You may remember the “passion quilt” meme from this past spring, where bloggers were making a little image macro or slide that encapsulated a little nugget of advice. My contribution (seen here small, click to enlarge) was “do it now” with an image of my older son with saftey goggles and a drill.

Recently I came across a link (via Waxy) to an old episode of Ze Frank’s The Show. The episode is titled washington, ideas, brain crack. I hope you’ll watch it: it’s short, it’s funny, and he uses the F-word an awful lot in a way that I find silly and amusing, though YMMV depending on how you feel about the use of the F-word in general.

Ze’s “brain crack” is the other side of “do it now.” If you don’t do it now, the larger the idea will loom in your imagination, making it harder and harder to do it at all.

The other “do it now” I wanted to share with you was one of the main inspirations from my original passion meme post. I heard it when Lian Amaris, one of the drama faculty at Colorado College, gave a talk on her performance art piece, Fashionably Late for the Relationship. As a way of partially explaining how she came to embark on a demanding performance piece, staged on the Union Square traffic island in New York, she read a passage from the end of Anne Bogart’s book, A Director Prepares:

Allow me to propose a few suggestions about how to handle the natural resistances that your circumstances might offer. Do not assume that you have to have some prescribed conditions to do your best work. Do not wait. Do not wait for enough time or money to accomplish what you think you have in mind. Work with what you have right now. Work with the people around you right now. Work with the architecture you see around you right now. Do not wait for what you assume is the appropriate, stress-free environment in which to generate expression. Do not wait for maturity or insight or wisdom. Do not wait till you are sure that you know what you are doing. Do not wait until you have enough technique. What you do now, what you make of your present circumstances will determine the quality and scope of your future endeavors.

And, at the same time, be patient.