things that are feeding me

a January snapshot

A list of things:

1. The book The Accidental Creative by Todd Henry

I first read this book when I was on a nonfiction kick as a teenager and wanted to inhale every prescriptive thing about creativity. This book emerged as a gem: it describes creativity with five core tenets: Focus (prioritizing what’s important), Relationships (cultivating healthy and supportive relationships), Energy (the motivation / energy to do things), Stimuli (bits of information and inspiration), Hours (the pure hours in a day). It also introduced the practice (which I should bring back) of bringing an index card with me and writing down things that intrigue me wherever I go, or when I read a book, I accompany it with an index card and write down passages I love, kind of like my own table of contents.

2. This Rainer Maria Rilke poem (the Stephen Mitchell translation) that I think about constantly:

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

3. This illuminating Substack post by author Edan Lepucki about social media, creativity and “the music we aren’t making”:

I have a daily screen time average that’s bordering on 7 hours. Each time I get such a notification I face it with a grim resignation. Social media makes up a lot of those hours. I have come a conclusion that there are two sides to my artistic self; there is the creative side, and there is the author side. Both are equally intrinsic. The author side is public-facing, sharing a formed book, thought, idea, aesthetic. Connecting. And social media has been incredible for that; necessary, even. But when I’m my creative self there is everything that comes with creation — uncertainty, revelations, anxieties, fixations, an ungainly rawness. That, I think, is what social media is less conducive to. The article refers to the increasingly crowdsourced creative world we find ourselves in, about musicians who may subconsciously adjust their music or angle it towards the playlists and existing sounds on Spotify; what, then, is the music they’re not making because they don’t think it’ll be palatable, viral, popular?

I don’t think I’ll quit social media. But it was nice to read the article above; it makes me think about what my relationship to social media should be, how it often encroaches on my creative self, deflates it, maybe. It’s like when I’m on the subway and I look up from my phone to see that the majority of the train car is also on their phones, feel some dense sense of melancholic awareness, and then go right back to looking at my phone.

4. Permission to do nothing:

I have been feeling a constant urge to be working all the time or to be on the move doing something. I think part of this came from my last few years, when I was always on one deadline or another. I used to pride myself on being able to hit any deadline and work through holidays and wake up at 7 AM on Sundays to work. But recently it’s gotten to a place where I would basically shame myself for doing any leisure activity because I wasn’t working.

I was looking at this Twitter / X account that posts an absolutely serene picture of a five-mile walk they went on that day and then another picture of the meal they made. That’s the whole post. It makes me so incredibly happy. I’ve read stuff on this concept of “deep work”, coined by Cal Newport, about people who were incredibly prolific, but really, truly filled their days with doing what seemingly was nothing except thinking, and in turn produced profound work. I’ve also read about the death of daydreaming, in which people feel the increasing need to fill their “nonproductive hours” with some activity — being on their phones, watching something, in some act of consumption.

I’m giving myself permission to do absolutely nothing once in a while, partially to rehabilitate my burnout, partially because I want to accept more deep work and daydreaming into my life. I think it’ll bring me closer to that creator side I talked about above.