Work In Progress

A few months ago, I had a particularly bad case of twenty-four-hour virus…you know, the kind during which you feel so vile you can’t understand why you don’t just die. In my dark mood I visualized my death, a small headline in a local paper “K. U. prof dies suddenly,” but I especially reflected upon everything that would be left undone if I really did die…

The lunch dishes weren’t washed. They lay strewn about the kitchen, too far from the sink full of soapy water to keep food from hardening on plate and pot and making it doubly difficult for my survivor to clean. There was a manuscript for a magazine article in my typewriter; the power was on and the carriage was even set at an indent tab, waiting for the beginning of my next paragraph which would never come. I was on sabbatical and taking nine graduate credits. Three professors would wonder what happened to me—I’d be a phantom to them, like I call some of my undergraduate students when they just disappear from class. A blister-pack cassette able for my specialty audio producer client in Washington would be deserted midway through production. My wife, nineteen-year-old daughter, and thirteen-year-old son would have to divide up chores of collecting trash, bringing in mail, and replacing a dead smoke detector battery. The family dog would not even have his late afternoon ball throw that he lives for each day. My life was a series of works, however humble, in the process of progressing towards goals.

I’ve been particularly conscious of the process of art as opposed to the finished product. When I returned from sabbatical, I began teaching a course in Visual Thinking, during which finished products are minimal or nil, but the successful process of how to think is the goal.

Life is a continuing process: a trying, doing, striving, failing, succeeding. As sorry as I felt for Olympics participants who traveled all that distance to end up in 32nd place, having made the Olympic team should’ve been enough (yes, I know, try telling the 4th place finisher that!). But perhaps more important was just the fact that they participated in the sport of Alpine skiing or luge or boxing or swimming.

Once in a while, back off from believing you are judged by your achievements. The very word implies a conclusion, a finality. Enjoy the process along the way. The greed of today often suggests we should achieve the goal by any means possible; but remember the legendary advice that it’s far better to compete, getting dusty and bloodied in the arena, and lose the contest, than to sit in the stands and watch.

I guess it’s evident that I recovered. There was no obit, the article got typed, I finished my courses and even the dishes. But I decided when I do go through the pearly gates, it’s going to be at speed. I want to be make blurred action on the negative so that you’d have to set your camera at a high shutter speed to stop me. I want to be fully involved in the process of whatever I’m doing, and that’ll make my life a successful product.

-John K. Landis