the CREATIVE DRY SPELL

You are used to sprinting forward like a rocket, but some days, you may go through a period of ‘dry spell’. Some call it writer’s or artists’ block, but you don’t have to be in a traditional artistic endeavour to experience this.

How you choose to live your life itself is a creative act: You can be a creative entrepreneur, business owner, chef, homemaker. You know you are in it when you struggle to move forward despite your best efforts. You may find yourself repeating your messages, or dreading work. 

Often, intense and gifted individual struggles with the idea of ‘being’ without ‘doing’. They feel almost obliged to be fast moving every single minute. 

A sense of existential guilt constantly haunts them. Part of this comes from a healthy place-- deep down, they recognise their potential, and thus feel the pressure to move towards fulfilling it. 

When compounded with chronic shame, your intensity can transmute into a daily burden of guilt — a nagging feeling that somehow you have not been productive or generative enough, that you have not worked hard enough, punished yourself enough to ‘earn’ their place in the world. 

But even when your desire to ‘do’ rather than ‘be’ comes from a place of healthy drive towards excellence, there is still that constant existential dread of not having used your time wisely enough, that you are somehow not moving fast enough to be at your best quickest enough.  

Learning about the inherent ‘seasonal changes’ in a creative process can help you to be better equipped when riding the emotional waves of anxiety when you don’t feel productive. 

Any creative or generative process have set phases. While the ‘high’ from actually producing tangible ‘products’ is reassuring, it is not natural to always stay in that state.

Imagine yourself as a gardener of your work— seeds need to be planted, sowed, and grow before anything can flourish.

Apart from the times where you directly churn out words and images, there also need to time for your research, for ideas to take shape.

This incubation phase can be difficult to bear if you do not have a sense of wise trust in the process. 

You may have defined your productivity by the amount of work you complete, the time to give to others, the number of tasks you can tick on the checklist, the amount of money you earn in a day. But often, more is operating in the background without you knowing. 

The time you take to rest, nap, play, take sabbaticals, have fun… can be as productive if not more productive and meaningful.

Ironically, when we become attached to our rigid idea of what and how much we ‘should do’, we sabotage the very thing that we are trying to achieve.

Leaning into your creative alignment means allowing your body’s signals, curiosity and enthusiasm to guide you. 

What if all the time that you spend ‘indulging’ in play, rest and pleasure are not a distraction from your work, but the springboard to it?

Research has found that people who ‘procrastinate’ are more creative (Adam Grant, in The Originals).

This is because what we have previously condemned as ‘procrastination’ is actually a time of ‘generative wander’, where we gather more information, allow ideas to build and develop, and eventually leading to more innovative ideas.

What if there is a wise internal mechanism that is built into you, operating in ways that your conscious mind cannot yet perceive?

As all systems are designed to do, your subconscious mind is constantly working, adapting, adjusting, and making decisions towards a functional equilibrium.

Like all things in nature, it yields to a natural rhythm that alternates between moving and stopping, generating and resting, and unless you fight and resist it, it is entirely in sync with how things ‘should be’. 

I am not suggesting that you stop working altogether during a dry-spell, but rather, recognise it for what it is, and make the best of it.  This can be an exciting time. It is the best time for you to return to the drawing board, to exercise your beginner’s mind, to see everything with a fresh pair of eyes, and to ignite the child-like wonder in you. 

This is also a time where you can joyously forage in libraries and online media, allow yourself to be exposed to all sorts of entertainment and information, and to collect new inspirations.

 You are not being generative ONLY when you are writing, drawing, working.

You do not have to segregate your life’s activities into the ‘productive’ or ‘unproductive’ camps, as they are all part of your creative process.

In times when you go down the rabbit hole of blaming yourself for ‘wasting time’, or ‘procrastinating’, see if you can consider that these time where you flex your stretched creative muscles are not deterrent or obstacles to your creative achievements, but part of it.

Trusting this unconceivable natural order is infinitely more powerful than your human mind’s planning, willing and judging. 

Next time, when your mind gets busy trying to punish you for having ‘wasted your time’. Think about how the opposite may also be true, if not truer, to your existing self- condemning belief.

“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”

-Lao Tzu. 

THIS WEEK’S EXPERIMENT: Drawing from the Subconscious

Prepare some charcoal if you can.

Tap into your intuition and free your mind up.

Start with making a mark, line, and shape or form with charcoal or eraser on your paper or sketchbook. Don’t overthink about this; any shape will do.

Then, look at the mark, and expand it intuitively. Add broad, quick strokes and delicate thin lines, large solid forms or grey, loose shapes, until you feel the entire page with charcoal marks.

The idea here is to draw from your subconscious. Follow your instinct and remember that there is no right or wrong.