Instants become Days become Years
Michelangelo Buonarroti started painting the ceiling of Rome’s Sistine Chapel in 1509. He painted over 300 individual figures in dozens of panels, such as the Creation of Eve, the Last Judgment, and the iconic Creation of Adam, in which God reaches out to touch Adam’s fingertip. The work took four years to complete, and has stood for over 500 years as one of the great monuments of sustained creativity in the Western world.
Detail of The Creation of Adam, by Michelangelo.
But none of that was how Michelangelo experienced it.
For Michelangelo, the Sistine commission wasn’t a paragraph in a textbook, a historical fact, a summation.
It was a daily challenge, a moment-by-moment war of tension and attention. The planning, the setbacks, the psychological pressure, all of it ran as a current against continuing, against persisting.
There were the physical strains of painting a surface that was above, rather than in front of him—the neck and shoulder pain, the wear on the back, the burning of the muscles. Just try to hold your hands above your head for five minutes. (Then try to do it suspended 65 feet in the air.)
“My beard toward Heaven, I feel the back of my brain upon my neck,” he wrote in a poem to a friend.
There were his inner demons to contend with, too. As Walter Isaacson described in his biography of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo suspected that the commission was a ploy by his enemies to saddle him with a doomed project and distract him—just so that he would fail publicly and douse his rising star.
There were the setbacks. At one point, a section of fresco became infected with a kind of lime mold. The damage was irreversible, and he had to chip away the surface of the whole section and start again.
And yet he persisted, moment by moment, day by day.
One stroke of the brush became twenty. Twenty strokes became hundreds, which became a day’s work. The work of days became the work of weeks, then of months, then years.
Each moment filled with the energy of persistence, with dogged discipline, or even with spite for his enemies. Whatever it takes to keep going.
“Each of us lives only now, this brief instant,” Marcus Aurelius wrote (and which we recently reminded ourselves).
But those instants accumulate. With guidance and purpose they gather toward a larger goal.
When you work on a project that feels sistine-like—a screenplay or an album, a book or a painting, a major recital performance—it can feel impossible.
But when you look up after a year of instants, when you survey what you’ve accomplished, you will feel the gratitude for each moment. There’s no other path.
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Today's email marks the one-year anniversary of The Creative Process newsletter. I started this newsletter because I wanted to share timeless principles and historical examples of creativity, to encourage you to do your best work.
The first newsletter was sent out on June 5, 2023, and told the story of writer Billy Oppenheimer taking his shot.
Over the course of the year, we’ve talked about unconscious inspiration, creative habits, creative collaboration, and resiliency.
I’ve told stories about Dave Grohl, Derek Sivers, Rick Rubin, Radiohead, Michael Lewis, and many more.
And, looking back now after a year, I’m more convinced than ever that the world needs your human creativity.
So whether you have been reading since the beginning, or just found this newsletter, thanks for reading.
Now stop reading, get on with it, and go create.
This article was originally sent to my email list subscribers on The Creative Process Newsletter. Enter your email below to join other creators and get insights every Monday. 👇 Want to see past editions first? Click here.