More Than Time
EPISODE 075: More Than Time
We need time to do our best work, but not only time. We need the internal resources to pay the emotional costs, and time without attention, focus, and curiosity probably only leads to cranking out the work, and that neither honours to muse nor benefits our eventual audiences. As we return to something a little closer to normal life, I worry I'm not going to have the same kind of time or internal resources that slower pace of the pandemic has allowed me. Let's talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
I spent the last week packing to travel again, which I haven't done for almost 2 years. Finally, after 20 months of waiting I've got tickets in hand, my duffle bags are packed, and if it all goes to plan I'll be photographing polar bears by the time you've got your coffee and are listening to this.
That hiatus from travel has also been a break from what has been for years some of my most enjoyable, and meaningful work. More than I can say I have missed being in the water, the dust of foreign cities, or the wilderness, spending time in other places with other cultures and other species, and I am so excited to be returning—however slowly and nervously—to that. 3 weeks ago I was sitting on a river bank as brown bears pulled red salmon from a bluer-than-blue river reflecting the golden aspens on the shore, and I nearly exploded from the joy of being back behind my cameras. I am so, so glad to be back at it.
What this means, however is another shift in my creative rhythm. When the pandemic began, like many people, I scrambled to re-calibrate, to keep busy, and find creative outlets to replace what had been lost. One of those outlets was, and remains, this podcast. A Beautiful Anarchy started as a pandemic project, a great big what-if that I thought might scratch an itch to connect and speak meaningfully to others about the joys and struggles of everyday creativity. In a sense it has become my church, and from the concerned emails I am still getting about my recent absence, some of you feel that same connection, and have been missing the weekly kick-in-the-pants, gentle nudges, or whatever very particular thing you glean from these times together.
So that's made it really hard, as my other rhythms and other work, have slowly returned and with them have brought more demands on my time, and my attention, and I've had to seriously consider whether A Beautiful Anarchy was only a pandemic project, or something more enduring for which I need to make room in my life, make space for it in both my schedule and my mind. With these thoughts have come bigger issues, issues to which you might relate, and I thought perhaps we might talk about it. I'm David duChemin, and this is episode 75 of A Beautiful Anarchy. Welcome here.
I know I've quoted painter Chuck Close before; he's on record saying that "inspiration is for amateurs, the rest of us show up and get to work." Picasso said something similar. The poet Baudelaire said "inspiration comes from working," and I've always felt like creativity was, among other things, a work ethic, a thing we do, and it's in the doing that we often discover the best ideas or inspiration. But like so much in life there's probably room for a little more nuance than this. It's more complex, I think, than merely showing up, and cranking it out. It's not only about showing up and doing the work but about having something to say. My friend Jon put it really well recently as we talked about this one evening over a glass of whisky. He said to just crank it out is to dishonour the muse and the audience for whom we create. Creativity, he said, needs space, which were words I needed to hear as I feel increasingly like the walls are closing in a little as we slow ease into post-pandemic life.
The pandemic, for whatever else it brought me and from which I'll be glad to be relieved once it's all over, gave me more time and space than I've ever had. Time to think, to read, to not be harried by all the many details of life that crowd our schedules. That space translated, I think, to a more contemplative inner life than I've had time for in many years, and books I might never have read if I were filling my days with travel and workshops, and the endless planning of those things. I've never been more aware, as some of that necessarily slips away from me, that my creativity thrives in wider margins, and with room to breathe.
My question as we slowly return to something more like normal life, as it seems like many of us are doing, is how do we keep hold of that which we've gained, and the lessons we've learned over the last 20 months? How do we remain mindful of the good, and not wash it all away in a torrent of once-normal activities? How do I cling to the space, and the slower pace, that I've gained and from which my creative life has so benefitted?
I know not everyone sees silver linings around the very dark cloud of this pandemic, and I'm not trying to conjure one where none exists. But we've reacted to, and learned to cope with, a very difficult situation and from it, some good has come. I can only speak for myself but as an example, I've spent more time, not less, with a few very good friends, and while I'd rather be face to face with them for Happy Hour rather than on Zoom or FaceTime, we have been forced to make that time together happen, and we've been less ad-hoc about connecting and spending time together. I don't want to lose those conversations to the busyness that will inevitably come with newly resuscitated demands being placed on our time. I don't want to lose the awareness of how valuable that time together really is, and how much I need it for my inner life to remain buoyant.
When it comes to what I put on my schedule I tend, like many of you, I suspect, to bite off more than I can chew. I chronically underestimate the time certain commitments will require, and even more so the emotional bandwidth those same commitments will absorb. I forget so easily that a 60-minute task will not only chew up those 60 minutes, but usually also the 30-minutes on either side, as well as all the time that goes into thinking about that one-hour task before it even happens, and then again once it's passed. And so very quickly my emotional and mental resources get tapped out well before my time resources do. Sure, I've got 3 hours left in the day, and activities to fill them but my ability to focus, to be creative, often even just my ability to care, are long spent.
We tend to think if we have the time to do something, we might as well do it. I look at things against my calendar alone and think, Sure, I've got the time, why not? We need time. It's essential. But it's not enough. We need more than time because time's not the only resource that determines my availability or my ability to show up for our work. I worry my schedule is going to resume its former pace unless I figure out a way to create more generous buffers and margins that allow for my internal resources to replenish themselves. I can't be the only one wrestling with this. This idea of emotional cost and the question of the availability of internal resources are becoming increasingly important to me. I think time alone is insufficient for our best work, and needs to be only one consideration in what we choose to do or not do with ourselves.
So when it comes to this podcast I hope you'll understand as we move forward that the pace I once kept is going to change. I just don't see a way to keep at it while also returning to the work from which I make my living. And there are going to be times when I miss a week or more for no other reason than that I care about this, and about you, too much to just crank it out for the sake of a work ethic that is meant to serve my creativity, rather than be served by it.
The problem with the idea that "inspiration is for amateurs and the rest of us just get to work" is that we sometimes work on the wrong thing. Or we work so long on one thing, a thing that was so right at one point in time but now no longer feels like it fits us. Or, faced with several projects all at once, we get a little foggy about which one is the priority.
Months ago now I compared creative work to digging, and found in that metaphor some hope that if I dig long enough on whatever it is I'm working on, if I just get to work with the shovel, I'll unearth something interesting.
I still find real value in that notion. But it's also important to put the shovel down with whatever frequency you need to in order to do not just hard work, but considered work. Work for which you have not only time but the internal resources. Attention, focus, curiosity. I guess this is my roundabout way of saying I want to be sure that I don't end up digging for the sake of digging and not for the wonder of discovery; and maybe it's a reminder to both you and me to be mindful that our creative work has a pace to it—a pace and a rhythm that changes—and you're not alone if the pace with which you were once digging so productively, is a pace that now yields diminishing returns and you need to slow down, take a step back, and rest awhile.
Thanks for joining me again. There's a good chance the next episode will have to wait until I'm back from my time with the polar bears, but it won't be long. And as always, if you have a question, or just want to say hello, you can get me by email at talkback@aBeautifulAnarchy.com. Thanks again for being here, we'll talk soon. In the meantime, go make something beautiful.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0