Creating the Space and Place to Flourish

This morning's reading has taken me from Orion Magazine, to the Urban Ecology Center in Milwaukee, to the LuLu Live site that began promoting the "Rock the Green" event in September of 2011 in May of 2009 as they began to seek corporate sponsorship.

Now that is what I call planning ahead and giving an idea and an event room to flourish. I hope they pull it off and I hope it's amazing.

But often we don't give ideas and opportunities just that, often we rush, and we rush to failure.

Here is something I find fascinating about human beings - how we can have such clarity and focus about how to succeed in certain aspects of our lives and such blindness in others. One can be marvelous at raising children with tender loving care and have no real idea how to succeed in the business world, one can be at the top of their game in business but really be lousy at love - and yet, in both cases be blind to the fact that this is the case.  

We can literally not see just how we constantly shoot ourselves in the foot by not creating the space and place to flourish in one aspect of our lives while avidly allowing and grooming it in others.

Certainly for most of us things aren't so black and white; life is usually pretty nuanced. But the fact remains that we can be very blind to how we prevent ourselves from blooming and growing in a particular section of our lives, while succeeding beautifully in others.

I have been a workaholic my entire adult life. First I was a workaholic in an industry I understood well but didn't enjoy (international shipping) and then I was a workaholic in two industries I enjoy (the handmade gift industry and then public relations) so for a long time I fooled myself into believing I'd resolved the problem because I had such a good time working so hard.

Now, for the record, I have no problem with working hard, that's not my issue, my issue is that I haven't known how to slow down unless it was the dead stop of sleep or laying in bed reading.

But a few months ago my gentleman friend shared with me how he had changed his philosophy about how he went about his work life about a decade ago and decided rather than being a businessman he was now an artist. A little bell went off that said, "pay attention" but at the same time it was a total tilt moment.

About a month later I had to ask him to explain it again because try as I might I couldn't remember what he said because it was so foreign to my way of thinking. True, I am an artist. I have been an artist since the age of three or so when I took to drawing and painting like swimming for a duck, but it's not the title I use when I tell others what I do. I lead with publicist and sometimes when I'm feeling brave, writer.

Of late I've been wondering, why? Why? A big part of it has to do with the idea I've had since childhood that artists are inherently flaky. I was always getting in trouble for being a flake as a child, for having my "head turned on backwards," for forgetting to do things. Since I was an artsy child I thought that the artist part was the problem - now I see that likely it was just because I was a child. Oh boy, big aha moment.

In my 20's I went painstakingly about reorganizing my world to move from artsy flake to organized polished professional in the fear that I would never earn a living as an artist so that always needed to be a side gig. And I succeeded. I became pretty fierce in my togetherness, apt to be early than be late, apt to over prepare, and at times overwhelm others with my research, information and ideas.

But do artists need to be inherently flaky? Now I think not. For one, over the past several years I've met some very together artists, and for another, as I've slowly allowed my own creative renaissance I've accepted that I like being together and organized.

But artists do need fuel for the fire, and I have realized that in order to kick up the caliber of what I'm able to imagine and envision and spark I need to allow myself more play time, and more down time that is inspirational and not merely rest with a book. In essence, I need to give myself permission to create the space and place for the artistry and inspiration to flourish.

How about you? Is there some aspect of your life that you're rethinking and reframing to give it the space it needs to grow? Have you found an area where you're finally able to "Allow that Permission Slip from God?"

Comments

[Mike Watters]

Nice post, Melissa.

Refueling creatively has become a top priority in my life. Creatives simply can't produce nonstop and expect to flourish. Yet that's what the Twitterverse seems to expect of us. I haven't found any perfect solutions, but a couple of good resources are Todd Henry's Accidental Creative website and podcast and Tony Schwartz's new book The Way We're Working Isn't Working. (If it seems like I am going on and on about Schwartz's book, it's because I absolutely LOVED it.)

[galim]

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