8 Clicks from Nowhere ䷀

Dispatches ⌂

Tag: habitual practice

Chapter List

  • Duty Demand

    I suppose many people read this site and assume that I’m some sort of creative workhorse, never stopping, never resting, burning the candle at both ends (as they say) and churning out endless works of creative brilliance powered by vast, sweeping moments of inspiration granted from on high.

    Heck, nothing could be further from the truth.

    I squeeze in a nap almost every day. I play video games whilst prone on the couch. I take the dog for long meandering walks in the park. I doom scroll. I sit idle while I try to work up the motivation to do something besides sitting idle. I’m just a guy.

    I struggle with ideas. I run plots over and over and over in my head and then decide half way through that the story is going nowhere. I carry around empty notebooks. I put ideas in point form into my phone and then forget what I was trying to say on the topic. I tear up terrible paintings and use the back sides as scrap paper. I noodle on my musical instruments and ignore the pieces I should be practicing while I endlessly tune or wipe dust from the corners. 

    Creativity is a lot of things, but I don’t think I would personally call it a straight line.

    Creativity is a mindset. Creativity is a duty to a long game. Creativity is holding the spirit of making and sharing and inventing and dreaming in your head—and then being ready to push on with the work when opportunity strikes, sure… but it is also habit.

    I am all those things from before but also I block off time every day to write. I keep notes on my phone. I hang those musical instruments near a music stand so I can reach over and pluck them from the wall to play. I have rituals. I have schedules. I have deadlines. I have demands I put upon myself to get the work done through the chaos of life. 

    That’s long game consistency, and creativity often comes simply from getting the work done around other commitments and obligations. Under the category of Duty & Demand I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Routine Back

    Nothing reminds me so much of the value of my everyday get-up-and-do-stuff routine as when I step out of it for a few days.

    Every few months I take on a weird side project (for pay) that becomes all-consuming. A contract here, a part-time gig there, and always an interesting side-quest from the main project of my semi-retired creative life. The week before I wrote these words I was at it again, up north having a little adventure in the rural Canadian prairies. 

    And while the details change, the post mortem is almost always the same: I have been decoupled from my routine and then I need to spend a week or two trying to find the routine back.

    Routine is, after all, a cognitive shortcut for feeling productive. Whether or not productivity is your end goal, or if the effort it is meant for something less clinical and more spiritual, routine is often way more important than we give it credit for being.

    Routine is habit. Routine is a temporal obligation to be somewhere doing something on a clockwork regularity that, bluntly, gets stuff done.

    For me, routine is sitting in a cafe for an hour in the morning sipping a hot drink and typing something, writing, making, creating with a regularity and scheduled purpose. Without the routine I may get it done, but more than likely I would not. Deciding with a planned regularity that this is where I need to be and when I need to be doing something means I don’t need to find the motivation or overcome the paralysis of deciding: it is just due.