Why you should just quit now
Giving up may well be the key to becoming more creative
I’m sitting in an airport terminal. Listening to Grouper. Waiting to return home, to the beloved comforts of my wife, my children, our little chaotic sanctuary where we seek the face of God in the midst of our blessed, domestic tumult. But I sit, and have a window in which to write. A fragment of time, merciful, yet pregnant with expectation. I don’t belong here, in this seeming abundance of time and creative potential. That’s why I can go days, or weeks without writing. Days, but not weeks, without journalling. Sometimes an entire week will pass without picking up a guitar.
Then, there are moments like these. Moments where I can ponder, consider, and give life to the truths that present themselves to me. Sometimes it will be in prayer. Other times it will be words on a page. It seems to me that the trajectory of my life is a series of concentric spirals; I’m never and always moving towards, in a way, and beside, any relative goal or achievement I’m working toward. There is the fleeting glimpse, the proximity and the relative distance that I grapple with hour to hour, each in perfect misalignment with the other.
This spells, on any given day, relative disaster, untold success, satisfaction, tumult, and delay, and I always feel as though my prayers and God’s gentle responses echo into one another. They abound, they proliferate, and they strike a strange chord within me that assures me that He resides in the depths of my being. My fickle, distracted , dissipated self must yearn to reside in the depth of His. Nothing is ever straightforward and simple, nor should it be for fallen creatures in a fallen world. If God wants me to move in circles and spirals toward and away from and around what I think is apt, then so be it.
These spirals; the distances between intention, action, conception and consumption, are one of the only consistent and predictable aspects of my life. And it’s dawned on me, that in finding peace in my inactivity, or inaction, or heaven forbid, procrastination, I’ve made peace with a creative reality that sometimes, we need to quit, in order to return to fervour, and fecundity.
It was in this very terminal, perhaps sitting at this very table with a dear friend some months ago, that I lamented an inability to iterate. I want to write. I want to write all the time. Every day. I want to embrace the notion and identity of someone who without fail, brings fingers to keys, ideally, at the same time, in the same place every day. It’s a wonderful idea, a noble aspiration, and I tip my hat to those who can make it work. But I, dear reader, am not that regimented in my creative pursuits. In prayer, yes, I am far more routine, predictable and intentional. But in writing, or playing music, alas, I am not.
I don’t know why I don’t just write, I lamented. It’s hard to articulate why one might avoid the very thing you love doing, so much. But alas, the reasons are legion. Full time work. Eleven children. A wife I adore, whom I want to spend my evenings with. The fundamental need to maintain a physical discipline. Maintaining an acreage with animals, and a wrecking crew working full time on the incremental destruction of the family home (I mentioned them already, three sentences ago).
There are seasons in which I simply can’t create. Extended pieces, at least. I’ll always take notes, scraps, fragments, brief journal entries. At a tipping point, I spent a few hours last night poring through one after the other, putting them in their place, either in Day One (where I journal), Trello (where I track ideas), or Scrivener (where I do the actual writing). But the writing, the actual writing, sometimes stops. And I’m more committed now than I’ve ever been, yet paradoxically, more at peace with not writing than ever.
It’s because I know that by letting go, turning away, taking a moment to accept that the page will become a stranger to me, I’ll begin to itch, to ache, to burn with a yearning to return, anew, again, ever and always, beginning again. I’m in it now: That delicate desire, the sense of flow, the joyful prolificacy. The creative act and the creative arc of one’s life may well be cyclical. Perhaps when we become stagnant and frustrated, absent from the work, the raw material bubbles away and ferments; it matures and knows new life, new shapes, and new forms beneath the surface of thought and act.
It is for this reason, dear reader, that I suggest turning off, or turning away, for a spell, a season, to return with a newfound fervour that befits the joy of the creative act, rather than the burdensome struggle that preceded it. There is much to be said for pushing through resistance, fighting your own indolence, and overcoming sloth. I advocate as much in my work here in Nazareth Anew. But sometimes, in all honesty, the sabbatical, the clean break, will bear more fruit than the battle. This must be discerned, however, and only you can do it.
And when the coals are burning hot once more, and the fire is kindled, let it breathe, find purchase on the canvas, the page, the fretboard. Without this, God forbid, all is for naught, and you have been beaten, allayed, defeated. Never, dear reader, may it be so.