Tree and Sun. Acrylic on paper. Approx 10x10”
Time doesn’t exist and yet is the most valuable commodity for many of us, so we latch onto anything that promises to effectively manage our time and productivity. What if we stopped with the time obsession and began to notice and live by our rhythms? What if we lived for our purpose? What if we gauge our path by how we feel while we’re on course compared to suffering the side effects of sidetracked?
Screenwriter, author and playwright C.S. Whitcomb turned me on to the concept of a creative cycle. In the west, artistic ideas and the work to bring the ideas to fruition are respected. However, a necessary balance in the cycle is rest, renewal and taking an opportunity to clear away to make room for the new. We generally don’t understand this concept in the west where work ethic is considered a moral good. If the world isn’t beating us up enough for being unproductive then we take over and berate ourselves as lazy procrastinators. What if the rest period is the most critical for us to generate ideas? What if tossing the notes and scraps in the dumpster clears the way for the latest, newest, best ideas? What if we need to wander memory lane to mine our experiences or project to the future and visualize where we’re going? What if we need a rest from the “high” of chemicals flooding our bodies during an expressive period. “Normal” can seem depressed compared to a time of intense output because the physical returns to chemical baselines.
Some of us naturally fall into the rhythms that bring us joy. Others of us need to suss out our individual tempo for life. When are we at our best daily? Perhaps our inspiration has a monthly or yearly rotation. What if summer is our best generative time or what if a limp dishrag has more get-up-and-go than we do in August? Until we understand ourselves and live to take care of our tender patterns, we may experience train wrecks. With people, in business, spiritually or even physically. My most vulnerable time for accidents with power tools is when I’m tired. When we know our patterns and sequence of ideas, work and rest, we’ll be far more effective generating what we love to contribute to the world.
If we are solitary workers, we tend to forget there are other people on the planet. The Dalai Lama said, “If you can, help others; if you cannot do that, at least do not harm them.” Tension, and consistently compromising our high energy work periods in favor of another’s will kill our spark. If we want to live and work in relationship, we must rely on respectful communication to come to consensus around boundaries for our work sequence and space.
So, the point of examining our cycles and rhythms is to find our best (and worst) times to be original and artistic. Only after we know how we operate and move in the world can we even begin to fully achieve our intentions.
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Next? The difference between resolutions, goals, intentions and manifesting.