I now understand that sometimes we have talents in precisely the areas that are most challenging to us. Strikes me that this is far more normal than being a total natural or a supernatural savant.
If you feel like you do your art in spite of yourself, you ain’t alone, welcome to the club.
Ritual prevents the ordinary from dissolving into invisibility. If you light a candle at dinner, the meal becomes an event. If you walk at the same time each day, it becomes more than exercise. Anthropologists will tell you that rituals function as technologies of attention: certain ordinary acts aren’t trivial, they’re the architecture of meaning.