Hello again, here I am with another late installment for you. I wish I could say that I have been meaning to get to this for the past few weeks but I really haven’t. It’s difficult to get on a creative schedule when most times creativity does not come to me when I need it to, but rather when it feels like hitting.

That being said, this month has been extremely hectic. Some freelance work that I picked up absorbed weekends, an art piece that I was determined to get done took up other free moments, I received a job opportunity that I’m very excited about, and I’m very thankful for the position that I’m in. But it is interesting to me that personal creative endeavors are always the first thing to take some of the blow whenever things get crazy.

I read a book a few months ago about rest. More specifically, what it looks like to live your life from a place of rest — and I followed a handful of the practices that the book gave as best as I could for about two months… saw the results… felt great… and then proceeded to beat myself up for not maintaining the habits. As a person who likes habits, routine, and order it was very hard for me to understand why it’s so easy for me to loose a tight grip on things that fulfill me creatively, mentally, spiritually, and as a result of these things even physically. Until I recalled something that the book mentioned.

A hurried life is obviously not an ideal one… this is common knowledge. I mentioned it in the first Newsletter installment via a quote from Sol LeWitt. But what if there is more aspects to a hurried life than just simply being busy.

Hurry, in its innate existence, is the result of disordered priorities. I was reminded of this this past month when I realized that I was slowly slipping into burnout emotionally and creatively… which unfortunately often times go hand-in-hand for me whenever I’m working on something. Hurry is also the result of running from something painful and/or boring. So why do we stray from creative endeavors like I mentioned earlier when we get busy? Are we bored with our own creative thoughts? Are we running from the pain of a past creative failure or even the potential failure of the current thing? Maybe it stems from an outside source and we’re running from boredom or pain in another area, which will bleed into your creative endeavors.

This train of thought could obviously be applied to anything of course. But I’m fascinated with the realization I had this last week that things we desire to do are often the first to go when hurry gets the best of us because I’m currently feeling it even as I write this.

So what do we do? We slow down. Whether it’s by choice or by force. you can choose to do it or things will catch up to you and your body will force you into it. In light of the past 30 days that I’ve lived I would recommend the first option.

Something that I’ve only exercised a handful of times is practicing creating something knowing that it will probably not be that good. Most ideas aren’t good anyways. If every idea was brilliant then none of them would be — Everybody would be a creative genius, a successful artist, a thriving director, or a musical prodigy. But it’s an effective method for slowing down because it forces you to accept that things aren’t so serious, and I believe that trapping ourselves in a mindset of everything needing to be taken seriously only feeds into burnout.

That being said, I’d like to point out that this is not a formula for solving hurry or creative burnout – it’s a conversation. No one will ever have it figured out. But this Newsletter exists to throw around ideas and thoughts that could help you and I simultaneously.

So there it is. Installment 5 of The Newsletter in all of its glory. Maybe we’ll get back to a bi-weekly schedule now that I’ve owned up to my busy month, maybe not. We’ll see. Either way thank you for reading. Talk to you soon.

– C