The Distillery – The Creative Act

The Distillery – The Creative Act

We went nomading again to Palm Springs for a few weeks, and that seems to now include a ritual photo of one of my favorite reading nooks.  This time I was reading Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act.
One of my favorite lines:
             “Discipline and freedom seem like opposites.  In reality, they are partners.
             Discipline is not a lack of freedom, it is a harmonious relationship with time.”
Is It Time Yet?

Is It Time Yet?

Two of the most common questions I hear, or hurdles people seem to anticipate, center around time.
The first challenge is finding the time. There is no question about it, I’m fortunate in the sense that I have space and I have opportunities for privacy. That takes away for me a lot of obstacles that many other people face.

I first wrote this piece in 2020, so the challenges that people had at the time with sharing space exploded, trying to accommodate work at home and school. Maybe, though, it has also led to more explicit negotiation around time and space for a little privacy if you live with other people. In a perfect world, it’s nice to pick the same time every day, and the same place is nice too, but if that’s not possible, there are a lot of people that jump in the car, drive to the edge of a parking lot somewhere, and just sit there.  Or walk outside and sit under a tree.  Or literally disappear inside a closet.

The real issue is setting aside the time, giving it a priority. It isn’t really that different from finding time to work out, and for some it is just as painful, but like any other habit, if you can just stay with it for about 30 days, you will probably get a pretty good imprint. You can find the time for at least five minutes, you know you can, just decide.

That leads to the next issue, how much time? I started at 15 minutes, I think, then moved to 20, and a couple of years ago to 25 minutes a day. There are a couple of other things that are part of my personal ritual that make it about 30 minutes start to finish. But there is nothing magic about that, no specific time that makes it successful or not.  You can start with one breath, then three breaths, then five minutes.  There is an Arthur Ashe quote that comes to mind:  “Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can”.