The true cost of waiting
By putting gates and limits on when I should create and trying to save it up for dates and to preserve energy, I am avoiding creativity.
I found myself waiting for my current 30 day challenge to start a new one. Naively, I suppose, I had decided I would publish from day one to thirty in December, denying the existence of a week of holidays commencing December 20th.
Prior to my holiday and keeping great pace, I was proudly writing multiple things a day. Before you ask, I have no magic formula- just a journal, black pen, coffee, and lying in bed with a book for an hour each morning to get the brain activated. Some of it works, most does not. But there’s something soothing in that pen and paper scratching while enjoying a tiny luxury.
And the volume of work produced means at least one thing worth taking further ends up somewhere.
Then of course, I go on holidays away from work (work being my computer, too), and publishing goes out the window.
This is not to be unexpected. I briefly flirted with, and disregarded, a contingency.
It is after the trip the rot set in.
Driving home on Boxing Day, I was too sore to write.
The 27th of December, it was too hot to think.
The 28th saw no revival of my writing fortitude, so I wrote myself the ‘meh, next challenge’ leave pass.
Thankfully, the leave pass was scratchy. By the 29th, it had annoyed me into rebellion.
Why was I holding my writerly breath? Why was I putting anything, even cleaning, in front of the clickety clackety of keyboard wrangling?
The more I was waiting for the January reset, the next 30 day challenge to kick in, the more excuses I had to avoid writing.
And the more opportunities I created to stockpile my writing, the more I created a pile so heavy that pulling out any piece, from start to finish or tasty middle, would send my sense of duty and obligation to my write life toppling over.
Overwhelm <> Obligation : it mattered not.
It was all simply a forcefield around the land of writing.
And the closer I pressed my face to that forcefield, the more the words became blurry, and the motivation, dim.
Pushing back on pushback
In contrast to my usual self, I ran away from this grinding nose sensation and cross-eyed blur with all the pep of a Border Collie looking for a vantage place with which to view her flock. I lay flat in the clover and breathed. The words but tiny dots, and my view no longer obscured by the push, push, pushing.
I realised I had the strength to write again if I stopped resisting. What a lovely feeling!
Validation <> Cheating (?)
I had published every day - on paper.
If I really felt stitched up by the dates, WordPress would always let me pick a publishing date that kept my publishing streak in tact.
Challenges don’t have to start on the first day of the month. I mean, if I was really bugging out, what (other than a sincere inability to gel with anything remotely math related) was stopping me from starting anew?
Nobody knew about this challenge and therefore couldn’t even comment on the silent productivity. And even if they did, wouldn’t that be an unreasonable level of interest in my creative life?
While the internet rages on and the algorithms speak of their daily appetite for our fresh new content, the humans it is meant for don’t care so much that they set their watch, eagerly awaiting my next bit of textual fancy to plop onto the internet. These things called lives see to that!
I soon realised what I had was not an unfinished challenge but a reason to procrastinate, to avoid, to have yet another good idea remain unfinished.
And that the best way to get over it was to get on with it.
A case of mistaken identity
Waiting, meet Resting. I am sure you two are familiar with each other. You’re often confused for each other at all kinds of creative events and undertakings.
Creativity and I engage in a serene sifting of thought alongside the new and interesting way I want to engage with them. I like to beguile Creativity, to impress her. Hearing her laugh or seeing her puzzle and then smile is beautiful to me.
But I am aware of the taut structure I hold emotionally, mentally, and philosophically to get there.
So much so, I sometimes confuse it for her far less attractive sister, Consistency.
Creativity and the attention she brings gives me a wonderful feeling. I want it so much, I decide on helpful structures and routines to make her visits inevitable.
I light the way with patterns and intrigue. I give myself permission to work while inviting myself to play. I decide that this is helpful, this repetitive, soothing motion interweaved with delicate curiosity. And I enter this space within myself feeling privilege and honour, excitement and productivity surge.
And then seeing it work, my self-conscious subconscious does its dandiest to sabotage it.
