Is it Day 27 of Art Every Day Monthalready? It can't be! My last AEDM post (or any post for that matter) was what, the 19th? So no way it is the 27th already!
But it is. <Sigh>
Where have I been? Well, I've been creating. But I got so hung up on falling behind with my AEDM posts that I sort of stalled out. I'm still creating, but with guilt hanging over my head because I'm so far behind on AEDM posts my creativity has been a little stymied. And that isn't productive at all.
Anyway, today I was reading Charlie's November 23 post over at Productive Flourish and I felt like a target must have been painted on my forehead when he wrote it. It spoke to me on many levels:
First, the concept of Meaningful Play was very, well, personally meaningful considering my current station in life having left the law and considering what career path to take next.
Meaningful play is just that state in which you’re doing really meaningful and valuable stuff, but your orientation to it is not the same as your orientation to work precisely because it’s much more enjoyable. The Flow that comes from meaningful play is just as powerful as the Flow that comes from stress, but it’s a more sustainable type of Flow.
....
[For some], work is solely the stuff you don’t want to do. Sure, we all want to avoid doing stuff we don’t want to do, but that’s almost tautological. Many of us aren’t trying to do less work as much as we’re trying to do more meaningful play.
Exactly!
And then there was the discussion about "time crunching" and unhappiness and stifled muses. [Note: the concept of "time crunching" derives from Timothy Ferriss's The 4-hour Work Week wherein he suggests one try to be ultra-productive in a shorter time period in order to free up more fun time. Sort of like ripping a band-aid off quickly to expedite the unpleasantness.]
Meaningful play comes with a certain kind of stress on its own.... Eustress is the positive stress that is part of the process of growth, change, and risk, and in that sense, eustress is a good guide for determining whether you’re doing something that’s making you come alive.
However, adding anxiety to your work by trying to crunch the time available for your meaningful play is adding a qualitatively different type of stress to your work. What’s particularly problematic is that it’s easy to slip from eustress as a byproduct of meaningful play to distress as a result of anxiety and time compression....[T]here is a relationship between decreased creativity and anxiety. At a certain level of distress, the creative process is stalled because you’re preoccupied by stressors.
For example, financial worries can become so powerful that your thoughts and feelings are devoted to managing the stress, which ironically can keep you from thinking about the ways you might work through those financial worries. As a result, your preoccupation with the stress allows the stressor to perpetuate or worsen, so your preoccupation with the stress remains or increases, so the stressor perpetuates or worsens, and the cycle continues until a new condition, behavior, or thinking pattern manifests.
All the while, your creativity is tied up in managing stress rather than generating solutions.
Isn't that exactly what I've been doing this past week? Losing some of my creative energy to the anxiety about not having kept up with my AEDM posts? Perhaps not as consequential as the financial worries example cited by Charlie, but still very, very applicable.
[W]hether we’re directly or indirectly working on something, we’re still working on it. That work going on in the background impacts our ability to commit our full attention on the one task at hand.
Focus is a funny thing. If you try to force yourself to focus, you can’t. If you don’t give yourself time to focus, you won’t. Try to do too many things at any given time and you can’t focus on any one of them. And if you don’t give yourself enough time to immerse yourself in a creative task, you’ll resist focusing on it in the first place.
So true! I have first-hand experience with the challenge of focus (or lack thereof!) - that's exactly the spiral I found myself in while practicing law. And that's where I've found myself lately: trying to force myself to focus on posting about AEDM to the point that my creative energy took a nose dive . . . and with it, the fun at the heart of AEDM. I suppose this is the manifestation of my prior preoccupations with lack of focus and the corresponding stress in my "traditional" career....
Over the last two months, I've commented several times about how hard it is to adjust my thinking from the logical, analytical perspective I relied upon in my law practice to the open, "go with the flow", more intuitive perspective I want to foster and strengthen - and follow - in my "new" life.
I must admit, re-framing my thoughts and preconceived notions about what constitutes "work" is more challenging than I expected. But I'm getting there . . . and recognizing myself in Charlie's post (as well as the recent replay in my creative life) is a step in the right direction!
So, what will I do about days 20 - 26 of AEDM activities? I'm not sure. I might post some photos and comments. Or I might not. But I'm no longer paralyzed by the frivolous expectations I had placed on documenting my first AEDM experience, because that's not what is really important. AEDM is about bringing more creativity into one's life. For me, creativity means fun -- and when it stops being pure fun, it's time to take a break, assess the situation, regroup if necessary, learn from the experience, and move on. Which is exactly what I plan to do!
Thank you, Charlie, for the nice bop between the eyes -- your post was just what I needed to get back on track!
Happy Creating!
~ Melony
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