MADE BY MANY: The Marathon Continues
**This column originally appeared in our July 2026 issue**
I went on a date to get out of the area.
A literal date, to Art Omi in the Hudson Valley. Sculpture grounds, open space, an afternoon that asks nothing of you except to be present. I needed air that didn't feel like it was asking me to solve something. I found it, for a few hours, soundtracked by Larry June, Nali, & Nipsey. Then I walked into the welcome center, and there were two books sitting on a small display amidst an exhibition in their Newmark Gallery. Ekistics: An Introduction to the Science of Human Settlements by Constantinos Doxiadis and Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space by Neil Smith.
I stood there longer than I should have.
Doxiadis spent his career arguing that cities fail when they optimize for buildings at the expense of the human and social layers that give those buildings meaning. Smith spent his arguing that displacement is not a side effect of urban investment but the mechanism, that capital deliberately allows neighborhoods to devalue until the gap between what land is worth and what it could earn gets wide enough to move in, extract the value, and leave. Both men were writing decades ago. Both were describing, with precision, the exact conditions I have been writing about in this column for six months.
Finding them felt like a sign. It also felt like a mirror I didn't ask for. If people have been documenting this since the 1960s, then what exactly is my writing for? If the thinking already exists, already has names and frameworks and peer-reviewed journals, then maybe the problem isn't that nobody has said it. Maybe the work is right, and the place is wrong. Maybe I’m the wrong messenger. Maybe the value I think I have isn’t actually worth much. I've been wrestling with these questions longer than I'd like to admit.
A few weeks later, a friend of mine held a listening session for his new album. He'd put serious work into it, the full weight of a person, not just their talent. The room was smaller than he probably hoped. The people there were the producers he'd made it with, the friends who knew what it cost him, and me, also a friend, spinning, hosting & designing the setup. He streamed it live and shouted out everyone present that shared the moment. At the end, when the music was done and the night was settling, you could feel him sliding toward the dark place every creative knows, the one that opens up when expectation and reality don't match. Someone made a comment about possibly using the opportunity to slow down, taking a breath, pausing to reflect on the moment. I said, “Nah, we on to the next show.” He sat in a chair and muttered almost to himself, like a prayer or a conjuring: momentum, momentum, momentum.
Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile spent years studying what actually drives creative output. She and her co-researcher Steven Kramer analyzed nearly 12,000 diary entries from creative professionals across seven organizations, looking for the conditions that produced the best work. What they found surprised even them. Not recognition. Not compensation. Not audience size or institutional support. The single most powerful driver of creative engagement and output was forward progress in meaningful work. The act of moving, however incrementally, on something that matters. They called it the Progress Principle, and its corollary is just as important: the single most corrosive force on creative inner life is a setback, a stall, a pause imposed from outside that breaks the rhythm of forward motion.
My friend didn't arrive at momentum. He received it in the moment it was offered, the same way two books in an exhibition offered it to me when I was sliding toward the same place. That distinction matters more than it sounds. Momentum is not self-generating. It is passed. Person to person, room to room, in spaces exactly the size they are. It is the blood to the body, the water to the roots of any creative ecosystem that has ever continued to grow in whatever condition it found itself. When it stops moving, it doesn't pause. It dies. Which means staying open to receiving is not just a personal practice. It is also a civic one. Passing it forward is not generosity, it is indeed the work itself.
Nipsey told us his songs were "the spirituals I swam against them waves with" AND I'm writing this on Juneteenth. So what other choice do we have but to keep “speaking things into the universe until they appear”?
What are you speaking into existence? I wanna hear it too. patrickharris@themetroland.com