I am writing a play with a friend and while I enjoy the process, looking back on the last nine months, it is fascinating to note how many times I’ve started over, rewritten scenes, and stared up at the ceiling wondering how to put the pieces together.
Peter Shaffer in one of my favorite playwrights, the author of works like Amadeus and Equus, and he had this fascinating four-word description of what such task, or any substantial endeavor, requires, “an endlessly demanding faith.”
In an interview Shaffer put it this way: “I write many versions of each scene and then tear them up. Or I take a couple of things from the scene and then tear it up. The whole process is a very slow one… It’s an endlessly demanding faith.”
Whenever we choose to commit to something – a relationship, a project, an aspiration, it is helpful to reflect on what it requires. Yes, an idea. Yes, strategy. Yes, effort. But what will sustain it are Shaffer’s four words – “an endlessly demanding faith.”
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