On being an artist: two books by Julia Cameron

Julia Cameron

The Artist’s Way + The Right To Write: I bought these two books online, from an used bookstore in the USA, and to my surprise, even beyong ocean Readers like to make notes and underline sentences on the pages. Quite normal, you may think, but I was surprised in discovering this. Happily surprised, albeit I wonder who can be the person who hold “The Artist’s Way” in his hands before me; something tells me that it was a woman… anyway!

I must admit that the topic and the contents of these two essays are almost the same ones. Maybe the structure and the tips are slightly different, but the main issue is the same. Someone could claim that they are the same book in different words…

The tools she suggests to use are two: the morning pages and the artist’s date.

The first one pushes you to handwrite 3 pages first thing in the morning, no matter what, just write before the inner censor wakes up.

The second one asks you to reserve one date a week for your inner artist: it is up to you what to do. A cocnert, a museum, some CD music, a walk in the wood or a visit to a brook… you can choose. The important thing is that you love what you do, that you are alone and that this date feeds your curiosity.

The effect of these two tools, says Cameron, should be visible in few weeks.

One effect can be sincronicity: a significant coincidente (do you remember Jung?). This can have nothing to do with your artistic life, but it should show you the power of writing. I was strongly curios about this matter and throughout the web I found experiences about it, but nobody goes deep in the matter, they simply report coincidences. Of course, if you put your attention on a certain topic, you will find out a lot of coincidences: this is just consciousness. But will this change your life, as Cameron asserts?

In my opinion, although I noticed some sincronicities, I believe that the author stressed too much the aspect of magic.

Let’s simply name the thing as it is: attention. This is a powerful gun we often miss in our life, taken as we are by habits and complaints.

Attention, then, leads to action. And Action, yes, it can change your life.

Anyway, these two books are useful to help you cultivating and enhancing your attention, the first ring of the chain. Therefore they are welcome.

Better Than Before – Gretchen Rubin

I do not like the way the title of this book has been translated into Italian: it means “It is easy to change”. You just wait that the title goes on with “if you know how to do it”… but this is the way italian editors work.

Well, at first sight it seems that the author is obsessed with self-improvement, and this can give you the impression that she is rather perfectionist and fuss-pot, thas she is Always looking for a better way to spare time, read more books, write more, meet more people, be lean, be a good mother and wife and so on. I must admit that this first impression did not let her be very funny to me.

She often uses phases and episodes taken from the lives of her fans in internet or from chats with her friends, because she like to share her current passions with everybody to test if her opinions are true. Anyway, this method is rather subjective.

This is why I do not consider this book as a real self-help book. I rather consider it like a good chat with someone who is trying to improve herself. This is not little.

How many people do you know wich purpose is to become better than before? Maybe you know someone who tries to be the best in something, the best manager, the best mother, the best athlete and so on, but this is not the same thing. I would rather consider it like the opposite, in a certain way.

Gretchen Rubin does give you some nice tips on how to get good habits. The first tip is to work on yourself, to know yourself (although I think that her classification method is rather strict). One of her mantra is “be Gretchen“. We must learn to know ourselves and be ourselves.

What I do not agree on, is her diet habit.

I became vegan after having read a lot of books on diet and health, not only by vegan authors. I think I discovered the true secret to understand if a scientific research is good or not, and this secret is the time.

I bet that she has lost weight with a high protein diet. Of course she did, everybody does, it is physiological because our body normally works by carbs burning. And if you look at all high protein diet researches, you will see that they are tested on the short run (max one, one and a half year). On the long run, people either gain again their initial weight or they develop illnesses. At the end, I do not think that Rubin’s diet habit is better than before. Maybe better than the standard american diet, but in this case she is just leaner than before.

I hope that she can read some books of plant-based doctors (Esselstyn, Campbell, Barnard, McDougall, Fuhrmann and many Others). She is a book lover, I do not doubt that sooner or later she will put a question mark on her high protein diet habit.