The Two Things Your Creativity Needs From You
Last week I had a list-related freakout. I wailed and moaned and lamented. It was something to see, friends.
“It’s too muuuuuuch,” I wailed. “I caaaaaan’t,” I moaned.
Martha, being a sympathetic sort, said, “You must have a really long list.”
“But that’s the thing,” I lamented. It’s not the length of the list. It’s the breadth of it.”
Because that’s how lists can be—especially in these days of infinite information overload. Some to-do list items are deep and pointed: “donate kidney to Brenda,” or “achieve world peace.” But more often, my lists are filled with a million shallow little tasks, all different from one another, all crowding into the merciless boundaries of a day.
You might be in a similar position. If you have a broad list, it likely dominates your inner monologue. It’s probably the boring, annoying soundtrack thrumming constantly at the back of your mind on any given day.
For example, here’s a slice of my inner monologue this morning:
…If I make coffee right now I can drink it in the car on the way to the pediatrician, which means that I’ll be awake enough in the waiting room to review those web designs on my phone, which means I can draft my newsletter using a transcription app on the drive home, and when I get home I’ll have enough time to start the laundry before my meeting, which means that I’ll have to set an alarm on my phone about switching laundry to the dryer because Lila’s summer blanket has to be dry by bedtime…
So life is busy and distracting—not exactly front page news.
But when I’m running my broad-list program in the background, it takes up ALL my RAM. My brain jams. It’s as though 29 tabs are open in a browser and they’re all playing different YouTube videos.
My mind loses its mind.
And this may actually be a worthy existential reason for my freakout: not all the things I have to do; not even the brain-jam. Instead, what makes the broad list so terrible is the parts of ourselves and our lives that it excludes.
Namely, creativity.
When my broad-list program is running, my creativity goes completely offline. There’s no space for what’s whimsical and playful in me, idle and entranced by the play of sunlight and shadow on the wall.
There’s no space for the storyteller.
I mean, I try. I think about it. I keep hoping my creativity will just show up, muscle its way into a day crammed with minutiae. But the fact is, creativity can’t show unless I somehow struggle out of the broad-list shallows.
“In the wholeheartedness of concentration,” Jane Hirshfield wrote, “world and self begin to cohere. With that state comes an enlarging: of what may be known, what may be felt, what may be done.”
Put another way, by Isabel Allende, “Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too.”
xR
Recommendations
This week I want to recommend the Australian musician Nick Cave’s newsletter, “The Red Hand Files.”
There are so few things that land in my inbox that I always open, always read. This is one of them. Nick’s words are beautiful, poignant and sometimes unexpectedly laugh-out-loud funny.
Community Voices
As always, I love hearing from you in the comments. 💚
“Ideas feel like newborns birthed from the ether. Not of you and not always just for you. You are the midwife or perhaps the wet nurse of an idea. Until formed in a brain or heart they belong to no one and once fully realized they belong to everyone. For a short time just like with a child they are yours to tend.”
- Tracy Aubuchon
I love that you're shining a light on this totally different approach to creativity that takes it OUT of being this struggle bus/alone time torture idea and into a collective support and, dare I say, even ENJOYABLE process.”
- Aliyah Washington
Meme Corner
I'm (only) navigating three things right now: a complete financial reset including change of home, supporting my partner''s recovery from a series of small strokes two weeks ago, and the resonant arrival of the knowledge that what comes next for me is to stand and face what making "the numbers" work has displaced for decades: the resonance within.
I am a resonance machine. I sing, I write, I communicate for a living -- helping others feel the note that thrums through, delivering their voice beyond the roar.
Before now, I seem to have thought my integrity turned on keeping commitments to external forces, taming my resonance to reduce conflict with culture so I could find some peace with it.
Now I find that integrity is walking out onto my Note, over thin air. An image I've had in my mind for years. Borne on my own true nature, as a couple of wise women suggest. If I'm on my Note, gravity fails. It's all lift. Plus a few epic cartwheels and backflips.
The breadth of logistics that support my Note are where I connect with the list concept. They are mind boggling. Beyond comprehension. The organizing skills the far left side of my brain spools out delight the heck out of me, now that I see them. The worried child that created them finds comfort there - thank god. Keeping those two muscles from crushing the tone is the trick -- and seems to be largely a matter of respect.
The three (tectonic) things occurring right now are of the highest order. (Well, dang. I have been -consciously - inviting the highest to occur.) If I lead with my Note, supported by the (by now Olympic level) left brain gymnastics, lifted by the fact of weightlessness (aka enlightenment?) to (my mind's eye view of) utter freedom, well... the improv continues.
I ask the Divine to guide this whole, merry, improv troupe.
I can relate to "muscle it's way into a day crammed with minutae". Love the idea you've put forth of creating space for communion creativity.