100 Day Creative Challenge Day 85: Pain is My Friend
Anything worth doing is worth doing well. We’ve all heard the saying and perhaps trotted it out at certain times in conversation. The truth of this statement is that anything worth doing is going to involve some pain.
I’ve returned to exercise after eight weeks of recovery from major surgery. Yesterday I ran 5km on the treadmill and today my thighs were a little sore this morning.
Today I went for an ocean swim in New Caledonia. I know, I know, it’s hard to take and doesn’t sound painful, but let me tell you tonight my muscles are crying out. I haven’t swum in the ocean for about a year and I swam out about 300m across a lagoon and back again—fun at the time, but boy am I feeling it now.
Pain is the price I pay for not pushing my muscles for the last two months.
This 100 Day Creative Challenge is causing me pain at the moment. Writing a blog every day as well all the other work I have to do has been like getting back into exercise. It’s a discipline I want to pursue, but I don’t enjoy the effort that goes into it. In other words, I enjoy the fruits of my work. I now have 85 pieces of writing on my website that I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t pushed myself to complete this challenge.
I wouldn’t have published four books if I hadn’t stretched myself and had the discipline of learning my craft, writing, rewriting and critiquing until I was sick of the sight of my books and couldn’t wait for them to come out.
Our lives are filled with pain. We face challenges and disciplines and disappointments and frustrations and tragedy and stretching all our lives. These things, we are told, build character. Sometimes I feel like saying, ‘I don’t need any more character. I’m fine!’
But, of course, character is a lifetime work.
Pain is something we all have to deal with in our creative work. If you think it’s worth doing then it’s worth the pain to achieve it.
We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character.
C.S. Lewis
