Turning Pro

THE AMATEUR SEEKS PERMISSION The amateur believes that, before she can act, she must receive permission from some Omnipotent Other — a lover or spouse, a parent, a boss, a figure of authority.

face the real fight of our lives, which is to become who we are and to realize our destiny and our calling.

The amateur identifies with his own ego. He believes he is "himself." That's why he's terrified. The amateur is a narcissist. He views the world hierarchically. He continuously rates himself in relation to others, becoming self-inflated if his fortunes rise, and desperately anxious if his star should fall.

Then one night I had a dream. In the dream I came into my room and found that my shirts had all folded themselves in the drawer (instead of being mashed together in their usual jumbled mess). My boots had crawled out from under the bed where I normally kicked them when I took them off and had set themselves upright and tidy. They had shined themsel

In Jewish mysticism, there is a positive force that opposes the yetzer hara. Above every blade of grass, says the Kabbalah, hovers an angel, exhorting "Grow! Grow!" What program did these ancients put forward as a means of allying with the positive forces and overcoming the negative? According to Rabbi Finley, it was a code called Mussar.

Everything I was doing in my outer life was a consequence and an expression of that terror and that shame.

It took me a long time to come to terms with the idea that I had ambition. I felt guilty about it. Who was I to aspire to "rise above" my brothers and sisters or to aim to be "better" than anybody else?

If the upper realm is, as Plato suggested, the sphere of perfect love, truth, justice, and beauty, then the artist seeks to call down the magic of this world and to create, by dint of labor and luck, the closest-to-sublime simulacra of those qualities that he or she can.

The amateur fears solitude and silence because she needs to avoid, at all costs, the voice inside her head that would point her toward her calling and her destiny.