I moved recently to another state. Again. I have relocated twice in less than two years. It's exhausting. It's draining. It's stressful. It's turning your life and body inside out and surviving it, though you often wish you hadn't.
Now I'm in my beautiful new home. It's the nicest house I've ever lived in. I live in a great town. I'm near a great city. So why am I so unmotivated? If I could hazard a guess it's because I spent weeks shutting my life off to pretend I didn't even live in my own home so it could be shown and sold. Then I spent more weeks wrapping my belongings and stuffing them into boxes and bags and trucks.
All of that was vomited up into this new location. Piles of life were just sitting in each room waiting for me to find their place again. But like actual piles of vomit, seeing everything around me in cardboard cairns encouraged me to continuously hit snooze on my routine's alarm clock.
As a person whose work is based in creativity, and with an already natural state of procrastination, this relocating malarkey didn't help a bit. I needed a jolt. Maybe even an actual can of Jolt had that soda not been discontinued.
So I gave myself a task. Daily creativity. I would make one new thing each work day and put it out there into the world. Sure, sometimes making that one thing prevented me from doing other, perhaps more important things like showering and brushing my teeth. But it got my mind clean. Making something new was like taking those cans of air that clean your keyboard, and getting it into the little folds and pockets of my brain.
Side note, if that were an actual procedure I think I'd have it done. I'm sure I have all sorts of nasty crust and dust caught up in the corners of my brain. Gross.
Has this daily creativity helped me? Yes. For one thing I get to the end of the day knowing I unleashed an idea, and isn't that why I do this dumb job to begin with? Because I was so tired of "the man" squashing all my ideas with his stupid, stanky boot?
Also, the pressure is off. If I do something new each day there is no demand for a masterpiece. That perhaps sounds like a cop out. What I mean is that if you save up all your time for this one chance at art, you want it be, you know, really good. But things you do everyday don't have that requirement.
You don't demand that when you brush your teeth each day it be the bestest, deepest, whitest clean they've ever had. What if you only brushed your teeth once each month? Wouldn't you want to make that brush a damn fricking good one? And wouldn't you also stay away from me you harlot of halitosis?
I'm not going to say that this has revolutionized my life. I'm still tired from my move, almost six weeks in. I still have a shit ton of stuff to unpack. I still wake up sometimes feeling life is a jar of mustard and I just can't breathe in it. But it has indeed cleared the decks. And when the decks are clear, there's plenty of room for something big to land. Or a really great dance party.
