The Arena is my process for approaching creative work from a place of aliveness and play. Every trip through The Arena lasts one week, and is guided by singular creative intention. Other than that, there really are no rules other than to follow the aliveness. These logs are just for me to document what I did during any given sprint, along with how I'm feeling about it.
What I Shipped From June 20th, 2022 to Present
a thread of lil videos of me riffing on the guitar!
— rob hardy 🦎 (@ungatedcreative) June 22, 2022
this first one is... shall we say... a tad sloppy bc of how nervous i was/am, and after watching it i'm struck by how many silly faces i make when i play 🙈 pic.twitter.com/zMHuuwnpmm
fuck it, let's make it two lil guitar vids in one day!
— rob hardy 🦎 (@ungatedcreative) June 26, 2022
this one's a bit sweeter and mellower and i love the melody/progression so much pic.twitter.com/UcytyTckyg
i wrote a zesty lil guitar riff this week and it's pretty dope pic.twitter.com/oYdAZ2BbMu
— rob hardy 🦎 (@ungatedcreative) July 22, 2022
Reflections
- This was, by far, the scariest creative challenge I've done in awhile. I've got so many insecurities around the way I look, around how imperfect my guitar playing is, etc etc. So yeah, this one felt very edgy and uncomfortable at first.
- Once I posted the first video and got a ton of great feedback on it, it was like "oh, maybe my insecurities weren't doing me any good lol." At this point, it doesn't feel particularly scary anymore to post these, even when I'm singing badly in them.
- Aliveness meter: 10 out of 10 - that old adage about anxiety and excitement being two sides of the same coin felt true here. I felt a lot of buzz and tension in my body before posting the first of these, and eventually realized that energy, which I had classified as fear, actually IS aliveness. Scary things make you feel more alive than comfortable things, that's for sure.