LIVING ABOVE THE 45
My friend Dylan is a gifted animator. He’s extremely talented in that Renaissance Man kind of way that would make you want to hate him if he weren’t so damn likeable. A few years ago he was speaking at a creative event in Vancouver and I popped in to see his talk. He talked about living past our comfort zone and it kept me awake and thinking, all the way to Bosnia where I was heading to photograph for a client in the rural areas around Sarajevo.
The thing about Dylan’s talk, the thing that shook me up, was that I thought I knew better. I thought I was living the life he was advocating. Hell, I was about to sell everything I owned and spend a year driving around North America in my 20-year-old Land Rover. If anyone was living above the 45, and I’ll explain that in a moment, it was me. Turns out you have to put yourself there every day, because the 45 is relative to who we are, and that keeps changing.
Dylan described “Living Above the 45” in the following way. Imagine your life on a graph. On one axis you’ve got the opportunities and challenges we undertake or submit ourselves to. On the other axis are your abilities and comfort level—essentially your perceived ability to handle the opportunities and challenges. When the two are equal to each other, the line bisecting the graph is at 45 degrees. Everything at that line on the 45 is in balance. More bluntly, it represents stagnation, because growth only happens when the opportunities we create or seize outpace our talent, ability, or comfort. To further abuse an already ill-fitting metaphor, biting off more than we feel we can chew is the only way to grow in our capacity to chew more.
It’s above the 45, and only above the 45, where growth happens and where we stop repeating ourselves and create something beautiful, important, or good. When creatives and artists get stalled on the idea of making money with every project and paying the rent, they abandon the muse, because the muse doesn’t give a hot damn whether you make money. She cares about making something beautiful and honest, about creating something that will outlast us. And while there are too many people that will put down a few bucks for something mediocre, there are as many people willing to put down more for something amazing, something beautiful, something that took risk and honesty to create. So take the risk and trust that it’ll pay off.
It’s when we live above the 45 that we begin creating things for the very reasons for which we stayed below the 45. It applies to more than just creation in the artistic sense. It applies to raising children, growing a business, and keeping the flames of a relationship lit and raging. Life is lived most vitally above the 45. To hell with balance. Leave that to the mediocre, the uninspired, and the uninspiring.
At the risk of flirting with presumptuous inspirational nonsense, are you living consistently above the 45? Are you one step ahead of your fear or has it been a while since you even considered its presence? Are you growing or stagnating? Moving forward or back? I ask because my own answer is not always Yes.
On the day I heard Dylan talk I was, as I said, heading out on assignment to Bosnia. I was packing up my home to live the life nomadic when I returned. To all appearances I was above the 45, but in significant ways I wasn’t. I wasn’t pushing my craft. I wasn’t leaning into the fear. Not the way I thought I was, anyway. What looked difficult and fearless to others was comfortable to me. What is above and below that 45-degree line is relative to each of us. And it’s ever-changing, which is why it’s so easy to wake one morning to find ourselves stagnant. We didn’t move an inch, but the line shifts, slowly, ever higher, and one day we realize we’ve been living below the line instead of above it.
The magic rarely happens within our comfort zone, but outside it, on the ragged, scary edge, where we have to fight like hell to keep from drowning in the unknown. This is where most of us create our best stuff, have our most adventurous thoughts, and feel the most alive. No one lives above the 45 by accident. You wake up every day and decide, not to wait for inspiration, but to work, to do the best work of your life, even your life’s work. You don’t sit around waiting for your real life to begin, because those that do will find it never comes, or some other unexpected horror comes first to wake us and our waited-for dreams slip away.
Now is the time to feed your hunger for freedom, for beauty, for meaningful work. It’s not, Seneca said, that we live for too short a time, but that we waste so much of it.