I read an article on the Zettelkasten and antifragility.
I clipped this quotation from the article:
Tinker a lot. Write lots of Zettels and apply the outline method in abundance. The more Zettel you write the faster you erase the downsides of investing time in writing a Zettel. It seems that you’d produce more waste but the more you write the less wasteful the waste becomes.
Inspired by that idea — adding more notes so that “waste” becomes “abundance” — I wrote this:
You need a certain degree of profligacy to be an artist: a willingness to throw it all away, or at least to “waste” time in pursuit of what you love or what holds your interest.
This mention of “waste” in connection with creative pursuits reminds me of a passage in Lewis Hyde’s The Gift:
The fruit of the creative spirit is the work of art itself, and if there is a first-fruits ritual for artists, it must either be the willing “waste” of art (in which one is happy to labor all day with no hope of production, nothing to sell, nothing to show off, just fish thrown back into the sea as soon as they are caught) or else, when there is a product, it must be this thing we have already seen, the dedication of the work back toward its origins.
Creative work of any kind requires offering something, perhaps only time and effort. It may feel wasteful, but it’s a waste that fosters fertility.