Three weeks ago I slipped on some neighbourhood icy sidewalks and wrenched a muscle in my back. It hurt for two and a half weeks and I was in enough pain that I had to temporarily suspend my fitness routine. No running. No swimming. Nothing overtly physical beside some gentle stretching and walking.
What I never considered—until I couldn’t do it anymore—was the impact a physical injury could have on my creative life.
Sure, I’ve been writing furiously here over that timespan of practice and effort and intention, but a lot of my posts over the last few weeks have been shrouded in an invisible fog of temporary inability to sit at a desk and write for long stretches, physical pain lifting my arms high enough to play my violin, or a blur of frustration about not being able to get out in nature for inspiration and stress relief.
And maybe this is obvious, but I don’t think we realize how important stable health is for having a creative lifestyle until suddenly we are not healthy anymore, even temporarily. Physical, mental, emotional. All of this is vital to clear the path for making art, playing music, typing words into a keyboard.
We can adapt, of course, but shifting to new modalities to work around longer term disabilities is the work of months or years, all respect given to those who do it successfully. Mode shifting, on the other hand, is not necessarily a quick jump to be made over a couple days or weeks because one foolishly slipped on the ice.
Terms FROm this POSt
- inspiration
- A vague concept I mention frequently on this blog but rarely define, I think the notion of being inspired is really at the foundational level, the seeds of creativity. Without inspiration, without muse, without spark creativity is just work or repetition or rote effort. Inspiration does not necessarily need to be monumental or epic or of the highest quality, but rather it is what is at the start of every creative process …until it flowers and drops more seeds of inspiration and the cycle repeats.
- keyboard
- Maybe it’s for typing. Maybe it’s for coding. Maybe it’s for making music. A bed of buttons arrayed for digital input is my favourite user interface and I’ll write about them often in their many varieties.
- running
- This is not a running blog, but I took up distance running in 2008 and worked my way up to running marathons, including two of the World Majors: New York and Chicago. These days I just run for fun and the social aspect, but it has shaped and shaded so much of the last two decades of my life that there is bound to be a mention on this blog more than I would let on.
- violin
- I write here quite a lot about the violin. It is exactly what you think: that four stringed wooden instrument with the distinctive curved body shape. Played well it is tuned to the range of the human voice, so it often haunts our hearts and reminds us of singing. I have been playing since 2016 when I took it up as an adult student, but one who could already read music. I can play, but the quality to which I aspire is something I will work on for the rest of my life.
