you can live a creative life

Last week I was in a taxi, crawling to the airport at a snails pace.

A sad conversation was lingering in my mind alongside last minute retreat issues that needed my immediate problem solving and attention. I was feeling a hint of reverberation from the previous nights earthquake alarm buzzing beneath my skin, the sound of twenty phones screeching all at once inside my favourite Shimokitazawa soup curry shop, immediately causing my hands to shake, wondering if the glass pendant light above me was about to drop.

Even though the retreat issues had been solved and the earthquake was over and I had plenty of time before my flight, I felt my body tense and my mood sour.

While a sour mood does not always deserve to be demonised I think we can all admit it can be a little addictive.

While I certainly do not expect to feel joy all of the time, my greatest nightmare is to be so high on a bad mood I become blind to the fact that life is always trying to delight me.

It is a crying shame how many people believe in order to live a creative life you mostly need a lot of talent, money and spare time.

While all of those things will provide an overwhelming advantage to anyone who has them, it is obviously, not the story as a whole.

What you need to live creatively, is simply to decide it is what you want for yourself, and refuse to take no for an answer.

If you like, right this very moment, write down in large letters in your journal or on a piece of paper (washi)taped to the wall above your desk: I commit to tending a creative life, I solemnly swear to honour my creative urge above all else or whatever words feel the most alive / least forced for you.

What you need to live creatively is to know that a creative life will not immediately be perfect, or as you have idealised.

You need to be okay with things not looking the way you imagined them in your mind and trust, that with time, they will grow and morph into something much richer and more satisfying than you could ever come up with through thinking alone.

Long term readers of this substack or members of the daily rest studio may gasp to find these words here, but for that decision to actually manifest in your reality, you do need both discipline and consistency.

I know I know.

Stay with me.

Just minutes after I exited the cab, I felt my body soften and my sour mood grow little wings and fly from my chest as I watched an elderly Japanese man check in three boxes of peaches at the baggage drop.

I smiled effortlessly.

Just a few metres to his left was a small group of women in their 70’s holding what looked like armfuls of of tiny dogs. They were buzzing with excitement.

It was, as excitement has always intended to be, contagious.

My mood lifted an inch.

Moments later, it lifted a few more as I realised this is something I have trained myself to do, and am seriously and extremely grateful for.

If you have ever been on the receiving end of a well-intentioned cheer up or just relax, isn’t it a beautiful day when this so-called beautiful day up until now has felt like chewing on a mouthful of glass, you know how well and truly unhelpful it is to command your mind to look for a glimmer of light when you’d rather do nothing but pout.

And yes, sometimes a bad mood can be restorative, alchemised into an overdue conversation finally springing from your throat, a nap, a furious journalling session, a much needed breakthrough — but sometimes, we have simply become blind to the beauty of the world, far too comfortable keeping our eyes firmly closed.

But when you have taught yourself, through attention and note taking, through weaving the images and influence of ordinary life and the world around you into stories, paintings, dance, photographs and food — the environment does it for you.

The creative eye changes how you see the world.

If you have the desire to create, you have the talent for it.

There can be no doubt about it.

The problem is when we take that desire and immediately attempt to cram it into something that can be written on an instagram bio, summed up in a single word, fit under the title of Purpose or Job Description or be explained to someone who is afraid of taking even a single step against the grain.

The devastating reality is that far too many of us spend far too much of our precious creative force attempting to sum up or make sense of our desire to create instead of Just Creating.

When you become disciplined with your devotion to creating, even if it is just for ten minutes a day at first, the sense making starts to happen all on it’s own.

What it takes is something most people will do almost anything to avoid.

They’ll throw money they don’t have at it, seek opinions from those who shouldn’t be giving them, abandon all intuitive knowing for some semblance of an answer in a moment where the whole point is that you don’t yet know.

It takes patience.

It takes patience and it takes time.

It takes a constant reminder to yourself:

This is something I deserve.

To live a creative life you must value yourself enough to view your time and attention as a resource that is extremely precious.

You must be deeply determined to rip your attention from the clutches of a social media machine designed to keep you addicted, feeding your minutes into it like coins into a slot machine and instead feed those same shiny moments into your writing, your garden, your pickling of vegetables, your drinking of tea on the balcony.

This takes discipline, but I promise you, it’s discipline you have within you.

To live a creative life you also need discipline with your thoughts, which will constantly and relentlessly tell you that you are not good enough, you are not entitled to such an existence, that it will never work, that you are wasting your time.

You will likely have to work on this, in some capacity, for the rest of your life.

To write you must write. Not occasionally, but often. Most days. Messily, imperfectly and without regard for a readers eye, much of the time. If it is impossible to write, fill that space with reading.

You need consistency, not over one good week or month but over your life.

Please stop telling yourself that if only you find the perfect routine and stick to it, you will finally be able to live the life you imagine in your dreams.

You can only build that life right now. In stolen moments. In getting up a little earlier, sometimes. Or staying up a little later when the mood strikes. In putting down the phone quicker. In deciding to take a whole day, just for your art, just for yourself. In deciding your creative work is sacred, and acting accordingly.

Routines work for some, yes, but for many they are made to be honoured and then broken. Experimented with and tossed aside. Held tightly in winter and gone by the time the weather reaches 25 degrees.

Whenever you are unkind for yourself for not keeping up with your writing, your meditation practice, your reading, your commitment to living a creative life, the very best thing to do is to immediately start again by taking the smallest possible step, and not waste a single second more berating yourself with the why couldn’t I or the I always do this I’m the worst — when this happens, you can only laugh at yourself for thinking it doesn’t happen to literally everyone else. It simply doesn’t matter, it is done, and now you begin again.

At the very same time you have to realise you are never starting again, because every single moment you have ever spent in the pursuit of it counts.

It does not dissolve into nothing, even if your break has been for months or years. Your lived experience does not and cannot simply disappear.

You must be very serious in your commitment to a creative life but in absolutely no rush at all.

As I boarded the plane from Tokyo to Kumamoto, a woman walked in front of me wearing an outfit I could see myself in, a few years from now.

She had the perfect straw bag and oversized linen shirt with a split up the back, a tiny heel on her summer slides. Her hair was messy, clipped half up, half down. An hour later, as we sailed through unstable air and I felt my heart rate rise, I noticed a young salary man seated on the aisle beside me, seemingly oblivious to the turbulence, engrossed in reading a novel, holding a delicate gold metal book mark with a bright red tassel.

The sight of it was soothing. My heart rate slowed down.

I have no doubt life is always trying to delight me.

I know and remember this, because I write it all down.

On July first we begin a new season in The Daily Rest Studio, Tending The Creative Life.

We have weekly live classes, workshops on romance, soft business and creativity, a book club, a suggested daily practice and a huge collection of restorative, yin, movement and meditation classes for the gentle pursuit and tending of a rich, creative life. Many members refer to the space as an online retreat, and feel supported in the knowing that it simply exists. It is my proudest creative work yet.

Maybe see you in there :)

The Daily Rest Studio