Resistance, Art, and Writing
How a sunset can change everything
The greatest thing you will do in your life will be met with the greatest opposition. Or, to put it differently: if you feel massive resistance to something, it means you need to do it. Steven Pressfield uses the idea of the shadow—if the shadow represents resistance, then the larger the shadow, the larger the thing we need to do.
In a couple of weeks, I’m putting on an art show, whether I’m done with it or not. There have been days when I didn’t want to paint—perhaps many days—but I went into the studio and painted until I was exhausted. There were days when I had too many other things to do and used those distractions as excuses. But the canvases won’t paint themselves. There were days when I felt overwhelmed by having to build too many canvases. Paula told me to get an assistant, and within a few days, I found someone who could help me build and stretch all my canvases.
As these barriers and excuses fell away, I kept painting. Maybe I wasn’t painting fast enough, but I was still painting.
The same happened when writing my next book. Too many ideas, too many excuses, too much resistance. But I kept at it—committing to finishing what I started, saving material from other projects, and generating new ideas.
One day, while driving, I listened to a podcast about anti-empathy books. Tangentially, I thought, It really sounds like evangelicals and atheists share the same ideas about what God could be and not be. They believe in the same God! So, I started researching in that direction. I wrote an introduction, drafted a book proposal, and sent it to seven publishers and two agents. (Getting a literary agent to represent you is like winning the lottery.) I received a great rejection from one press and a promising bite from another, which will let me know next week if they think it’s worth pursuing.
In Jesus of the East, I wrote about the Korean concept of han, the deep wound carried by people and communities. The corollary to han is dan. I define dan as resistance—not resistance for its own sake, but the kind that refuses to perpetuate harm. It is resisting the pain that keeps us from healing and becoming whole. This kind of positive resistance allows us to transform the negative resistance we encounter in our lives. Resistance itself is not bad. In the gym, weights provide resistance that helps our muscles grow. Likewise, we can leverage the resistance in our lives to propel us forward.
If I feel resistance toward something, I can:
Recognize that I need to do it first.
Understand that whatever I’m resisting can reveal something about myself.
Easy things become obstacles to the things we really need to do.
That said, sometimes we need breaks. We need to step away, take a walk, and let our work breathe.
Last night, after a full day of work, I was drained. It was St. Patrick’s Day, and I didn’t want to cook—I just wanted to go out, eat, and rest. As Paula was driving us to get ramen, she spotted a strange but beautiful cloud formation. I looked up from my phone and was equally amazed. Even easy distractions couldn’t keep my eyes away. It was a spiral with a line through the middle, glowing in the sunset’s brightest orange.
I made a SpaceX joke, but for a moment, the current state of the world faded away. A sunset is the cure for cynicism. Everything has its moment and then it’s gone.
A few days earlier, during a meditation exercise, I had seen this exact vision and even thought that Paula and I would witness it together. I dismissed it at the time, as I often do things that don’t make logical sense. It had been a period of anxiety, a time when I was waiting for something to break through—but nothing did. Then last night, it happened, almost as if I had seen it in advance.
I don’t know what my mind was doing, and I’m not going to try to interpret it. Maybe it was just filtering my experiences. But we both saw it. We both experienced it. Then we got ramen, and I had my green matcha ramen in honor of St. Patrick’s Day.
Whatever we are doing—when we are consistent, when we show up and do the work, when we learn to leverage resistance—we grow.
Here are some things I’ve learned:
Resistance is an indicator of what we should be doing.
Resistance can be leveraged for something positive—like resisting the impulse to return harm for harm.
Work, or anything else we feel we have to do, doesn’t have to be difficult.
Distance can help when we’re stuck.
Get enough sleep.
When resistance is a shadow, the sun can dissipate it. Rather than working against it, we can lean into it and make it something useful—like starting with dark tones on one of my paintings.
When I struggled too much with making one painting “work,” I switched to another blank canvas. I had a palette of blues and browns, two pigments that can be mixed to create deep blacks. So I started with that, and what emerged was something spectacular.
Not every day does the sky paint an unimaginable picture and top it off with a beaming sunset of sorbet peach. But when it does—be ready for it. Better yet, be open to it.
Love this idea of 'feeling resistance means it is worthwhile.' Wise words there. Resistance is the sign that we should keep working and searching to figure out what the painting, the essay, the book should be.