My father is in his sunset years. He’s always been an ideas man—full of intellect and curiosity, connection and investigation. He’s at no loss for creative ideas. They come to him quickly and easily, but he’s run out of ideas for maintaining his health. He can’t pretend to care. If he could be a brain connected to a machine, he’d take that in a heartbeat.
It’s incredibly challenging to watch him fall into decline—from my perspective, he could be in much better shape. He feels this is the natural decline of old age. As I watch him, I think back to my own dark periods, months and years when I just felt frustrated and exhausted. I saw creative work as just work and nothing else—a task to be completed rather than creativity to be celebrated.
I have ideas all the time. No matter how many ideas for books and art, poems and nonfiction I have, when I’m out of ideas for how to be an artist, every new thought just falls by the wayside. In my exhausted state, I don’t recognize my ideas for the jewels they are. I received them and think “if only I had time” or “if only I had energy.” If only.
After facing exhaustion (creative and otherwise) at the beginning of 2023, I’m relieved to be back in action. What got my gears turning again wasn’t a new conclusion, just a very old one. It’s the bottom line that I keep circling back to again and again. I’m an artist, so I have to create. One word reminded me that I always have the power to create. The word is “practice.” Practice means the outcome is unimportant, the important thing is the doing. This is not a new idea, but it’s a powerful one. For me, thinking of my efforts as practice unhooks me from the need to get it right or be successful; it interrupts the need for the work to be productive or to move me forward in my career. It’s the original idea behind being an artist—simply to create.
Embracing practice has woken me up to my ideas. These ideas are different from the ideas I usually covet or execute, but they are here and ready to be activated. As artists I think we’re often obsessed with our ideas for the work, but in this season of my life, I’m seeing how powerful our idea of ourselves as artists is. The next big idea isn’t outside of us—we are the big idea. Being a fountain of creativity is a massive mountain of magic. And how we see our role, power, and possibility as creators fuels our creative acts.
Sometimes, when we think we’ve run out of creative ideas, we’ve really run out of faith in ourselves as artists. We’ve exhausted the fight and have depleted our trust in our right to create. We are too brittle to take creative risks or simply follow our ideas. We put more stock in the judgment of the work that comes out than in the fact that we’re making work at all.
As my father struggles with the fight he needs to continue on this earth, I’m embracing the simplicity of letting the work come out in whatever lumpy, imperfect, oddly shaped and unrecognizable form it comes in. And I’m moving forward with the faith that it will morph into the creation it was born to be.
Onward!
—K.