For a very long time, productivity has been driving out creativity in me. What I mean by creativity is the creative urge, the impulse to make something, to bring something into being and a big part of it is to be able to feel and imagine. For as long as I can remember, I have always struggled to get a balance between productivity and creativity and that was largely down to my career choices- there was very little- if anything, out there that met the brief of offering both the opportunity to be productive and to be creative. Years of habitually acquired drive to be economically productive aka pulling my weight in earning and paying bills have culminated in busyness and crammed schedules as the norm. Indeed, many people I know tend to ask ‘are you busy?’ quite early on in conversations. Recently, after years of being nagged by my husband and close friends, I decided to start turning down non-biodynamic work in order to introduce some slack in my weeks and to give myself the opportunity to experience space and maybe to get my creative juices running again. Today was day 1 of a no work day and boy has it been HARD. I felt totally scattered. I felt quite anxious and in the anxious feelings, fears. There was a running internal commentary of ‘you’re doing nothing; you are wasting your day; time is precious and you are wasting it away…’ The most difficult feeling was having no connection to any sense of what I wanted and those thoughts turned into ‘what would I do if this was EVERYDAY?’ Where we live now there is a small garden room where I have paints etc. I had not entered the space properly since 2021 when we moved in. Around lunchtime, I felt like step 1 was to clean the outside of the cabin and its moss-covered windows. Having done that, I opened the doors and walked in properly and started to look at little scribblings and experiments from three years ago. It is so interesting how things often look and feel differently with the passage of time. In the process of creating something, it is always about impulse and possibilities. Interestingly, looking at some of the stuff, I started to feel possibilities emerging. For instance this:
I had a visceral dislike of this canvas and I felt there was nothing I could do with it – but I kept it. And today, looking at the marks, I can now start to sense some possibilities. This is good news. I now need to sit with it for a while and start to play with colours, with another surface and to see what I might end up making on this canvas. And this in turn has sparked a notebook which I starting writing from the backside by mistake and I hadn’t realised until today. As I turned it to the side that clearly had the brand name on it and wrote inside ‘This way up!’ an idea came to me that I could write from both directions with slightly different intentions- from the back, imagining a desired future and writing a story from there to how I got there then the other way, a diary of how I am now and how things are unfolding. I wondered at what point the two directions would meet. I am excited about this two-way diary.
Even though the day has not been productive in the usual sense but the day was productive in the way new ideas and possibilities materialised.