I asked some questions a while back, in the entry No Secret.

Namely, I wanted to know:
"When is the time to act ... to invent, create, show, teach something worthwhile?
Is it a conscious decision at all, or just a natural byproduct?"

A lot of you came forth with answers, and I thank you for that.
It was a few months ago that I asked, and now I'm happy to be able to answer myself as well, and assertively so. I'm happy to answer myself because advice is always helpful, but it's always said that isn't until you can teach something that you truly know it, so...

The first part of Acting is courage.
I keep mentioning Tillich's The Courage to Be because he addresses it so well,
because courage is one of the most difficult things. At this point I'd say that the difficulty of attaining and keeping it may even surpass the struggle of the pursuit of happiness, since that latter can hardly be embarked on without some courage.
Courage will allow one to act, knowing full well that one is always in the process of learning, and that mistakes will happen. Courage allows for fluidity, and unapologetic growth.

With courage, one can proceed to act while learning.
I had a teacher, F. Young, who would always say: "Just do the work. Don't judge, just do the work." Hell of a guy.

The application of knowledge is both a natural byproduct and purposeful. It happens because it can't help but happen if one is learning while making, but it's conscious because it requires effort and thinking. Sometimes there is even the realization: Wow, I never would have done it this way before, but this works. It happens when one allows an idea in progress to transform itself as it requires, as the learning informs it, so that the end result is hardly the same as the original intention and yet truer, more correct and thus more beautiful than it would have been had it followed the plan exactly. In that way, a good idea, a good action imitates life.

On a similar note, sometimes good work might not be recognizable right away as useful or as work at all, if it's naturally informed as is the good idea.

"Tell me, have I done anything of worth? Tell me if anything was ever done."
— Leonardo da Vinci,
at a dark time when his work was interrupted due to accusations of witchcraft and necromancy.

"When you judge as you're making, it slows you down, it's an undue burden, and in some ways it's not up to you to judge — it's up to someone else; it's social. ... [However], as you're making, you see a kind of reason and rationale. You follow that."
— Paul Chan, artist

Based on that, I'm realizing that I'm working even now. Writing is pleasurable for me, it's a good way to figure things out; so I hardly ever think of this or blogging or a lot of what I do as work. But if I'm pulled to do it, it's because this feels like the most important thing I could be doing right now — nevermind that paid work, or homework is waiting. This is The Act, even if it is unrecognizable.


Leonardo spent years immersed in the sciences, learning and apparently trying to master them all —

"And yet he had a reputation as a flake."

This was so because Leonardo's mind was a free-associating one: he would go from one thing to the next, because the particular thing in which he was absorbed at any given time was

"the most important thing in the world"

and then it would be "over" and the next thing would be the most important thing in the world.
In moving from one fascination to the next,

"you don't get much done over a short period of time, but over long periods of time you get a great deal done."

(These quotes and re-phrased ideas are from "Leonardo da Vinci", the 2004 BBC documentary.)


It's unfortunate that doing the important thing and that lacking adherence in favor of fluidity is seen as flaky or, by today's standards, quite ADD.

To finish up, the idea that well-informed, successful work is somehow accidental, or rather, "suddenly inspired" seems to be fairly prevalent (as in the case of Newton's apple).
I really like what Malcolm Gladwell has to say about that, in this short talk about The Beatles:

"It tells something very valuable about the distorted way that we think about success that we constantly talk about '64, but we don't think about '59."
— MG