Creativity has her own version of delicious yet jagged momentum. She doesn’t want to hang out every day. Her lips thirst for variety.
Plus, she is annoyingly contrary. She hikes up to the top of any project simultaneously running up the hill to watch her progress and to the nearest rock to sit in protest her aching legs.
Sometimes, I am almost ashamed to admit, I’d prefer a roadmap, a plan, and something a little less la vie il faut la vivre. So, I invite Consistency to tea.
But I have come to realise I am not settling for Consistency. I am simply resting with another companion so I have enough enthusiasm to enjoy my time with Creativity.
The greatest shame is not that Creativity doesn’t visit every day. It is that I am using Creativity as a means to an end, to view the outcome as the part with the greatest meaning.
If Creativity wants to flounce around in the wild daises for a bit, admiring the cicadas and drinking dandelion tea from a thermos, maybe we should just bloody let her get it out of her system? Maybe, instead of waiting for it to get out of her system (my system), I should be present and experiencing it.
It is not a passing moment, something to overcome. It is a part of the creativity.
I wait. You wait.
We wait to equal the verve and zeal of the heady beginning.
But it never does. And the more we wait, the more the confidence we’ll connect with the work again wavers. And the more we pause, the looser the structure of the idea becomes. The more time’s gap whistles on through, and the other parts, the parts we’ve already built, creak and become undone.
As we create, we break. We break things, rhythm, and even ourselves.
But as we break, we often breakthrough. And that, not neatly pressing our face against the glass of creativity, is what inspires us to keep going. Or to do it all again.
“I was so into this, but now I’m not so sure,” doesn’t mean you’ve fallen out of love with your idea. It just means the relationship is maturing, changing.
Creativity, like anything else in life, grows unevenly. She tests you to know you are worthy.
She makes a lot of promises to peak your interest and crack open the fertile grounds of your enthusiasm. But you have to know that initial burst is never, ever sustainable. Because she’s already given what she can. She’s now asking you to reciprocate.
To keep confidence for the task at hand, we need rest, to run up hills like eager Border Collies and look at what we have, and stay low to the ground and creep back up upon her again, delighting and wagging to make her laugh before she gives you a treat again.
Creativity allows time to sniff, drink, scratch our arses, roll on our backs, get bored, look at other fields, before resuming our focus on the task at hand.
I owe it to my challenge, or to any creative idea, to stop excusing.
To love an idea is to know - and even welcome - days where it doesn’t want to be done. Days where the best remedy isn’t waiting but resting. To try, give up, and not get angry. To take up with consistency - or not. But just stop blaming or deferring with some cockeyed magical thinking about creativity that ultimately, is sabotage in a borrowed sundress.
The cost of waiting on art, creativity, yourself, myself, life, it isn’t a fair exchange. It is a tax paid for complacency.
So, begone the cost of waiting for:
The date to click over to the first of the month to start anew. If I hold back, all I am doing is amplifying the feeling that I have an incomplete challenge, one I have failed. This is not inspiring me and is simply punishing me because that is familiar, far more familiar than enjoying this writerly thing I am doing.
A new year to start. For I cannot save up all my creative enthusiasm by not engaging with it in the holidays and spreading it thin during the working year, hoping I don’t run dry or don’t burn out. I am not a weir or a dam. I am a creative being desperate to connect with their creativity. A creativity that realistically works better not when it is contained or saved up, but given places to play.
Ideas to self-assemble on some conveyor belt of productivity and neatly plop off, perfect, round, and oh so tasty. Who am I kidding that the adorably ramshackle and utterly terrifying yatterings that drive this creative engine would be anything but sharp elbows and happily snapping at each other, backfiring at my confidence? They’ll fly when they fly. I’m merely the triage nurse in their journey.
Creativity to knock every day. Or Consistency to not realise she is my second choice. They are smarter than that, even if I am not. Nobody, not even me, deserves this horrendously immature choice.
And let’s begin the challenge anew.
Image: jet stream in the sky above the rock flats at Shellharbour make an X.