Impulse

I’m incred­i­bly cre­ative at avoid­ing cre­ative work.  I’ll find myself with a spare half hour, and think, “Hey, I’ll do some­thing cre­ative!”.  Photography? I can’t set up the lights & shoot enough in that time.  Writing? I can’t really get into a story with only 30 min­utes.  Film edit­ing?  I’ve got to watch 70 min­utes of footage first.  OK, maybe exer­cise?  I’m too tired.  Does this sound at all familiar? 

I think all cre­ative peo­ple excel at this in some way.  Meanwhile, count­less men­tors pre­scribe doing some cre­ative work every day.  I’ve often para­phrased the maxim, “When all hell breaks loose, make art.”  So, it’s impor­tant to get stuff done regularly.

I’m becom­ing a huge fan of incre­men­tal­ism: doing tiny bits of work instead of huge projects.  This prac­tice is a great rem­edy for my delu­sions of grandeur.  Over the past few weeks, I’ve been sat­is­fy­ing myself with tiny lit­tle projects: given 15 min­utes, I’ll set up lights for a photo.  I won’t shoot; not enough time.  But I’ll set them up so in a future 15 min­utes, I’ll get to shoot.  The result — other than my din­ing room being filled with pho­tog­ra­phy gear — is that I’m get­ting work done and feel­ing bet­ter for it. 

Early this week, I got sev­eral bits of bad news in just a few hours time.  I was all geared up for a lovely bout of melan­choly.  Instead, though, I looked at my list of stuff I wanted to do, and just started back on the list — doing lit­tle things I know I wanted to do.  In about an hour, I was feel­ing great again.  Doing micro­scopic cre­ative projects was a bet­ter rem­edy for the blues than any­thing I’ve pre­vi­ously encoun­tered.  I guess they were right: “make art”.  (I note that it doesn’t say “make great art”). 

Today I was noodling on this, and for what­ever rea­son, JFK’s famous quote came to mind: “Ask not what your coun­try can do for you — ask what you can do for your coun­try.”  Yeah, I don’t know why it propped into my head either, but I decided to riff on it a bit.  It always helps me to have a lit­tle catchy mantra to remind myself to do things — like make art when blue. 

Here’s what I came up with: “Ask not how time con­strains you — ask how you can exploit your time.”  Not as melo­di­ous as JFK, but it gets the job done.  And, I like how it demon­strates the master/slave role reversal.

However it’s phrased, the les­son I’m learn­ing comes down to — accept no excuses; make stuff; I’ll feel bet­ter for it. 

Related posts:

1. Zen and the cre­ative act