as much a matter of timing as content, sometimes.
Referring to the source of creativity, Rubin claims, “the content does not come from inside us. The Source is out there. A wisdom surrounding us, an inexhaustible offering that is always available.… To the mind, this material appears to come from within. But that’s an illusion.”
For Rubin, creativity is the discipline of setting up conditions for the Source to speak to us: “How do we pick up on a signal that can neither be heard nor defined? The answer is not to look for it. Nor do we predict or analyze our way into it. Instead, we create an open space… so free of the normal overpacked conditions of our minds that it [draws] down the ideas that the universe is making available.” This openness, this generative space that Rubin describes, couldn’t be more removed from the life of the modern college student, or from my own cluttered daily agendas.
Rubin avoids highly technical psychological or theological terms, referring instead to a transmitter which he calls “Source,” and our receiving ability, which he simply calls “Awareness”: “In most of our daily activities we choose the agenda and develop a strategy to achieve the goal at hand.… Awareness moves differently. The program is happening around us. The world is the doer and we are the witness. We have little or no control over the content.”
Time and again, he emphasizes what I see as a core Taoist quality of this receptive practice, wu-wei (achieving through not-forcing): “Awareness is not a state you force. There is little effort involved, though persistence is key. It’s something you actively allow to happen.… When we cultivate our awareness, we are expanding… not just the material at our disposal to create from, but of the life we get to live.”
If searching for God seems too great a task, or too opaque, then opening a sketchbook, sitting at a keyboard (piano or computer), and cultivating a simple curiosity and openness to the light and sound vibrating all around us, all the time, may feel more achievable.
In a chapter called “The Unseen,” Rubin makes this Source more explicitly spiritual:
We aren’t creating to… sell material products. The act of creation is an attempt to enter a mysterious realm. A longing to transcend. What we create allows us to share glimpses of an inner landscape, one that is beyond our understanding. Art is a portal to the unseen world. Without the spiritual component, the artist works with a crucial disadvantage.
Does this “crucial disadvantage” apply to me? To my students? What are the requirements of this “spiritual component”? I was raised Roman Catholic, but stopped considering myself one just after my Confirmation. I couldn’t grasp the faith, but neither have I ever been able to look at the world as a materialist would. I briefly joined a Buddhist sangha while writing my dissertation on James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and non-dual metaphysics—in the process exploring negative (or apophatic) theology, especially the thinking of Christian mystics like Meister Eckhart and the Taoism of Lao Tzu. Throughout my academic career, mysticism has been an ongoing intellectual fascination. But keeping such concepts at a comfortable arm’s length, and not committing to a real spiritual practice, is like endlessly reading the menu and never eating. Increasingly, I feel like a spiritual refugee, searching for a path to tread toward grace. The simpler, the less wordy and intellectual, the better.
Rubin’s straightforward definitions seem fashioned just for me in this regard: “Practice” means letting go of any clear-cut but superficial agenda, and waiting for the moment when deeper pattern recognition clicks into place within our Awareness. He recommends collecting “seeds”—simple short recordings for melodies, notes on inklings of stories, sketches of the visual world—without any concern for whether they will develop into a finished or “successful” project. It’s practicing a dynamic waiting, or “unforcing” our experience.
For Rubin, the cardinal virtue of spirituality isn’t imagination or intelligence, although those are obviously valuable traits. It is instead that least sexy of virtues: patience. For him, patience itself is creative, because we need to continually re-solve how to become receptive to wonder because “[a]wareness needs constant refreshing.” To be alert-but-patient is how Rubin suggests we supplicate before the Source: “If there’s a rule to creativity that’s less breakable than the others, it’s that the need for patience is ever-present.”
For spiritual refugees such as myself—let’s call us semi-secular creatures, waiting for the way back to the Source—Rubin’s writing strikes me as a useful introduction to active waiting. In his vision of creativity, we see the soul locating itself by attending more carefully and curiously to the nuances of the moment outside oneself: the shifting light over a landscape, the subtle variations in a syncopated drum solo. Rubin’s invitation to find out what wonder awaits if we can learn to slow down, quiet ourselves, and listen, reaches readers like me as a more dogmatic voice likely couldn’t. If searching for God seems too great a task, or too opaque, then opening a sketchbook, sitting at a keyboard (piano or computer), and cultivating a simple curiosity and openness to the light and sound vibrating all around us, all the time, may feel more achievable.
I fear that, for a soul drifting through the horse latitudes, reaching the other side may take much longer than imagined.
The humble smallness of these creative gestures—agreeing to something bigger than oneself—reassures me. I’m looking for a potent, multipurpose antidote in a landscape where toxins are widespread. Ours is an era of social contagions. Mind-viruses are legion, but one variant I keep hearing about from students and colleagues alike is “burnout.” This collective sense of exhaustion isn’t yet the hell of despair, a world where nothing has meaning, and creation is either impossible or pointless. Rather, this “exhaustion” I keep hearing about—mainly from young, healthy people—is a kind of purgatory: an indefinite waiting for some imaginary future when everything is easier, the batteries are recharged, and one is ready to engage with joy and forward movement again.
I fear that, for a soul drifting through the horse latitudes, reaching the other side may take much longer than imagined. Life doesn’t tend to get easier by itself. To believe that it’s up to oneself to break out of purgatory, while having no idea how to engineer the escape, amounts to a vague and aimless waiting that runs the risk of tipping over into hell. I’ve seen the children falling, so to speak, from burnout toward despair. And not just children—older peers, too, who maybe don’t plummet, but wander in ruts, lost to joy. Make no mistake: it is possible to wait poorly.
Perhaps the most valuable shift in consciousness is the realization that our ability to become active in our waiting is grace in action.
After finishing Rubin’s book, I re-read Robert Henri’s opening quote about the ultimate “object” of a creative practice being a “wonderful state.” It’s striking to me how the objective transfigures into the subjective; the specific goal becomes an indefinite process; the noun reveals itself as a verb: being.
Given the commodious definition that Rubin gives creativity (a waiting carefully, attending to the Source for its subtle communications), I wonder if we could call such a creative state “grace.” Or is it waiting, receptive, for grace? The phrase “waiting for grace” might imply an absence, a sense that grace is something in the future, something not here and now, omnipresent. Perhaps the most valuable shift in consciousness is the realization that our ability to become active in our waiting is grace in action. The waterfall is always roaring in the background, offering its boundless energy, if only we are humble enough to cast off our rigid golden plans—ironically, put in place to keep us safe—and get caught up in the careless torrent of play.
Colm O’Shea teaches writing at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. His work has been anthologized in Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (Bloodaxe Books) and Initiate: An Oxford Anthology of New Writing (Blackwell). His recent books include James Joyce’s Mandala (Routledge), and the sci-fi novel Claiming De Wayke (Crossroad Press). He was also a finalist in Singapore University’s sci-fi flash fiction competition run by the Center for Quantum Computing.
