Trudgin'
Rick Rubin quotes, an incorrect definition, etc.
In the Big Book, there’s a famous line on the last page of the basic text:
“We shall be with you in the Fellowship of the Spirit, and you will surely meet some of us as you trudge the Road of Happy Destiny.”
The word “trudge” gets tossed around a lot in meetings, usually with a negative connotation. Once, a guy made a good case (but I’ve since Googled it and found it to be incorrect) that the word means to “walk with purpose.” For a while, I just took him at his word and thought that’s what it meant. But everything I find online says that trudge usually implies heavy labor. For example, Merriam’s definition, which is “to walk or march steadily and usually laboriously.”
I like how this site includes recent news articles including the word, in this case: “As Belichick and the Tar Heels trudge through a disappointing first season together, speculation has also continued to spread that both sides are looking to part ways less than one year into his five-year deal worth $10 million per season.” —Sean Neumann, PEOPLE, 12 Nov. 2025
On Tuesday, before returning to work after my regular weekday coffee at Metric, I wandered around West Fulton Market. I love looking at all the cool industrial buildings and seeing people welding, packaging, doing hard manual labor. They were the ones hard at work, but I felt like I was the one trudging. I felt spiritually depleted in the gray Chicago late autumn. I wondered why.
Ever since I’ve been on the other side of two big events, I’ve been in a little bit of a funk. Looking forward to the book and album releases gave my creative life direction. Since they’ve ended, I feel like I’ve been creatively trudging. Plodding along, perhaps even sputtering.
I made a bunch of cool merch for the YMIAH concert, and I spent a ton of time with a designer to perfect the vision I had to release the record as a tote bag and t-shirt. Not many people seemed to get it or like it (meaning I left the gig with as much merch as I came with). I lamented this to a friend recently, and he said just give it some time, people will come around. I hope so.
I thought about the process that went into the work, and how a few quotes from Rick Rubin’s book on creativity, The Creative Act: A Way of Being, related to the aftermath.
Rubin says: “All that matters is that you are making something you love, to the best of your ability, here and now.” Well, I don’t know if that’s all that matters, but it does matter. When I slow down and zoom out (Rubin says, “Zoom in and obsess. Zoom out and observe. We get to choose.”) I can observe the work I’ve done and be proud of it, regardless of how many tote bags people bought.
The last quote from Rubin’s book that pertains to what I’m experiencing is: “Oscar Wilde said that some things are too important to be taken seriously. Art is one of those things. Setting the bar low, especially to get started, frees you to play, explore, and test without attachment to results.” I loved playing around with the concept for the tote and tees with my designer friend. I love toting the bag around town, and I felt proud mailing out shirts to my regular bandmates who weren’t on the most recent recordings.
Plodding along is part of the process. Being disappointed with the results is, too. I like the idea of zooming in and obsessing versus zooming out and observing… the latter takes more effort. But if I give myself just a few minutes to do this, I kind of get back in that beginner’s mind headspace, one might even say naive, similar to when my friend’s definition of trudging felt right to me, even though it was technically wrong.
What makes being right so important? And what makes things having to be linear so important? I think about these questions relating to the work I make and life in general, and I realize that in the long run, the road of happy destiny doesn’t care about being right or linear nearly as much as I do when I’m overly zoomed in…
Until next time,
Matt
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Reading: Win by Harlan Coben
Watching: “Die My Love”
Listening: The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery audiobook by Brianna Wiest, Geese
Interesting way to look at things! There are times we need to “zoom in” and times we need to “zoom out”!