Ebs and Flows
The book ‘Living with a Creative Mind’ unpacks the way creative people experience intense swings in mood and energy, likening them to tides. Sometimes we’re able to work for hours or days without food or sleep and at other times they’re unable to function at all. Just as light can’t exist without darkness, creative energy can’t exist without destructive energy. Two sides of the same coin. The seasons, the weather, and plants – it is nature’s way to change or swing between extremes, it’s the law of nature. It is our nature to evolve too.
Swinging back and forth is what ‘life’ is. Living in our man made bubbles we can become so detached from nature and its fluidity. So that when the seasons of our life, our day or our mood begin to evolve we cling desperately to the past, to what we know. Even if what is opening up in front of us is exactly what we’ve been asking for, the destabilising feeling of change is enough to deny progress and success.
The ebbs of life hurt, their misery feels endless in the moment. And it only hurts more when we fight against them. Most Aussie’s who live on the coast know that when the ocean has you in a rip, never to fight against it. Fighting the current will only exhaust you and likely drawn you. We are taught to stay calm, let it take us, and after the undertow has run its course we can swim freely around the back, back to safer waters. It’s the same with creative struggle. I’ve been on the ebb for the last week, trying to figure my way out, trying to outsmart and outrun the darkness. But there are no answers, only questions. How do I trust my own nature? How do I embrace that this is part of process? How do I stop making myself wrong?
I don’t think it is a lesson we have to learn, but a truth we need to remember. A wise man said that ‘in nature we are reminded of our own nature’ I think it was Dr Wayne Dyer interpreting the Tao. So try this next time you find yourself fighting the tide of your creativity: look into a flower, take a walk in nature or get in the ocean. Re-connect with nature to re-member that the same divine intelligence that is behind the seasons is behind you. Let it take you where you need to go.
Art is found in the gloom, but never in haste.
Your Friend,