The brush at the wall

A calligrapher in Sharjah has practised for most of her life. People commission her for wedding gifts and new homes, and other calligraphers point students towards her work.

She has been asked to write a single line, very large, on a wall at a public festival, with a crowd watching her do it. The night before, her hand will not stay still. She wonders whether they asked the wrong person.

We tend to think this feeling belongs to beginners, and that recognition cures it. Enough praise, enough years, enough people who know your name, and at last you will feel entitled to stand at the front.

Watch accomplished people closely and the opposite shows. The doubt does not leave. If anything it grows, because the stakes grow with it.

There is a reason. Anyone doing work that matters is reaching for something they have not done before. She has never written this line on this wall in front of these people. Nobody has. In that moment she really is pretending, acting as though she can before she has proved it. Every person making something new is doing the same.

So the feeling is not a sign that she does not belong there. It is the cost of being there at all. The people who never feel it are mostly the ones who have stopped trying anything they might get wrong.

That changes the question. It is not how to make the doubt go away before the festival. It will not go.

The only plan that works is to turn up, pick up the brush, and not put it down until the line is finished.