Formidable Journey
Illustration, 2015
- Role
- Illustration
- Target
- Draw the distance between a fearful perception of a journey and the plain reality that nothing is stopping the first step
- Constraints
- January 2015 · self-directed, and made for one specific person rather than an audience · a single image, carrying an idea most people only ever hear as a proverb
- Force fielded
- Nick Charney Kaye — illustration
- Time-to-dispatch
- Drawn January 15, 2015
- Result
- An illustration that puts the proverb and its correction in the same frame: the journey of a thousand miles, and the fact that the obstacle is the perception rather than the road
- Principal
- Outright Mental (self-directed — a gift)
- One frame, 2015 studio archive · personal workArchival · 2015
They say a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
This is about the fearful perception that holds us back, versus the reality that we are unhindered to begin.
What it is: a step. Available immediately, at no cost, to anyone standing up.
What is actually in the way: the first picture.
What is not in the way: anything else.
Drawing the difference between a distance and a fear
The proverb is so worn that it has stopped landing. Everyone has heard that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and almost nobody is moved by it, because as advice it only describes the arithmetic — it does not touch the reason people stay put.
The reason people stay put is that the thousand miles is visible all at once and the step is not. Distance renders instantly and completely in the imagination; the next action does not render at all until you are already doing it. That asymmetry is the whole of the problem, and it is a picture problem, which is why it is worth drawing rather than saying.
So the image holds both states at the same time: the formidable version, which is a perception, and the unhindered version, which is the fact. Nothing in the frame argues that the journey is short. It argues that the barrier is not the journey.
The studio has been drawing this one idea for two decades in different clothes — the Jack of Souls grinning at what frightens him, Mental Roger opening his own head rather than armoring it. Different registers, same instruction: the obstacle is on your side of the eye.
Acceptance is not passivity — it means acting clearly, without illusion, says the manifesto. This drawing is that sentence with the illusion named: the illusion is that the whole distance has to be survivable before the first step is permitted. It does not. You were always unhindered to begin.
Record: a self-directed illustration, made for one person and never sold — proof: [], and no link to follow. The image above is the evidence.
